The Garden Of Ediacara

I came across this lovely evocative passage in Nick Lane's book Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.

"You are not completely spineless. You have a notochord: a flexible rod made of cartilage, which in your descendant, millions of generations hence, will develop into a proper backbone. For now, you flex your rod like an eel to undulate through the water, never quite fast enough. Better to stay submerged in the soft mud at the bottom, with only your head visible, while you filter out grains of food from the swell. You have a wormlike head, with a small bulging of nerves that will one day become your brain. Your eyes aren't much use, but at least you can make out the looming of a monster, and swiftly bury your head again. Oh, times have changed. Not long ago, the world was full of gently filter feeders, swaying their fronds softly in unison, never harming a soul. Not that you remember, except in some hazy instinctive yearning for the garden of Ediacara. But now there are vast armour-plated war machines, bristling with claws and spikes and rows upon rows of crystalline eye facets fixing you from every dimension. You are a tender morsel, barely a couple of inches long, protein-rich muscle strapped to a crispy rod; a tasty snack for Anomalocaris. Better pull in your head again, just in case- being a little bit spineless might help you survive in this fearsome new world, outnumbered a thousand to one by spiny monsters".

The passage describes the early Cambrian world (540-510 million years ago) which saw the rapid diversification of the animal biosphere. The ancestors of vertebrates had worm like bodies, and Anomalocaris, an early arthropod, was top predator. Much before, the garden of Ediacara was a very different place. Complex multicellular life appears in the fossil record from about 570 million years ago in the Ediacaran Period. These creatures were sessile (fixed to the sea floor) filter feeders with body shapes resembling large leaves and fronds. Evidence of mobile animals manifests by 550 million years ago. Their tracks, trails, and burrows are preserved in soft sediment.

The graphic shows this  'Edicaran biota', a term that includes a diverse and unrelated groups of organisms. Three distinct phases, termed Avalon, White Sea, and Nama,  showing different community assemblages and increasing ecologic specialization are recognizable through the Ediacaran Period. Notice that mobile bilateral creatures first appear in the White Sea (B) assemblage. 

 Source: Rebecca Eden, Andrea Manica, Emily G. Mitchell: Plos Biology 2022.

Later in the chapter Nick Lane elaborates on how many of these Ediacaran filter feeders, simpler creatures without specialized tissues for different functions,  could not cope with the anoxic sulpur rich environments and died out. Sponges notably did survive. Mobile animals though had evolved a rudimentary circulatory system and molecules like myoglobin and haemoglobin, capable of storing oxygen and removing carbon dioxide. When oxygen levels increased in the Cambrian their descendants had metabolic machinery to take advantage of this high-octane environment. The radiation of animals utterly transformed our world. 

I highly recommend this book. It has a fair bit of chemistry in it. Nick Lane explains much of it using easier to follow diagrams instead of the dreaded chemical equations of our college years. He is a firm advocate of the metabolism first (as against a RNA/genes first) view of the origin of life and provides elegant explanations of energy flow and the evolution of metabolic pathways that build organic molecules to form biomass and breaks them up to power respiration. Disease and ageing is the inevitable consequence of the eventual degradation of these metabolic reactions. 

At the heart of all this is the Kreb's cycle, a series of reactions which burn sugars in oxygen to generate energy for cellular functions. But the surprise is that much of life can get by with only a partial Kreb's cycle. In many microbes, it is not a cycle at all, but a short linear path. Not at all what our biochemistry book taught us and a lesson for creationists who insist that systems like the Kreb's Cycle are irreducible complex, a sign of intelligent design, which could not have evolved through incremental steps.

Nick Lane- Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.

Patterns Of Angiosperms And Insect Evolution

Charles Darwin famously called it an 'ábominable mystery'. He was referring to the sudden appearance and diversification of flowering plants in the Cretaceous fossil record. He noticed that these early fossils resembled modern flowering plants. 'Primitive' or ancestral stages were missing. Today, biologists categorize these as crown and stem representatives of a group. 

The first fossil evidence of flowering plants is from 140-130 million year old sediments. These are early types of pollen grains with one aperture (uniaperturate). Triaperturate pollen is found in slightly younger 125 million year old rocks. Towards the end of the early Cretaceous, by around 100 million years ago, flowers, leaves, and other organs appear from several continents representing all the major groups of angiosperms.

The picture below is of an early Cretaceous (~100 million year old) flowering plant from the lotus family. The location is northeast Brazil. There is a remarkable preservation of the whole plant, with connected roots, rhizome, leaves, and aggregate fruit. 

Source: William Vieira Gobo et.al. Nature Scientific Reports 2023- A new remarkable Early Cretaceous nelumbonaceous fossil bridges the gap between herbaceous aquatic and woody protealeans.

Taking a long view of their evolutionary pattern, angiosperm diversification is structured in three phases. The first phase was a steady expansion through early to late Cretaceous. There was more rapid diversification in late Cretaceous by around 70 million years ago. Enumeration of floral species through the Cretaceous indicate that angiosperms made up about 5% of species in early Cretaceous, increasing to 80% by Maastrichtian times (late Cretaceous). Despite this increase in species numbers, in terms of biomass, angiosperms were still a small component of Cretaceous floras. Their domination of floral communities, including the origin of modern wet tropical forests, began in the Paleogene (65-24 million years ago) after the end Cretaceous mass extinction. Michael J. Benton, Peter Wilf, and Herve Sauquet have provided a good overview in New Phytologist of this pivotal phase of ecosystem change.

These evolutionary changes did not occur in isolation. Throughout the Cretaceous, significant changes were occurring to terrestrial ecosystems, with the origination of many plant and animal groups. This extended phase of ecosystem reorganization is known as the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. Angiosperm diversification is thought to have played a key role in this transformation of land biodiversity, so much so, that the phase from about 100 million years to 50 million years ago is known as the Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution.

