Animal that flummoxed Darwin finds its genetic home

An animal whose pedigree stumped even Charles Darwin has at long last found its place in the tree of life. A study released Tuesday in Nature Communications concludes that the Macrauchenia patachonica, or the "long-necked llama," is part of a sister group of the Perissodactyla placental order, which includes horses and rhinos.

The two groups split about 66 million years ago, reports the AFP, right about the time a massive asteroid struck the Earth, causing the extinction of land-roaming dinosaurs.

Macrauchenia, which looked like camels without humps and weighed up to 1,000 pounds, lived in what is now South America until the late Pleistocene Era, between 11,000 and 20,000 years ago.

"Its outstanding feature, however, was its nose," says study co-author and American Museum of Natural History curator Ross McPhee. "We have no soft tissue fossils," he continues, "so we don't know whether the nose was developed into an actual trunk, like an elephant's. It would not have looked very much like anything alive today." The new study built on a 2015 study that attempted to determine the animal's lineage through the analysis of ancient collagen, the structural protein found in skin.

CNN reports that McPhee and University of Potsdam paleogenomics expert Michi Hofreiter extracted mitochondrial DNA from a Macrauchenia fossil found in South America and employed new techniques in genome recovery, which together allowed them to identify the animal's origins without the DNA of close relatives.

Darwin was the first to find the animal's fossils, while in Patagonia in 1834, but neither he nor Richard Owen, the renowned paleontologist he sent the fossils to, was able to place the creature in any known lineage.

(As for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, it hit in exactly the wrong place.)

Red, White, and Blue Animals for the Fourth of July

Independence Day in the United States is coming up, and the red, white, and blue will be flying—and fluttering, and swimming, and skittering.

CHERAX PULCHER CRAYFISH
This freshwater firework was first formally described in a 2015 paper by German independent researcher Christian Lukhaup, who noticed the species being sold in the ornamental fish trade.

"It took me several years to find where it comes from," Lukhaup says, but he knew it was of the Cherax genus, endemic to several areas including West Papua, Indonesia. With the help of locals, Lukhaup finally tracked it down to the creeks of West Papua's Teminabuan region.

Cherax pulcher differs from other subspecies of crayfish in that its chalae, or claws, are smaller, its body slimmer, and its coloring far more fantastic. This crayfish is vulnerable to the pet trade, Lukhaup says, particularly as crayfish collecting becomes more popular in Europe and Asia.

CUBAN TROGON
Cuba's national bird, the Cuban trogon—also called the tocororo or tocoloro—matches the colors of the American (and Cuban) flag, and then some.

"The blue feathers present iridescent patterns," and sometimes appear dark green, "depending on the angle of the sunlight," says ornithologist Eduardo E. Inigo Elias, senior research associate at Cornell University, who has studied the biology and conservation of birds in Cuba for 14 years.

In this species both males and females sport these bright colors, but there's a marked difference in their songs, with longer calls for males, says Inigo Elias.

COMMON AGAMA OR RAINBOW LIZARD
Native to sub-Saharan Africa, "there is variation in color across the range of this widespread species," says Robert Espinoza, a biologist at California State University, Northridge.

"The color is related to social hierarchies," he says, and a 2002 study on the suburban population in coastal Kenya notes that the males with the best fighting abilities have the brightest "nuptial colors," a signal the animal is ready to mate.

"The biggest and brightest typically defend a harem of females from competing males," adds Adam Leaché, a biologist at the University of Washington.

(See: Earth Farthest From Sun on Fourth of July—So Why So Hot?)

MANDRILL
In this equatorial east African primate species only the males have dramatic white whiskers and chins, and bright blue and red on their noses and hindquarters.

And the brighter the colors, the more dominant the male. (Related: Some Monkeys Have Blue Testicles - Here's Why)

In 2005 Joanna Setchell of the University of Cambridge, UK, did a study showing that brighter males ranked higher than paler ones, which leads to less conflict since high ranking males can be identified and avoided.

A 2004 study by Setchell showed that brighter males also enjoyed more female attention and that females preferred them—even if they weren't the highest ranking.

POLKA-DOT WASP MOTH
So is it a wasp or a moth?

It looks wasp-like, but this is a moth, native to the Caribbean and also inhabiting Florida and Georgia. The only plant this moth's caterpillar offspring will chow down on is oleander, hence its other common name, the oleander moth.

As a caterpillar it is orange, covered in what look like patches of false eyelash. But after it has matured in its cocoon of silk, it emerges red, white, and blue, flying in the breeze.