Category: Environment

{How do we create innovative and sustainable solutions to climate-related challenges affecting communities and cities in Rwanda and across Africa? This is what, climate advocates, entrepreneurs, economists, NGOs, digital innovators and environmental experts set out to work on at Saturday’s Climathon at Impact Hub Kigali.}

Organized in collaboration between World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), ICLE and Impact Hub Kigali, the Climathon aimed to use creativity, teamwork and cross-sector collaboration to come up with tangible projects and business ideas that can tackle climate-based challenges. With a special focus addressing challenges around food, water, energy and transport, participants came together for an early morning Umuganda brainstorm and continued working until the sun had already set over Kigali to come up with innovative, sustainable and implementable solutions to climate-related challenges affecting urban life in Kigali – and Africa at large.

Two representatives from WWF in Zambia and Uganda travelled to Kigali to find inspiration in Rwanda’s approach to creating green cities and come up with sustainable solutions.

“Kigali is a pioneer in Africa when it comes to sustainable city planning, so we asked Impact Hub Kigali to create this event with us so we can have a chance to learn from people and institutions in Kigali, brainstorm, generate new ideas and come up with projects and practical solutions to climate-driven challenges that can be implemented in Kigali, Lusaka and all over Africa. It’s been a fantastic day and we are excited to come back to Kigali with a larger group to continue the work”, said Bwendo Kabanda from WWF Zambia. The event was part of WWF’s Earth Hour City Challenge, which they are carrying out in different African cities together with ICLEI.

Sally Murray from International Growth Center participated in the all-day event and gave a keynote address on her research on climate smart cities carried out in Kigali. According to her, a climathon is a perfect setting to come up with new, innovative solutions.

“When a mix of people and backgrounds come together like today we can tackle climate challenges from different angles. We’re focusing on developing practical solutions that can actually be implemented and maybe even run as businesses, and this is a great way of testing ideas that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own.”

After a busy and collaborative day, six groups of participants pitched their projects to overcome some of Kigali’s challenges in green, sustainable ways. Ranging from electronic waste management, sustainable cooking stoves, turning waste into energy and setting up composting systems in schools, the projects all looked at specific ways of introducing green and innovative solutions to communities and cities.

Alex Mulisa, Coordinator for Rwanda’s Green Fund, FONERWA, observed the presentations with great enthusiasm.

“This is exactly what we need; innovative ideas to address green challenges.
Fornerwa was set up because we need ideas from people like you. I see projects here today, which have the potentials of accessing funding and turned into reality. Sustainable solutions start as ideas like the ones we’ve seen here today. They are transforming Rwanda into a sustainable and green place that we can be proud of”, he said in his address to the participants.

The winning project will be announced on November 29th, when a larger WWF delegation comes back to Rwanda to continue where they left off last Saturday. The winning team will win one year of office space in Impact Hub to continue developing their project and turn it into a tangible solution to make Kigali an even greener city.

{An international team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge has discovered the ‘thermometer’ molecule that enables plants to develop according to seasonal temperature changes.}

Researchers have revealed that molecules called phytochromes — used by plants to detect light during the day — actually change their function in darkness to become cellular temperature gauges that measure the heat of the night.

The new findings, published today in the journal Science, show that phytochromes control genetic switches in response to temperature as well as light to dictate plant development.

At night, these molecules change states, and the pace at which they change is “directly proportional to temperature” say scientists, who compare phytochromes to mercury in a thermometer. The warmer it is, the faster the molecular change — stimulating plant growth.

Farmers and gardeners have known for hundreds of years how responsive plants are to temperature: warm winters cause many trees and flowers to bud early, something humans have long used to predict weather and harvest times for the coming year.

The latest research pinpoints for the first time the molecular mechanism in plants that reacts to temperature — often triggering the buds of spring we long to see at the end of winter.

With weather and temperatures set to become ever more unpredictable due to climate change, researchers say the discovery that this light-sensing molecule moonlights as the internal thermometer in plant cells could help us breed tougher crops.

“It is estimated that agricultural yields will need to double by 2050, but climate change is a major threat to such targets. Key crops such as wheat and rice are sensitive to high temperatures. Thermal stress reduces crop yields by around 10% for every one degree increase in temperature,” says lead researcher Dr Philip Wigge from Cambridge’s Sainsbury Laboratory.