The Cretaceous -Paleogene mass extinction hit angiosperms hard, as well as altering the trajectory of their evolution. For example, there was a 40% loss of diversity of flowering plants in Colombia following the mass extinction. But certain attributes of angiosperms, such as their partnerships with other organisms, their ability to efficiently capture energy and enhance photosynthetic rates, and an underlying genetic propensity to speciate, resulted in them expanding rapidly in the post extinction landscape. Angiosperm evolution opened up opportunities for a variety of land creatures including insects, spiders, lizards, birds, and mammals,  eventually driving up terrestrial biodiversity to 10 times more as marine biodiversity.

Paleobiologists are interested in understanding the interaction and impact angiosperm diversification could have had on other groups of plants and animals. Of particular interest is the diversification of insects in the Cretaceous and Paleogene.

Modern insect lineages began diversifying by 245 million years ago, long before angiosperms evolved. Gymnosperm and insect communities preserved in amber and sediments show that insects had an intricate relationship with host gymnosperms like cycads, conifers and ginkgoaleans.  Insect pollination of gymnosperms predated the origin of angiosperms by at least 100 million years and their fossil record show phases of diversification even when angiosperms were rare. 

Did angiosperm evolution also drive a rise in insect diversity? Pollinator insects particularly would seem to benefit from an abundance in flowering plants, and if so, what co-evolutionary patterns are apparent from the fossil record?

David Perise and Fabien Condamine have tackled this question in a new study in Nature Communications. I will share this beautifully compiled infographic from the paper that conveys so clearly the patterns of angiosperm and insect diversification through the Cretaceous and Cenozoic.

Digging into published databases, the researchers compiled data on the origination and extinction times of angiosperm and insect families. They then statistically analyzed whether angiosperm and insect origination and extinction times, and pulses of their diversification coincide. Their analysis showed that angiosperms seemed to have played a dual role in insect evolution. They mitigated insect extinction through the Cretaceous and spurred on the origination of new insect groups in the Cenozoic. Besides a broad analysis of insects, they also found that pollinator insects like bees and long proboscid butterflies show a pronounced diversification alongside angiosperm lineages. 

The success of angiosperms in the late Cretaceous and Cenozoic coincided with the decline in gymnosperms. Intrinsic mechanisms of genomic rearrangements in angiosperms resulted in repeated evolution of novel traits and specializations. They competitively displaced gymnosperms. The impact on gymnosperm dependent insects was variable. Generalist insect pollinators such as several beetle lineages transitioned to angiosperms. Much of the co-diversification of angiosperm and insects can be explained by this shift of gymnosperm pollinators to angiosperm hosts.  Gymnosperm specialized insect groups did not fare that well. For example, gymnosperms like Cheirolepidiaceae and Bennettitales went extinct by the latest Cretaceous. This was followed by the extinction of insect groups that were dependent on these plants such as some specialized long-proboscid flies, scorpionflies and lacewings.

Insect diversification did not depend only on angiosperms. Analysis also shows that warmer climate phases negatively impacted insect diversity and coincided with higher insect extinction rates. There seems also to be a relationship with other plant types. Spore plant and gymnosperm diversity had a positive impact on origination rates of insects. Ecosystem relationships and dependencies are multifarious and complex as this analysis between angiosperm and insect co-evolution shows.

Darwin's anxiety over flowering plants reflected his insistence that evolution is gradual. Nature does not make leaps, he stressed. He explained abruptness in the fossil record by invoking missing strata due to non deposition and erosion. Regarding flowering plants, he suggested that fossils were perhaps preceded by a period of cryptic evolution of that lineage that took place in a remote area or a lost continent, although he conceded that this was a poor explanation. However, this latter view, that a substantial lag time or a long fuse precedes the bang, continues to resonate among many biologists. Molecular methods that compares accumulated genetic difference to calculate the time of divergence of groups indicate a fairly long gap between the genetic branching of lineages and their first fossil appearance. 

Most familiar is the example of the origin of animals. Molecular data indicate that animals originated by 750 million years ago, yet unequivocal animal fossils appear by 570 million years ago, close to 200 million years later. Similarly, some molecular estimates put angiosperm origins to pre-Cretaceous times, stretching back 240-200 million years ago to Triassic-Jurassic, a good 100 million to 60 million years before first appearance of fossils.

This idea of a phylogenetic fuse has been recently criticized. Published in Systematic Biology, Graham E. Budd and Richard P. Mann have undertaken a critical examination of molecular clock methods. Their analysis indicate that popular methods used to assign probabilities to maximum age of lineages are biased against rapid lineage radiations being true evolutionary events. In their view, the mismatch between molecular dates of lineage origin and the timing of the first appearance of their fossils is an artifact. They point out that the coincident appearance of fossils from widespread localities in a particular sequence and across different modes of preservation faithfully records evolution. The time gap between the origin and later diversification of lineages is not that deep.

The 'abominable mystery' of the sudden appearance of fossil groups may in fact be a real biological motif in earth history, signalling the rapid radiation of lineages filling ecologic spaces following an environmental crises and evolutionary innovation.

Agglutinated Foraminifera From The Deep Sea

No matter how many David Attenborough specials you may watch, nature always throws more surprises at you.

Foraminifera are protists that build a skeleton or a test made up of calcium carbonate. The calcium carbonate is precipitated out of sea water. There is a sub-group of foraminifera which construct a shell not by capturing the calcium carbonate via chemical precipitation, but by assembling sedimentary grains and then cementing them together like a brick and mortar structure. This group of forams are known as agglutinated foraminifers. 

All this is well known. Many different species of forams use a variety of grains as bricks. They are mostly different shell fragments, but even mineral grains like ilmenite (iron titanium oxide) , rutile (titanium dioxide), or garnet are used. 

