cbc radio story camels in the arctic

[monte]

Interesting story on researchers finding evidence of camels in the arctic and yukon.

wonder how this plays in the global warming debate?

[Hopperbin]

definately camel bones, one hump or two?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/story/2013/03/05/pol-camels-in-high-arctic.html

[Hopperbin]

I said it was a focilized tree but got laughed out of the meeting.

[TOM4CWB]

One Hump... with temps 14 to 22c warmer... I wonder
what C02 levels were then?

Cheers!

Let's just put this out there: Camels used to live in
Canada's High Arctic.

It seems unlikely, but 3½ million years ago, Nunavut's
Ellesmere Island was a totally different place.
According to a group of scientists led by the Canadian
Museum of Nature's Natalia Rybczynski, it was a boreal
forest anywhere from 14 to 22 C warmer than it is
today.

It's hard to say whether or not the camels loved it up
there. But why wouldn't they? The weather wasn't bad
and there was plenty to eat. The remains were found in
a fossil deposit called the Fyles Leaf Bed, after all. And
for a vegetable muncher like the camel, Rybczynski's
discovery of fossil leaves, wood and other plant
material sounds like the perfect smorgasbord.

COMING UP
Quirks & Quarks talks to Natalia Rybczynski on March
9 at noon on CBC Radio One

And if eating a leaf and grass salad without relatives
muscling in on your plate was top of list, well, this
place fits the bill. The nearest known prehistoric
camels before this find loped around in Yukon, 1,200
kilometres to the south.

Rybczynski and her team — John Gosse from
Dalhousie University in Halifax and Mike Buckley from
the University of Manchester in England — authored a
study on their find for the online journal Nature
Communications. It took them three summer field
seasons.

Still, camels in the high Arctic. Unbelievable!

Maybe the most unlikely part of this story is the
evidence Rybczynski's team used to make their
astounding claim. Check out the picture next to this
paragraph. That's right. It's a miniature sandbox filled
with 30 bone fragments. Camel bone fragments, mind
you.

The fossil bones of the High Arctic camel are laid out
in Dr. Natalia Rybczynski's lab at the Canadian
Museum of Nature. (Martin Lipman, Canadian Museum
of Nature)
So how do you build a 900-kilogram, 270-centimetre-
tall at the shoulder dromedary (that's a one-humped
camel, for your information) out of what looks like a
sabre-toothed tiger's table scraps?

CSI - Camel Scene Investigation
Detailed digital scans of each of the shards allowed
Rybczynski to piece them together and build a tibia.
That's the big lower leg bone in all mammals. It was
part of an animal that belonged to the order of
artiodactyla. Those are cloven-hoofed animals like
cows, pigs, giraffes, hippos — and camels.

And then Buckley stepped in. He's developed an
identification technique called "collagen
fingerprinting." Collagen is the main protein in bones.
He takes a bit, analyzes it and then he compares his
findings to the collagen profiles of 37 modern
mammals.

Guess who matched up closest? It was our buddy's
insatiable southern cousin, the Yukon Giant Camel.

Rybczysnki is pretty excited about her discovery.

"It's thrilling! It's absolutely thrilling! Because it's the
first evidence of this type of animal. So we have a new
animal for the assemblage that we know lived there at
the time," she told the CBC, "and also of course, it's
the first evidence we have that camels were living in
this forest-type environment."

Camels in the high Arctic. Awesome!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/story/2013/0
3/05/pol-camels-in-high-arctic.html