“Discovering the molecules that allow plants to sense temperature has the potential to accelerate the breeding of crops resilient to thermal stress and climate change.”

In their active state, phytochrome molecules bind themselves to DNA to restrict plant growth. During the day, sunlight activates the molecules, slowing down growth.

If a plant finds itself in shade, phytochromes are quickly inactivated — enabling it to grow faster to find sunlight again. This is how plants compete to escape each other’s shade. “Light driven changes to phytochrome activity occur very fast, in less than a second,” says Wigge.

At night, however, it’s a different story. Instead of a rapid deactivation following sundown, the molecules gradually change from their active to inactive state. This is called “dark reversion.”

“Just as mercury rises in a thermometer, the rate at which phytochromes revert to their inactive state during the night is a direct measure of temperature,” says Wigge.

“The lower the temperature, the slower phytochromes revert to inactivity, so the molecules spend more time in their active, growth-suppressing state. This is why plants are slower to grow in winter.

“Warm temperatures accelerate dark reversion, so that phytochromes rapidly reach an inactive state and detach themselves from DNA — allowing genes to be expressed and plant growth to resume.”

Wigge believes phytochrome thermo-sensing evolved at a later stage, and co-opted the biological network already used for light-based growth during the downtime of night.

Some plants mainly use day-length as an indicator of the season. Other species, such as daffodils, have considerable temperature sensitivity, and can flower months in advance during a warm winter.

In fact, the discovery of the dual role of phytochromes provides the science behind a well-known rhyme long used to predict the coming season: Oak before Ash we’ll have a splash, Ash before Oak we’re in for a soak.

Wigge explains: “Oak trees rely much more on temperature, likely using phytochromes as thermometers to dictate development, whereas Ash trees rely on measuring day length to determine their seasonal timing.

“A warmer spring, and consequently a higher likeliness of a hot summer, will result in Oak leafing before Ash. A cold spring will see the opposite. As the British know only too well, a colder summer is likely to be a rain-soaked one.”

The new findings are the culmination of twelve years of research involving scientists from Germany, Argentina and the US, as well as the Cambridge team. The work was done in a model system, a mustard plant called Arabidopsis, but Wigge says the phytochrome genes necessary for temperature sensing are found in crop plants as well.

“Recent advances in plant genetics now mean that scientists are able to rapidly identify the genes controlling these processes in crop plants, and even alter their activity using precise molecular ‘scalpels’,” adds Wigge.

“Cambridge is uniquely well-positioned to do this kind of research as we have outstanding collaborators nearby who work on more applied aspects of plant biology, and can help us transfer this new knowledge into the field.”

{Researchers have identified the first known example of fossilised brain tissue in a dinosaur from Sussex. The tissues resemble those seen in modern crocodiles and birds.}

An unassuming brown pebble, found more than a decade ago by a fossil hunter in Sussex, has been confirmed as the first example of fossilised brain tissue from a dinosaur.

The fossil, most likely from a species closely related to Iguanodon, displays distinct similarities to the brains of modern-day crocodiles and birds. Meninges — the tough tissues surrounding the actual brain — as well as tiny capillaries and portions of adjacent cortical tissues have been preserved as mineralised ‘ghosts’.

The results are reported in a Special Publication of the Geological Society of London, published in tribute to Professor Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford, who died in 2014. Brasier and Dr David Norman from the University of Cambridge co-ordinated the research into this particular fossil during the years prior to Brasier’s untimely death in a road traffic accident.

The fossilised brain, found by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks near Bexhill in Sussex in 2004, is most likely from a species similar to Iguanodon: a large herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous Period, about 133 million years ago.

Finding fossilised soft tissue, especially brain tissue, is very rare, which makes understanding the evolutionary history of such tissue difficult. “The chances of preserving brain tissue are incredibly small, so the discovery of this specimen is astonishing,” said co-author Dr Alex Liu of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, who was one of Brasier’s PhD students in Oxford at the time that studies of the fossil began.

According to the researchers, the reason this particular piece of brain tissue has been so well-preserved is that the dinosaur’s brain was essentially ‘pickled’ in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water — similar to a bog or swamp — shortly after its death. This allowed the soft tissues to become mineralised before they decayed away completely, so that they could be preserved.