Now there is a new report of a deep sea living agglutinated foraminifera which constructs a tube made up of  planktonic foraminifera shell fragments of a single species. 

Read that again. A benthic (bottom living) foram shell made up of bits of another foram which lived floating in the upper water column!  

These shells are selected to the exclusion of all other types of available sedimentary grains. The specimens were recovered in a core drilled off shore northwest Australia by the International Ocean Discovery Program. The paper by Paul N. Pearson and IODP 363 Shipboard Scientific Party is published in the Journal of Micropalaeontology.

Here is the entire abstract. It is mind boggling. 

Agglutinated foraminifera are marine protists that show apparently complex behaviour in constructing their shells, involving selecting suitable sedimentary grains from their environment, manipulating them in three dimensions, and cementing them precisely into position. Here we illustrate a striking and previously undescribed example of complex organisation in fragments of a tube-like foraminifer (questionably assigned to Rhabdammina) from 1466 m water depth on the northwest Australian margin. The tube is constructed from well-cemented siliciclastic grains which form a matrix into which hundreds of planktonic foraminifer shells are regularly spaced in apparently helical bands. These shells are of a single species, Turborotalita clarkei, which has been selected to the exclusion of all other bioclasts. The majority of shells are set horizontally in the matrix with the umbilical side upward. This mode of construction, as is the case with other agglutinated tests, seems to require either an extraordinarily selective trial-and-error process at the site of cementation or an active sensory and decision-making system within the cell.

 

The photographs from the paper shows the tube of the agglutinated foraminifera made up of planktonic foraminifera shells of a single species.

Charles Darwin knew of agglutinated foraminifera from reports he had read and was astonished....“almost the most wonderful fact I ever heard of. One cannot believe that they have mental power enough to do so, and how any structure or kind of viscidity can lead to this result passes all understanding”.  This was a letter he wrote to W.B Carpenter who had described them in 1873.

I'll leave you to ponder upon this most exquisite of natural wonders. The paper is open access: A deep-sea agglutinated foraminifer tube constructed with planktonic foraminifer shells of a single species.

Links: Early Life, Critical Minerals, Net Zero Emissions

Some interesting readings over the past couple of weeks.

1) In a Fierce Desert, Microbe ‘Crusts’ Show How Life Tamed the Land. Zack Savitsky describes a fascinating research program underway to study microbial life in the fierce Atacama Desert in Chile. These organic communities are called 'grit crust'. They coat pebbles and large sand grains on the desert floor. A closer examination has showed that they are composed of hundreds of species of cyanobacteria, algae, fungi, along with lichen combinations. These microbes play an important role in the biogeochemical fixation and cycling of elements and over millennia break down rock and enrich the soil in nutrients. They also give scientists a glimpse on how life may have first colonized land, perhaps as early as the Archean. 

2) Digging into India’s critical minerals dash. Recently, the Indian Ministry of Mines released the Critical Minerals for India report. India has also approved commercial mining for minerals containing the following elements —lithium, beryllium, titanium, niobium, tantalum and zirconium. These elements are raw materials for magnets used in wind turbines and EV motors. M Rajshekhar writes about the geological distribution of these elements and global supply chains, pointing out the challenges India faces in procuring a reliable supply of these materials necessary for its energy transition away from fossil fuels. 

3) Explainer: Will global warming ‘stop’ as soon as net-zero emissions are reached? Even if we stop emitting CO2 today, we are locked into hundreds of years of warming because of past emissions. I too have uttered these words, but it turns out that I, and many others, have been conflating two separate scenarios: constant concentrations versus zero emissions. Zeke Hausfather clarifies what these two different situations mean and how they will differently impact CO2 levels and future warming. 

Net zero CO2 scenario will very quickly stabilize temperatures or even slightly cool the earth, but that will also depend on emissions of  other confounding variables like aerosols and other greenhouse gases. Aerosols by blocking sun's energy have a cooling effect. On the other hand, achieving net zero too far in the future might still result in warming due to the feedback effects of other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide. Good explainer!

Links: Crust Evolution, CO2 Emissions, DNA Structure

I'm posting a reading list after a long interval. Hope you like this selection. 

1) Secular Evolution of Continents and Earth Systems. The earth's outer shell has evolved and changed in its chemical and mechanical properties over time. This long term evolution has had profound consequences for geological and biological processes. Peter A. Cawood and colleagues have written an informative article in Reviews in Geophysics on the geologic history of the continental crust and its value as an archive for earth processes. The paper is open access, and there is also a shorter Q &A with lead author Peter Cawood which I have linked to in the title. 

2) Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution. What is the best approach to limiting global warming? Do geoengineering methods which remove CO2 from the atmosphere offer a way out? David T. Ho, using a simple and effective explanation, refutes that notion and argues convincingly that drastic emission cuts is the only way to slow down temperature rise.  

3) Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the discovery of DNA's structure. 1953 was a standout  year in our understanding of life with the publication of papers proposing a structure for DNA. Rosalind Franklin's role in this story has been either sidelined or misunderstood until recently. The authors of the linked essay, Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, are writing biographies of Francis Crick and James Watson respectively. They recently went through Rosalind Franklin's notes and some other unpublished documents which helped them piece together a different account of the discovery of the structure of DNA and Rosalind Franklin's key insights. 

This essay goes beyond the popular eureka moment narrative which held sway over people's imagination for a long time. Instead, we find collaboration between the teams working on this problem and many twists and turns before Watson and Crick came up with the solution. The article also raises important issues of ethics and sexism in science. 

Links: Long Covid, Galapagos Islands, Origin Of Life

 I enjoyed reading these over the past few days.

1) Clues to Long Covid:  The disease that has affected us over two long years is still quite a mystery. Jennifer Couzin-Frankel has written a very informative article on the quest to understand Long Covid and how to treat it. 

