Scientists aren't exactly in agreement... but in any case, they're getting all warm and cuddly by calling her 'Ida'...

She's unique: a 95% complete fossilised early primate.  And showing a rare level of detail - including the outline of where fur covered her body - and amazingly, even stomach contents indicating a last meal of berries and leaves. 

The name, 'Ida' was bestowed upon her by Jørn Hurum - a paleontologist at Oslo's Natural History Museum and leader of the international team who have studied the fossil for two years in secrecy.  Ida is the name of Hurum's 6 year old daughter who is roughly at the same stage of development as the ancient primate was when she died 47 million years ago.

Ida's proper name, is 'Darwinius Masillae': obviously partly a tribute to the great scientist Charles Darwin.  The second part of her name refers to the Messel Pit, an out-of-use quarry southeast of Frankfurt am Main, Germany where Ida was discovered.

So... what's all this about Ida being 'The Link'? Which link?

More ancient than that stuff in your fridge...

Researchers believe they have extended the age of domesticated maize; as far back as 8,700 years ago. 

Maize - also known as corn - has been recently shown by molecular biologists to have evolved from a wild grass from the Balsas Valley in southern Mexico. 

Researchers focused on the Xihuatoxtla Shelter in an area of the Balsas Valley that is home to a large, wild grass called Balsas teosinte that molecular biologists recently identified as the ancestor of maize. The shelter contained early maize and squash remains as well as ancient stone tools used to grind and mill the plants.

"We found the remains of maize and squash in many contexts from the earliest occupation levels," added Dolores Piperno, of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "This indicates these two crops were being routinely consumed nearly 9,000 years ago."

"Big deal," you may think.  "No honey..."

Since around 2006 there have been reports of the rapid decline and disappearance of bee populations around the world.  The British Beekeeper's Association, for example, reported a 30% decline in bee numbers during 2007/2008.

It's not just a decline in the production of honey that will result, however.  Those of us who are city dwellers may not be completely aware that honeybees pollinate many plants - and some of those plants go on to feed animals.  One estimate is that around 90 commercial crops are pollinated by the honey bee - resulting in an annual harvest approaching a figure of US$ 15 billion.

So far, the decline in bee populations are not understood by researchers.  Theories abound such as  Colony Collapse Disorder, parasitic insects (the varroa mite), bacterial infection (foulbrood) - some claims even include speculation on bee proximity to genetically modified crops and mobile phone masts.

...but find giant prehistoric snakes instead

Carolos Jaramillo and his team of Smithsonian funded paleontologists would be able to tell you just how similar coal mining and hunting fossils really are.  Mostly due to the fact that their work-site is within the massive open-pit Cerrejon coal mine in northern Colombia.

The similarity mostly ends there.  Coal miners hunt for ancient plant matter, unrecognisably compressed over millions of years, which they will bring up to the earth's surface and send off to be burned.  Paleontologists, on the other hand, carefully examine dig sites, aiming to find, classify, understand and preserve the remains of fossilised life from the past.

oh...don't forget Titanoboa cerrejonensis...

13 metres long and over a thousand kilograms in weight.  Jamarillo's team have found the 60 million year old fossil remains of 28 of these monster snakes under the layers of the open-pit mine.  The name, Titanoboa, definitely conjures up (nearly as old!) gaudily coloured Godzilla monster movies.

You don't have to be 8 years old to love it.

Unless it's a cloned chicken in Canada...

According to new Canadian guidelines released on 13th Feb, 2009, producers won't be able to raise cloned animals in an 'organic' environment and label them as an organic product.

In 2008, U.S. legislation was introduced to ensure that meat or milk from cloned animals could not be labelled as 'organic'.

It all seems a bit odd.. as certainly a cloned animal is not necessarily a genetically engineered one - and hence just as organic as any other.

Baobab trees!

This is a photo of a group of Adansonia Grandidieri trees - a.k.a. baobab trees.

Baobab are found in Africa and Australia and can grow up to 30m in height with trunks up to 11m.  Some baobabs are though to be thousands of years old.

This image is available to download - please read image rights prior to use.

Have you heard of the 'mirror and mark' test?  Magpies haven't - but they pass anyway...

Mirror and mark is a test which is commonly given to human infants and apes.  It's designed to show whether or not the person or animal is self-aware  - basically if they know that they are themselves.

The test requires that a mark is put on the test subject where they can't see it.  New research by Helmut Prior (Goethe-University, Frankfurt a.M.) with Ariane Schwarz and Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr-University Bochum) used the mirror-mark test with magpies - producing some extraordinary results - the birds knew who they were!

 <iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thoughtposi04-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0715633910&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=FFFFFF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>    In ancient Greek and Roman thinking, whether the world is flat or spherical it will have imaginary boundaries and liminal areas where the norms of nature and culture are thought to break down. Analogies are constantly drawn between 'primitive' peoples at the 'edges of the world' and 'primitive' people in prehistory. Distance, both in time and space, leads to difference, and the idea that strange things happen out there or happened back then dominates Greek and Roman thinking on other cultures. This book examines ancient ideas of the creation of the world, the beginnings of life and origin of species, humans and animals, utopias and blessed islands, and 'barbarian' cultures beyond the Mediterranean world, before going on to trace the influence of ancient anthropological and ethnological thought on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We begin with primordial chaos and end with the invention of the Americas, taking in many strange creatures, from the savages of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, to the Man-faced Ox-creatures of Empedocles, the Dog-heads of India, the Amazons, the Centaurs, and the Tupinamba of Brazil.

 <iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thoughtposi04-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0340624973&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=FFFFFF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>    Peter Mitchell's highly readable and non-technical Introduction to Theory of Mind focuses on the latest exciting research in the field and integrates work carried out on adults, apes and children with autism. The author shows how children develop (or fail to develop) an understanding of the minds of others during infancy and beyond. On one hand, there are circumstances in which toddlers show a surprising insight into the minds of those around them. On the other hand, even the average adult does not always reason effectively about other people's minds. Unfortunately, the development of an understanding of mind can run into serious difficulties, and one form of such abnormal development can be autism. The background to this socially crippling syndrome is introduced for the benefit of the non-specialist and then examined in some depth.

So.  Two guys tell you they have a dead bigfoot in their freezer....

It sounds like the beginning of a really bad joke you might hear in a bar.  But the sequence of events associated with the most recent claims about the discovery of bigfoot are definitely more strange than funny.