“What we think happened is that this particular dinosaur died in or near a body of water, and its head ended up partially buried in the sediment at the bottom,” said Norman. “Since the water had little oxygen and was very acidic, the soft tissues of the brain were likely preserved and cast before the rest of its body was buried in the sediment.”

Working with colleagues from the University of Western Australia, the researchers used scanning electron microscope (SEM) techniques in order to identify the tough membranes, or meninges, that surrounded the brain itself, as well as strands of collagen and blood vessels. Structures that could represent tissues from the brain cortex (its outer layer of neural tissue), interwoven with delicate capillaries, also appear to be present. The structure of the fossilised brain, and in particular that of the meninges, shows similarities with the brains of modern-day descendants of dinosaurs, namely birds and crocodiles.

In typical reptiles, the brain has the shape of a sausage, surrounded by a dense region of blood vessels and thin-walled vascular chambers (sinuses) that serve as a blood drainage system. The brain itself only takes up about half of the space within the cranial cavity.

In contrast, the tissue in the fossilised brain appears to have been pressed directly against the skull, raising the possibility that some dinosaurs had large brains which filled much more of the cranial cavity. However, the researchers caution against drawing any conclusions about the intelligence of dinosaurs from this particular fossil, and say that it is most likely that during death and burial the head of this dinosaur became overturned, so that as the brain decayed, gravity caused it to collapse and become pressed against the bony roof of the cavity.

“As we can’t see the lobes of the brain itself, we can’t say for sure how big this dinosaur’s brain was,” said Norman. “Of course, it’s entirely possible that dinosaurs had bigger brains than we give them credit for, but we can’t tell from this specimen alone. What’s truly remarkable is that conditions were just right in order to allow preservation of the brain tissue — hopefully this is the first of many such discoveries.”

“I have always believed I had something special. I noticed there was something odd about the preservation, and soft tissue preservation did go through my mind. Martin realised its potential significance right at the beginning, but it wasn’t until years later that its true significance came to be realised,” said paper co-author Jamie Hiscocks, the man who discovered the specimen. “In his initial email to me, Martin asked if I’d ever heard of dinosaur brain cells being preserved in the fossil record. I knew exactly what he was getting at. I was amazed to hear this coming from a world renowned expert like him.”

The research was funded in part by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Christ’s College, Cambridge.

{Global populations of vertebrates — mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish — have declined by 58 percent between 1970 and 2012, states a new report from World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Animals living in the world’s lakes, rivers, and freshwater systems have experienced the most dramatic population declines, at 81 percent. Because of human activity, the report states that without immediate intervention global wildlife populations could drop two-thirds by 2020.}

“This research delivers a wake-up call that for decades we’ve treated our planet as if it’s disposable,” said Carter Roberts, WWF president and CEO. “We created this problem. The good news is that we can fix it. It requires updating our approach to food, energy, transportation, and how we live our lives. We share the same planet. We rely on it for our survival. So we are all responsible for its protection.”

The top threat to wildlife is habitat loss and degradation, driven primarily by increasing demand for food and energy. According to the report, global food production is the leading cause for destruction of habitats and overexploitation of wildlife. Agriculture currently occupies approximately one-third of Earth’s total land area and accounts for 70 percent of all freshwater use.

Wild animals are not the only ones at risk; the report states that increased pressure threatens the natural resources that all life — including humanity — depend on.

The report demonstrates the need to rethink how we produce, consume, measure success and value the natural environment, and calls for an urgent system change by individuals, businesses and governments. The report also illustrates the positive momentum that is building by highlighting recent global agreements on climate change and sustainable development. In particular, the report recognizes the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as an essential guide to decision-making that can ensure that the environment is valued alongside economic and social interests.

“A strong natural environment is the key to defeating poverty, improving health and developing a just and prosperous future,” said Marco Lambertini, WWF director general. “We have proven that we know what it takes to build a resilient planet for future generations, we just need to act on that knowledge.”

Living Planet Report 2016: Risk and resilience in a new era is the eleventh edition of WWF’s biennial flagship publication. The report tracks over 14,000 vertebrate populations of over 3,700 species from 1970 to 2012 and includes research from the Global Footprint Network and the Zoological Society of London.

{Common swifts are known for their impressive aerial abilities, capturing food and nest material while in flight. Now, by attaching data loggers to the birds, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 27 have confirmed what some had suspected: common swifts can go for most of the year (10 months!) without ever coming down.}

While there had been examples of birds remaining in flight for periods of months, including frigate birds and alpine swifts, the evidence on common swifts sets a new record, the researchers say.