2) The Galapagos Is a Glimpse of Eternity.  Geology influence organismal habitat and life habits. Penguins nesting in lava tubes. Tortoises finding warm volcanic vents to raise their body temperatures. Paul Stewart describes the landscapes of the Galapagos Islands with its amazing biodiversity, now threatened by climate change. 

3) From Pre Biotic Soup To Fine Grained RNA World. I often come across new articles breathlessly announcing that organic molecules of various types have been found on asteroids. But whatever the source of different molecules, it is specific conditions on early earth that we need to understand to arrive at a sensible theory of the origin of life. Fine article by Philip Ball.

Neglected Children Of The Sea Floor

Carl Simpson and Jeremy B.C. Jackson, in an essay titled Bryozoan Revelations for Science Advances, sketch out the important biological aspects of bryozoans, a type of marine invertebrate. 

From their article: 

"Bryozoans are neglected children of the sea floor. Google corals and you get nearly 4 billion hits, whereas bryozoans get just 4 million. This disparity reflects the enormity and notable beauty of coral reefs and extraordinary diversity of associated species that have long attracted intense scientific research. Yet for all their grandeur, corals occupy less than a tiny fraction of 1% of the global ocean, whereas bryozoans extend from the equator to the poles and intertidal to abyss. Bryozoans are species-rich. As a group, they have at least 10 times more species than corals. They also have a more extensive and continuous fossil record and have been major components of vast seafloor communities for half a billion years".

The enormous diversity of bryozoan skeletal shapes and their abundance as living communities and as fossils from the late Cambrian onwards make it possible to use them to understand evolutionary questions such as timing of origins, rates of change, convergent evolution, and origin of variable form in animal communities. This succinct essay summarizes these lines of research quite well.

As a sedimentologist my interest in these organisms was the role they played as sedimentary particles. Bryozoans, along with echinoids and brachiopods, were among the most common sea floor inhabitants of Paleozoic shallow marine realms. They made up a large proportions of the sediment that formed by the disintegration of shells and skeletons of sea creatures.  

A typical bryozoan skeleton has a trellis like appearance. Bryozoans are colonial organisms building a lattice like structure with the animal living in chambers called zooids. It is these zooids that was my main interest, or rather what I could see inside them. The animal was long gone, decayed away, but the chamber or cavity was filled with different types  of calcite, archiving the process of the transformation of loose sediment into rock. Through geologic history different types of fluids had entered the open spaces within the skeleton and precipitated different types of calcite. Petrologists can infer the changing geochemical conditions as sediments get buried and importantly trace the changes in open spaces, or porosity, as fluids either dissolve sediment or deposit new minerals, information that is useful to the petroleum industry.

I will share a couple of examples of these diagenetic changes observed inside a zooid.

This thin section of a limestone from the Middle Ordovician strata of the southern Appalachian mountains has been stained using a mixture of Alizarin Red-S and Potassium Ferricyanide. The pink is an iron free calcite. The purple in the center of the zooids is an iron rich calcite. This sequence from an iron free to an iron rich calcite indicates oxygen poor reducing conditions upon burial, a chemical environment in which iron can enter the growing calcite crystal.

And in this thin section the pale bronze colored mineral highlighting the skeletal frame is chert, a variety of silica that has partially replaced the calcite skeleton. The replacement process has been quite delicate, preserving the original structure of the skeleton.

Evolution is not the only story that bryozoans reveal.

Campus Memories: Prof. Sohan Modak

I came to know from media reports and Twitter posts that biologist Dr. Sohan Modak passed away on March 23rd. Although I never interacted with him directly I do have some distinct memories of his presence on the Pune University campus when I was completing my Masters in Geology in the late 1980's. On various occasions there were protests and strikes organized by faculty in opposition to some decision regarding University functioning. I don't remember Dr Modak ever making common cause with the rest of the faculty regarding going on a strike. He used to show up to the canteen with large posters which outlined his opinion of the situation. He then used to vociferously appeal to the faculty to get back to teaching. 

On the academic side, many of my college batch mates had opted for a Master's in Zoology. I started hearing a different language from them. There was less emphasis on the rigid divisions between Zoology and Botany. Instead, universal mechanisms underlying all life were being discussed. Gene regulation, chromosome structure, development. All this was new and alien to me, but exciting to hear about none the less. 

Dr. Modak had played a big role in the transformation of biology syllabus I was told. The various tributes now poring in bears this out. 

R.I.P. 

 

Links: Noisy Soils, First Art, Mars Geology

A few readings for your perusal.

1) Biologists are poking senors into soil to listen to the hum of life. Amazing article by Ute Eberle on what we can learn from acoustic signals given off by animals living within a soil profile.

Life in the soil was thought to be silent. What if it isn’t?

2)  When was the first 'árt' made? Is there a neat sequence from abstract scratches on rock and bone to representational art that adorns the walls of caves? Excellent article by Amy McDermott on this question, bringing together the viewpoints of archeologists and cognitive scientists. 

What was the first “art”? How would we know?

3) One year on, NASA's Mars Perseverance has been drilling into rock, collecting samples and finding some surprises along the way. It will now head towards an ancient delta to look for past life! Alexandra Witze reports on the progress.

A year on Mars: How NASA’s Perseverance hit a geological jackpot.

 

Cyanobacteria And Mountain Building In The Paleoproterozoic

By 2.3 billion years ago, cyanobacteria employing oxygenic photosynthesis began proliferating in the world's oceans. This resulted, several hundreds of millions of years later, in triggering the formation of fold mountain belts in places where tectonic plates converge and collide. 

This big idea linking geological processes and biological evolution is explored in an interesting paper by John Parnell and Conner Brolly published in Communications Earth and Environment.  

Source: Examining the tectono-stratigraphic architecture, structural geometry, and kinematic evolution of the Himalayan fold-thrust belt, Kumaun, northwest India- S Mandal et.al. 2019.

Consider how fold mountain grow using this example from the Lesser Himalaya. The different colored layers are rocks formed on the northern margin of the Indian plate. They range from 1.8 billion years to around 50 million years in age. As the Indian continent collided with Asia around 50 million years ago, this pile of metamorphic and sedimentary rocks was squeezed by compressional forces. They were folded and broken up by thrust faults into a series of panels or sheets. Deformation of the Indian plate spread from north to south. As you gaze from the top to the bottom of the graphic you will notice that folding and faulting first began at the zone of collision (extreme right of the graphic). Over time the locus of deformation migrated further and further away from the site of continental contact. New faults grew and moved sheets of rocks southwards, stacking them and building mountains by thickening the crust.

Now look at the more detailed cross section below from Mandal's paper. The fold and thrust architecture of Lesser Himalaya is clearly revealed. The thin pink lines are the thrust faults and they have partitioned the rock pile into a series of panels (A-G), causing 'stratigraphic repetition' across the mountain belt. Internally, each panel has the same sequence of layers. I am ignoring some of the complexities of the formation of the Greater Himalaya for the sake of brevity.

Parnell and Brolly argue that the increased biomass in oceans starting 2.3 billion years ago produced organic rich sediment, which transformed on burial into carbonaceous shale and graphite bearing metamorphic rocks. The rates at which tectonic plates move meant that basins that filled up with such sediments began arriving at collisional zones some 200 million years since their initiation. 

Carbon rich and graphite bearing layers reduce friction along faults making the contractional deformation I outlined in the Himalaya example easier. The widespread mountain building activity observed in the geological record from 2 to 1. 8 billion years ago was helped along by faults preferentially splitting the rock pile along weaker graphite rich layers with the carbonaceous material acting as a lubricant, allowing easier movement and stacking of the faulted blocks. The nice graphic below compiles instances of mountain building that took place during that time frame from across the globe.  

Source: Increased biomass and carbon burial 2 billion years ago triggered mountain building- Parnell and Brolly 2021.

The authors give several examples of Paleoproterozoic orogenic belts in which major fault zones are associated with graphite rich layers. They also point out that the atomic arrangement of carbon in graphite that has been disturbed by faulting is different from the background graphite in sediment. Many fault zones in their examples contain this 'disordered' graphite bolstering their case that graphite was mobilized during fault movement.

This connection between carbon rich sediment and faulting appears as a recurring theme in geologic history. Another example comes from the Cretaceous when there was abundant deposition of organic rich sediment during times of globally high sea levels and oxygen depleted ocean depths. The resulting black shales subsequently provided the weak zones for faults to split and move crustal sheets during the building of the Rockies, the Andes and other mountain ranges spread widely across continents.

While it makes sense that carbonaceous material will reduce frictional resistance and enhance fault movement, one must be careful not to overemphasize the causal link between carbon rich sediment and mountain building. After building a case for the close association of carbonaceous sediments and major faults, the authors write, "Given the link between organic matter and deformation evident in younger rocks, the scene was set for collisional orogenesis at ~2 Ga (Fig. 1) by the exceptional accumulation of organic carbon during the mid-Palaeoproterozoic.

I would think that 'the scene was set for collisional orogenesis at ~2 Ga' not because of the presence of carbon rich sediment, but because by that time a global plate tectonic regime was operating and plate forces were maneuvering continents in directions that resulted in them converging at multiple places. The pulse of mountain building during that time period occurred because several continents crashed into each other. 

That the presence of carbonaceous sediment may aid faulting but is not a necessary condition for thrust fault regimes to develop in convergent settings is supported by looking at what occurred earlier in geologic history before the exceptional bloom in cyanobacterial growth and carbon burial. Yatin Zong and colleagues in a recent paper published in Nature Communications describe the formation of the Central Orogenic Belt of Northern China which formed by the collision of a chain of oceanic volcanoes with the North China continent in Neoarchean times (2.8-2.5 billion years ago). They demonstrate the development of fold and thrust structures and large distance movement along thrust faults that occurred in this convergent plate setting along the North China continental margin between 2.6 and 2.5 billion years ago. Here, thrust faulting detached sheets of the crust made up of lava erupted from oceanic volcanoes and also sediments deposited in adjacent basins and moved them hundreds of kilometers.  The fault surface was lubricated by copious amounts of the shiny mineral mica. 

This is several hundred million years before the exceptional accumulation of carbonaceous sediment in Paleoproterozoic times. It appears that the lithosphere deforms in a mechanically consistent style under the horizontal compressive forces prevalent in plate tectonic settings, with hydrated oceanic crust, water saturated clays, micas, and carbon being alternative candidates for reducing friction.

How did the outer shell of the earth behave before plate tectonics? Early earth was a much hotter place. Warm rocks are weak. Plate motion is driven by a pull force that is imparted as a tectonic plate subducts or sinks underneath another tectonic plate. So, for plate tectonics to evolve, the lithosphere or the outer shell of the earth has to become strong enough not to disintegrate as it is being pulled by its subducting leading edge. Such conditions, geologists think, likely became more and more common as the earth cooled sufficiently by about 3 billion years ago. 

Before this time tectonics played out as gravity driven vertical movements of the crust . This inference is based on the structures observed in many Archean age terrains which show large granitic bodies encircled by steeply tilted and metamorphosed volcanic and sedimentary rocks. On a hotter earth, buoyant granitic magmas rose and intruded the near-surface volcanic and sedimentary layers pushing them aside and thermally transforming them into low grade metamorphic rocks.