“When the common swifts leave their breeding site in August for a migration to the Central African rainforests via West Africa, they never touch ground until they return for the next breeding season 10 months later,” says Anders Hedenström of Lund University in Sweden. “Some individuals may roost for brief periods, or even entire nights in mid-winter, but others literally never landed during this period.”

Hedenström says the birds likely save energy during the day by gliding in upward currents of warm air. But they also ascend to high altitudes each day at dawn and dusk.

Scientists had long ago proposed that swifts might spend most of their lives in flight. To find out, Hedenström and colleagues developed a new type of micro data logger. The data loggers record acceleration to monitor the birds’ flight activity. Later, the researchers added light sensors for use in geolocation. The researchers attached the data loggers to 19 common swifts that were later recaptured.

The data showed that swifts spend more than 99 percent of their time during their 10-month non-breeding period in flight. While some individuals settled down at some point, others never did. The birds’ flight activity often appeared lower during the day than at night, most likely because the birds spent their days soaring on warm air currents.

Hedenström says the researchers don’t yet know whether or how the birds sleep. But, “the fact that some individuals never landed during 10 months suggests they sleep on the wing.” Perhaps they find time to nap during slow descents at dawn and dusk, he suggests. That’s one possibility he and his colleagues hope to explore in future research.

Despite the high energetic costs associated with all that flight, common swifts also manage to live surprisingly long lives, contrary to popular notions about living hard and dying young. There are documented cases of common swifts living to the age of 20.

In that time, “the accumulated flight distance equals seven round-trip journeys to the moon,” Hedenström says. And that, he says, means there are many more intriguing questions to ask and answer about the birds’ physiology.

{Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire.}

An unprecedented 40-year experiment in a 40,000-acre valley of Yosemite National Park strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.

After a three-year, on-the-ground assessment of the park’s Illilouette Creek basin, University of California, Berkeley researchers concluded that a strategy dating to 1973 of managing wildfires with minimal suppression and almost no preemptive, so-called prescribed burns has created a landscape more resistant to catastrophic fire, with more diverse vegetation and forest structure and increased water storage, mostly in the form of meadows in areas cleared by fires.

“When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants within the watershed. And it increases the drought resistance of the remaining trees and also increases the fire resilience because you have created these natural firebreaks,” said Gabrielle Boisramé, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and first author of the study.

Boisramé and co-author Sally Thompson, a UC Berkeley ecohydrologist and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, found that even in the drought years covered by the study, the basin retained more water than similar areas outside the park. That translated into more runoff into the Upper Merced River, which flows through Yosemite Valley, at a time when other rivers in the surrounding areas without a restored fire regime showed the same or decreased flow.

“We know that forests are deep-rooted and that they have a large leaf area, which means they are both thirsty and able to get to water resources,” Thompson said. “So if fire removes 20 percent of that demand from the landscape, that frees up some of the water to do different things, from recharging groundwater resources to supporting different kinds of vegetation, and it could start to move into the surface water supplies as stream flow.”

The study was published in this month’s issue of the journal Ecosystems.

If the results are confirmed from other studies, including the UC Berkeley team’s new project analyzing the Sugarloaf Creek Basin in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, they could alter the way the federal government as well as water districts deal with fire, benefiting not only the forest environment but potentially also agriculture and cities because of more runoff into streams and reservoirs.

“I think it has the potential to change the conversation about wildfire management,” said co-author Scott Stephens, a fire expert and UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management who has studied the Illilouette basin since 2002.

This “wildfire management” strategy is counter to the federal government ‘s 110-year-old Smokey Bear policy, which is followed throughout the West and emphasizes suppressing fires wherever they occur for fear they will get out of control. With persistent drought and a warming climate, the U.S. Forest Service budget is increasingly going to firefighting. On most federal land, only forest thinning and human-initiated prescribed burns are allowed as a way to manage the trees and underbrush.

Stephens noted, however, that these agencies have recognized the folly of total suppression — thanks in part to his own studies throughout the Sierra Nevada over several decades — and current draft wildland management policies for three of the state’s national forests allow active wildfire management in up to 60 percent of the forests.