This ensemble of metamorphosed volcanic and sedimentary rocks are called greenstones. The typical structure is a granitic dome encircled by vertically oriented layers of greenstone having a flattened or schistose fabric formed due to the parallel orientation of platy minerals like micas and chlorite. The satellite image below shows one of the classic examples of this 'dome and keel' structure from the Archean age terrain of Pilbara from northwest Australia. Grey green narrow schist belts are wedged between light colored oblate shaped granitic domes.  The Pilbara terrain ranges in age from 3. 5 billion to 2. 9 billion years.

The Indian continental crust has its share of these Archean granite-greenstone associations. Some prominent ones are in Karnataka, exposed near Dharwar, Shimoga and Kolar. Most of these belts are older than 3 billion years in age.

Contrast this structural style with that of a classic fold belt from younger Proterozoic times. These are the famous Nallamala ranges in south India formed by horizontal compressive forces.

The earth changed considerably between 3 and 2 billion years ago. Chemical differentiation of magmas separated heavier elements from the lighter ones, forming continents made up of lighter buoyant granitic rocks and oceanic depressions floored by denser basalt lava. The growing mechanical strength of its outer shell formed coherent slabs or plates ultimately resulting in the more familiar plate tectonic cycles of super-continent formation and breakups. 

Another striking change appeared on the surface by 2 billion years; the formation of high topography. In the Archean, growth of new crust by constant injections of magma kept the outer shell warm and weak, unable to support the weight of tall mountains.  As the earth cooled the lithosphere gained strength and became rigid. High mountains built by tectonic thickening of the crust at continent collision zones could now stand on a strong foundation.

Folds, faults, crushed rocks, and mountain belts. All these dramatic contortions of the crust readily invite us to probe the physical evolution of the lithosphere as an explanation for the geological dynamism of our planet. Parnell and Brolly in their paper remind us that unique biological events have played a role too in shaping earth's physical features, even those as immense as the Himalaya.  

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Wishing readers a very Happy and Safe New Year!

The Games Lizards Play

I did mean evolutionary games played out over long periods of time, where for example, three colored varieties of one lizard species keep cyclically oscillating in their numbers. Why should this happen? The answer lies in the children's game 'rock- paper- scissors', an analogue for understanding evolutionary strategies for reproductive success.

This is a really fine essay in The Wire Science by evolutionary biologist Raghavendra Gadagkar on the ecology and evolutionary biology of rock lizards. Dr. Gadagkar started out as a molecular biologist but changed course and got interested in the biology of large animals, choosing lizards as one of his research subjects. 

He describes the various life strategies lizards evolve, dependent on ecology and population dynamics. His colleagues Maria Thaker and her student Anuradha Batabyal too are engaged in work on Indian rock lizards. He points out some aspects of their work-

"Ecologists generally take great pride in studying forests and exotic places, the more pristine the better; few study the ecology of their backyard, the trees lining their streets and the lizards that run around them. It is somehow considered too silly for a serious scientist to be doing so.

Much of Anuradha and Maria’s research on rock lizards defies this stereotype. They extract rigorous scientific questions that can only be answered by studying urban animals and comparing them with their rural or forest counterparts. When animals move into urban habitats, they face new challenges, just as we do when moving from villages into cities – new enemies, new resources, and rapid spatial and temporal changes in the environment, requiring a new survival toolkit. How do lizards deal with these problems?"

It gladdens my heart to see such science coverage in a major Indian news portal. And what about the last sentence? .." I think it’s time we changed the canonical image of the scientist from that of an elderly, bearded man in a white coat to one of an intrepid young woman in the wilderness!"

That this is an admission made by an elderly bearded man makes me even happier.

More Fun Than Fun: My Favourite Lizard Stories- Raghavendra Gadagkar.

Mammalian Evolution, Earth Biosphere, India Geology Outreach

 Sharing these interesting items:

1) Simone Hoffman writes about one of the fundamental transitions in mammalian evolution, the transformation of bones of the lower jaw into those of the middle ear.

Lend an ear to a classic tale of mammalian evolution.

2) How has the earth's evolving biosphere from early microbes to megascopic land plants impacted the biogeochemistry of the earth? A great review article by Noah Planavsky and colleagues. Read this one quickly. It is open access for now, but might go behind a paywall in the next few weeks.

Evolution of the structure and impact of Earth’s biosphere.

3) Live History India anchored by Mini Menon has produced a great geology outreach video. Four geology enthusiasts talk about India's varied geology, how to raise awareness among our citizenry about the importance of geology in our lives, and the urgent need to protect sites of exceptional geological significance. Dr. Pushpendra Ranawat, Bidisha Bayan, Dr. Reddy, and Aliya Babi are the guests. 

Do make the time and watch this. Email subscribers who can't see the embedded video can watch it here - India: What Lies Beneath.

 

Books: Origins Of Complexity ; China Water History

These just arrived.

Extract:

I hope to persuade you that energy is central to evolution, that we can only understand the properties of life if we bring energy into the equation..... I want to show you that the origin of life was driven by energy flux, that proton gradients were central to the emergence of cells, and that their use constrained the structure of both bacteria and archaea. I want to demonstrate that these constraints dominated the later evolution of cells, keeping the bacteria and archaea forever simple in morphology, despite their biochemical virtuosity. I want to prove that a rare event, an endosymbiosis in which one bacterium got inside an archaeon, broke those constraints, enabling the evolution of vastly more complex cells. .....Finally, I want to convince you that thinking in these energetic terms allows us to predict aspects of our own biology, notably a deep evolutionary trade-off between fertility and fitness in youth, on the one hand, and ageing and disease on the other.

The last book I read on the evolution of complexity was Mark Ridley's The Cooperative Gene which described the many evolutionary inventions that suppress genomic conflict and make multicellular bodies workable. Nike Lane writes at a more fundamental level of the energy currency of the cell. Feeling very excited about this book. I am sure to learn a lot.