The value of forest clearings

Wildfire management, as opposed to suppression, comes with major changes in the way the forest looks, Stephens and Thompson said. Unlike the dense stands of pine and fir most people associate with Yosemite and similar mid-elevation Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain forests, the Illilouette Creek basin has thinner forests and more clearings with dead trees.

“There is much more dramatic structural change in this forest than most people would probably feel comfortable with,” he said. “You are talking about low-density forests and gaps of 4 or 5 acres, up to maybe 100 acres. These are the result of major fires about every decade or so, large enough to cause tree scarring and affecting as much as one-quarter of the basin.”

These fire-caused clearings, however, act as natural fire breaks and make the area resistant to catastrophic fires such as the 2013 Rim Fire in the western part of the park, which burned 250,000 acres and left patches up to 20,000 acres in extent in which not a single conifer tree survived. These areas could take a century to recover, Stephens said.

“In the Illilouette basin we lost about 20 percent of the forest cover, but there was a 200 percent increase in wetland vegetation: meadows starting to reemerge from forests that have probably encroached on historical locations,” Thompson said. “That sets us up to think that this new regime should be leakier as far as water goes — leaky in the way that suits us as a society.”

Even if these wildfire management techniques don’t produce more runoff, Thompson added, “I think it is a fabulous result in terms of forest management if you end up with a healthier forest with some better intact aquatic habitat, even if you don’t see a drop of water further downstream. It is still the right thing to do from an ecological point of view.

“Bottom line, this strategy might be a triple win-win-win for water, forest structure and fire risk,” she said.

The ‘jewel’ of Yosemite National Park

The findings are the culmination of a 14-year study led by Stephens and his UC Berkeley colleagues to learn how monitoring natural, lightning-caused fires with a bias toward letting them burn affects the landscape, the vegetation and the groundwater. Only four areas in the western U.S., including two in California — the Illilouette Creek basin and the Sugarloaf Creek basin — have allowed lightning fires to burn in large areas for decades.

Most studies of different ways to manage wildland fires have been limited to a few hundred acres, and it’s hard to extrapolate from such limited experiments to an entire forest. Luckily, Yosemite National Park started its experiment in 1973 — spurred by a 1963 report authored by the late UC Berkeley forester Starker Leopold — to let nature take its course in the Illilouete Creek watershed, stepping in only when fires in the basin threatened to get out of control or sent too much smoke into Yosemite Valley two miles to the northwest.

“This is the first study that looks at fire regime restoration on a watershed scale with empirical data,” he said. “Others do smaller areas or modeling, but this is 40,000 acres — a big place — over many years.”

One reason the basin was chosen was that it was surrounded by granite walls, which naturally prevented fires from spreading outside the basin. It had not been burned by the indigenous tribes of the region, which often set fires to increase acorn production, and had no history of prescribed burns. In fact, it saw only natural, lightning-caused fires except for an interval of nearly a century — 1875 to 1972 — when the park suppressed all fires.

While Stephens and his many students documented the changes in fire over the past 400 years, Boisramé and Thompson analyzed aerial photos to document vegetation change. Then, with the help of installed sensors and more than 3,000 soil moisture measurements throughout the basin, the team was able to estimate the amount of water in the landscape today versus in the past. They found similar or marginally drier conditions where forests had been replaced with shrubs, but these were balanced by much wetter conditions in small areas where meadows expanded.

They observed more snow reaching the ground because of the clearings, and more snow remaining during the spring, delaying runoff. And in recent drought years, when surrounding basins saw more trees die, there was almost no tree mortality in the Illilouette basin.

“In order to really understand whether this approach should be part of our management toolkit, I would recommend that we give it a crack in a few other places,” Thompson said. “This appears to be a promising management strategy without significant harm and with several very strongly quantifiable benefits and several very suggestive outcomes.”

Boisramé, who spent the past four summers sampling and camping in the Illilouette Creek basin, emphasized that this is not a strategy that would work everywhere. But in wilderness areas where wildfire management is being considered because of its safety benefits — to reduce underbrush and eliminate fuel for out-of-control and catastrophic fires that risk lives and property — the ecological and hydrological benefits are a big bonus. Areas with similar elevation and climatic conditions to the Illilouette basin, and thus perhaps suitable for managed wildfire, comprise about 18 percent of the Sierra Nevada, though the strategy may work at lower elevations as well.

“The whole ecosystem will be better off if we let the natural fire process back in,” she said.

{Upper Paleolithic humans may have hunted cave lions for their pelts, perhaps contributing to their extinction, according to a study published October 26, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marián Cueto from the Universidad de Cantabria, Spain, and colleagues.}

The Eurasian cave lion, likely among the largest lion species ever to have lived, became extinct around 14,000 years ago, but the reasons for its disappearance are not clear. Upper Paleolithic humans were previously known to have hunted other small and large carnivores, but archaeological evidence of lion hunting is sparse. To help fill in this gap, Cueto and colleagues examined nine fossilized cave lion toe bones from the Upper Paleolithic cave site of La Garma, in northern Spain, for evidence of cave lion exploitation by humans.

The researchers found that most bones showed signs of having been modified by humans using stone tools, with a specialized technique similar to that used by modern hunters when skinning prey to keep the claws attached to the fur. The authors suggest that the toe bones they analysed may therefore have been part of a single lion pelt, which possibly lay on the floor of the occupied cave. La Garma is known to have been associated with human rituals, and cave lions may have been symbolic animals for Upper Paleolithic humans.

While the analysis is not definitive evidence that Upper Paleolithic humans exploited cave lions for their pelts, the authors speculate that human hunting of cave lions, perhaps as part of ritual activities, might have been a factor in cave lion extinction.

{Findings heighten simultaneous awareness of gregarious bird-like dinosaur sociality and fossil poaching.}

In the paleontology popularity contest, studying the social life of dinosaurs is on the rise.

A new publication on the bird-like dinosaur Avimimus, from the late-Cretaceous suggests they were gregarious, social animals — evidence that flies in the face of the long-held mysticism surrounding dinosaurs as solo creatures.

“The common mythology of dinosaurs depicts solitary, vicious monsters running around eating everything,” explains Gregory Funston, PhD student and Vanier scholar at the University of Alberta. “Our discovery demonstrates that dinosaurs are more similar to modern animals than people appreciate. Although the players are different, this evidence shows that dinosaurs were social beings with gregarious behaviour who lived and died together in groups.”

The discovery comes from a site in Mongolia, first encountered by paleontologists a decade ago. The site contained thousands of shards of destroyed bone, belying the telltale evidence of a previous discovery by fossil poachers. After conducting additional field work, scientists discovered a bonebed with an assemblage of Avimimus dinosaurs, who were extremely rare prior to this discovery.

Funston, who has traveled to Mongolia several times to work on the material, explains that though it is common knowledge that modern birds form flocks, this is the first evidence of flocking behavior in bird-like dinosaurs.

“With an assemblage like this, you can’t really understand why the dinosaurs died together unless you see the field site,” says Funston. “We can tell that they were living together around the time of death, but the mystery still remains as to why.”

What the paleontologists do know is that the discovery highlights the potential trend of increasing gregariousness and social behaviour in dinosaurs.

“There are groups of dinosaurs that become social towards the end of the Cretaceous. What still remains to be solved is whether this increasing trend is based on dinosaur behavior or it if it’s because of how the fossils were preserved.”

Bonebeds provide good evidence that the animals were living together in herds or groups. Though rare in the Jurassic and Triassic, they dominate the Cretaceous period. However, this is the first discovery of a bonebed of bird-like dinosaurs.

Funston says that perhaps more important than the scientific findings is shedding light on the increasing incidence of fossil poaching and how this affects scientific understanding. For this reason, he and his co-authors have published their findings in the open-access Scientific Reports, part of the Nature group of scientific journals. Inspired by their mentor who has been working in Mongolia since the 1980s, Currie’s students have taken up not only the scientific cause but also the higher social justice to protect our shared heritage.

The actor Nicholas Cage made headlines in late-2015 when he returned a Tarbosaurus skull to Mongolia — purchased in an auction where he beat out another fossil-loving film star Leonardo DiCaprio — after learning the fossil was poached. Funston says without buyers, the fossil poaching market will dry up, so it is critical to raise awareness of the crime.

“Exposing poaching is almost more important than the science, because cutting off this crime will let the science continue. It changes our attitude about fossils,” says Funston. “They shouldn’t be seen as collectors’ objects but rather as evidence of our shared heritage that helps us understand where we came from and where we are going. To work as part of a team that is helping to ameliorate the situation is a great honour.”