Extract:

But the ubiquitous and ambivalent relationship that the Chinese people have had with water has made it a powerful and versatile metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression, and its political connotations can be subverted and manipulated in subtle ways for the purposes and protest and dissent. These meanings of water are more than metaphorical. Because the lives of everyday folk has always depended on water, the river and canals mediate their relationship to the state. Water -too much of it,or too little - has incited the people to rise up and overthrow their governments and emperors. Burgeoning economic growth now places unprecedented pressure on the integrity and sometimes the very existence of China's waterways and lakes. Not only can China's leaders ill afford to ignore this potential brake on economic growth, but the environmental problems are leading to more political pluralism in a nominally one party state.

Sweeping... from the Qin Dynasty (200 B.C.) to the present..

On The Moth's Inordinate Love For Salt

I am reading The Forest Unseen- A Year's Watch In Nature by David George Haskell.

During a vigil in the forest, a moth landed on the author's finger and refused to let go.. why? A passage from the book...

Only males have such an exaggerated antennae. They comb the air for scent released by females and fly upwind, guided to a mate by their enormous feathery noses. But finding a mate is not enough. The male must provide a nuptial offering to his mate. My finger provides him with an essential ingredient for this gift.

Diamonds may be the crystal of choice for wooing humans, but moths seek a different, altogether more practical mineral, salt. When the moth mates he will pass to his partner a package containing a ball of sperm and a packet of food. This food is generously seasoned with sodium, a precious gift that looks forward to the needs of the next generation. The female moth passes the salt to the eggs and thus to the caterpillars. Foliage is deficient in sodium, so the leaf-munching caterpillars need their parents salty bequest. The moth's arduous attachment to my finger prepares him for mating and will help his offspring survive. The salt in my sweat will make up for the deficiencies in caterpillar diets.

Full of nuggets like this... recommended.

Book- The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

Currently reading- The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science by Armand Marie Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College, London. 

"His ideas flow like a subterranean river through the history of our science, surfacing now and then as a spring with ideas that are apparently new but are, in fact, very old. 

This book is an exploration of the source :  the beautiful  scientific works that Aristotle wrote, and taught, at the Lyceum. Beautiful, but enigmatic too, for the very terms of his thoughts are so remote from us that they are hard to understand. He requires translation: not merely into English, but into the language of modern science. That, of course, is a perilous enterprise: the risk of misunderstanding him, of attributing to him ideas that he could not possible have had, is always there.

The perils are particularly great when the translator is a scientist. As a breed we make poor historians. We frankly lack the historical temper, the Rankean imperative to understand the past in its own right. Preoccupied with our own theories, we are inclined to see them in whatever we read" .

Promising start! Will keep you posted...

Interview- Rosemary And Peter Grant On Watching Evolution In Action

Source: Quanta Magazine; Courtesy Peter and Rosemary Grant

Daphne Major in the Galapagos chain.

Yes, 40 years of field research on that half a square km size island, tracking, generation after generation, changes in body and beak size of different species of ground finches.  Lately, they have supplemented their morphologic and bird song data with genomic analysis to get an understanding of the genetic underpinnings of morphologic change.

Rosemary and Peter Grant interviewed about their epic evolution watch:

"The diminutive island wasn’t a particularly hospitable place for the Grants to spend their winters. At less than one-hundredth the size of Manhattan, Daphne resembles the tip of a volcano rising from the sea. Visitors must leap off the boat onto the edge of a steep ring of land that surrounds a central crater. The island’s vegetation is sparse. Herbs, cactus bushes and low trees provide food for finches — small, medium and large ground finches, as well as cactus finches — and other birds. The Grants brought with them all the food and water they would need and cooked meals in a shallow cave sheltered by a tarp from the baking sun. They camped on Daphne’s one tiny flat spot, barely larger than a picnic table.

...They visited Daphne for several months each year from 1973 to 2012, sometimes bringing their daughters. Over the course of their four-decade tenure, the couple tagged roughly 20,000 birds spanning at least eight generations. (The longest-lived bird on the Grants’ watch survived a whopping 17 years.) They tracked almost every mating and its offspring, creating large, multigenerational pedigrees for different finch species. They took blood samples and recorded the finches’ songs, which allowed them to track genetics and other factors long after the birds themselves died. They have confirmed some of Darwin’s most basic predictions and have earned a variety of prestigious science awards, including the Kyoto Prize in 2009".

indefatigable to the end..

"Do you plan to go back to Daphne?

RG: We stopped intensive work after 40 years, but we do plan to go back.

PG: The oldest person died at 122 years old. That means we have 40 more years".

Ground finches are off course the birds that Charles Darwin famously observed when on tour to the Galapagos, but infamously didn't mention in his book since he never labelled his samples according to their island location. He did borrow correctly labelled samples from other sailors and then had the ornithologist John Gould classify them. Gould's finding was that the islands finches were a group of sibling species despite their widely varying body and beak size and shape.

Habitats varied on different islands. Darwin realized that sometime in the distant past one ancestral population of finches must have immigrated from the South American mainland and then diverged into several morphologically distinct species, each a fit to its habitat. That was one of the threads of reasoning he weaved into a more comprehensive theory of common descent and evolution through natural selection.

The book, Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner, is a bit dated but is still a riveting account of Rosemary and Peter Grant's research.

Update: @avinashtn alerted me to the Grant's book "40 Years of Evolution".

Life Began As Clay Crystals

There is a fine article on BBC Earth by Martha Henriques on the work of chemist Graham Cairns-Smith and his theory that life may have begun as clay crystals. Cairns-Smith reasoned that clay minerals are made up of sheets of atoms bonded in a regular lattice pattern that is stacked in layers.  Pieces of this latticework break off, forming offspring crystals often with minor dislocations to the latticework. These offspring crystals grow ..break off with more minor changes... grow.. and so on. Organic molecules like the precursors of DNA might have used such a "replicating entity" as a scaffolding to build an organic replicating system.

His idea stood at the intersection of geology, chemistry and biology and his wife Dorothy recalls the reaction he got from his peers:

"He could never get funding," Dorothy says. A major stumbling block to securing research grants was that his work straddled too many different disciplines.

One time we went to California, and Graham gave lectures to the Menlo Park Geology Survey," says Dorothy. "They all said, well, your geology's fine but I don't think your chemistry's right. Then he gave a lecture to NASA on the chemistry side and they said, well, your chemistry's fine but I'm not sure about your biology. And then he lectured to Berkeley and they said, well, your biology's fine but I'm not sure about your geology".

Nowadays such grand problems are tackled by multi-disciplinary teams of sub sub specialists. If a chemist is asked to talk on the geology aspects,  he just forwards the email of his teammate.

Quote: David Quammen On Continental Versus Oceanic Islands

I have been writing on the geological origins of India's two famous island chains. Coincidentally, I am reading  David Quammen's classic book - The Song Of The Dodo- Island Biogeography In An Age Of Extinctions. The focus is about the importance of islands in understanding evolution and extinction. Darwin and Wallace independently got their insights regarding the formation of new species through studying the geographic distribution of fauna on island groups.

Yesterday being World Environment Day it is timely to share this great passage-

A continental island begins with everything, and everything to lose. An oceanic island begins with nothing and everything to gain. Island biogeography, over the past century and a half, has been the scientific record of those gains and losses. 

What this implies is that since continental islands are extensions of continents with a low area between them and the main landmass, they already have a terrestrial fauna on them when they become isolated on account of rising seas flooding the low shelf and severing the land connection between. Oceanic islands on the other hand rise from the ocean floor anew, made up either of lava piling up from the sea floor,  or by coral growth on undersea volcanic summits. They get colonized by birds flying in from the mainland an reptiles and small mammals arriving with flotsam. These are pioneer fauna which diversify in their unique way on this new land.

Highly Recommended.

In Darwin's Footsteps: A Book On The Galapagos Daphne Major Finches

Years ago I read Jonathan Weiner's excellent book The Beak Of The Finch. He describes the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant on the finches of Galapagos Islands with its fertile volcanic landscapes and biodiversity having inspired another aspiring naturalist in the 1830's to great discoveries. The Grants studied for decades evolution of finch populations, observing in them natural selection in action.

Now they have written their own book- 40 Years of Evolution: Darwin's Finches on Daphne Major Island.

Jonathan Weiner writes about it in the New York Times:

They kept up their watch during years of downpours and years of drought — seasons of feast and famine for the finches. And Darwin’s process unfolded before their eyes in intense episodes that illustrated better than anything in the Origin the struggle for existence, and the ways that life adapts and emerges fitter from the struggle.

.. and on the possible beginnings of a distinct lineage -

Big Bird’s lineage has now lasted for 30 years and seven generations. The Grants are cautious about its prospects — “It is highly unlikely that we have witnessed the origin of a long-lasting species, but not impossible,” they write — but other scientists are buzzing.

This is exciting work, the stuff that inspires young students of the subject to push ahead with their own dreams and aspirations. The Grants are both 77 years young now... and still studying their beloved finches.

OF Flies Mice And Men- Francois Jacob 1920 -2013

The great French biologist Francois Jacob died on April 19th 2013. I started this post and left it lingering in draft. I want to post it now.

 Carl Zimmer at The Loom  has an essay which outlines one of the key moments of Jacob's career- when he realized how cells turn genes on and off.  That formed the basis of understanding gene regulation and laid the foundation of the field of developmental biology. For that work he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965 with Andre Lwoff and Jacques Monod.

Francois Jacob also wrote beautifully about evolution. His description of evolution as a tinkerer has become a popular way to think about how evolution builds novelties and puts together complex structures and traits. From his elegant essay on evolution and tinkering published in Science in 1977 :

Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior, However, if one wanted to play with a comparision, one would have to say natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer - a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him whether it be pieces of string, fragments or wood, or old cardboards; in short it works like a tinkerer who uses everything at his disposal to produce some kind of workable object. For the engineer, the realization of his task depends on his having the raw materials and the tools that exactly fit his project. The tinkerer, in contrast, always manages with odds and ends. What he ultimately produces is generally related to no special project, and it results from a series of contingent events, of all the opportunities he had to enrich his stock with leftovers. As was discussed by Levi Strauss (5) none of these materials at the tinkerer's disposal has a precise and definite function. Each can be used in a number of different ways. In contrast with the engineers's tools, those of the tinkerer cannot be defined by a project. What these objects have in common is "it might well be of some use". For what? That depends on the opportunities.

I enjoyed reading his books; The Statue Within and Of Flies Mice and Men.

Here is a passage from his book Of Flies Mice and Men where he describes the fear and excitement of changing course midway through his career:

The word "courage" is not too strong. The daily interaction over years with a living organism, however humble, entails a certain familiarity. You could almost say that you acquire a certain tenderness for it. After 15 years of working with a particular colon bacillus, I had accumulated hundreds of mutants. In each of these mutants, one or another of the cellular functions, many of them indispensable to the life and reproduction of the bacteria, had been altered. To abandon this work and all that it offered; to renounce the kind of intimacy that comes with the knowledge of little unwritten quirks, the folklore that surrounds the work of any one organism; to start again from zero with another, unknown organism whose idiosyncrasies I would have to discover - all this was a considerable sacrifice. It was a little like leaving a loved one . But, at the same time, the new project was an exciting one. It would mean entering an unknown world, beginning a new life, becoming young again....