View from a Rhino House: don’t look up!

Let’s be honest, when you think about crocodiles & alligators (if you think about them at al), you think of them lumbering around on the ground or lying in wait in the water – not climbing trees. However a University of Tennessee study has found that the beasties can climb trees

The team observed checked on species on 3 continents, Africa, Australia, & North America, & examined earlier studies & anecdotal evidence. They found that there are four species that regularly climb trees, & how close they got to heaven depended on their size. The smaller animals were able to climb higher than the larger ones & some species were observed climbing as far as four metres high in a tree & five metres along a branch.

“Climbing a steep hill or steep branch is mechanically similar, assuming the branch is wide enough to walk on,” the study reported. “Still, the ability to climb vertically is a measure of crocodiles’ spectacular agility on land.”

The beasties seen climbing trees, both at night & during the day, were nervous at being approached, jumping into the water when an approaching observer was no more than10 metres away. (They can jump?)

“The most frequent observations of tree-basking were in areas where there were few places to bask on the ground, implying that the individuals needed alternatives for regulating their body temperature,” the authors wrote. “Likewise, their wary nature suggests that climbing leads to improved site surveillance of potential threats & prey.”

So I guess it’s back to hiding under the bed with a broom handle for protection (they can’t jump on you under the bed, & there’s no point in trying to climb a tree to get away).

Good thing I wore a hat..... — Good thing I wore a hat…..

Not again?

I dunno, first it was the damned monkey, now this..... — I dunno, first it was the damned monkey, now this…..

Lucy in the sky (well OK, more the trees in this case)….

The ancient hominid known as Lucy is getting shouldered into the trees by a recently uncovered fossil child. But scientific onlookers disagree about whether Lucy’s long-extinct species mixed tree climbing with walking.

Apelike shoulder blades from the ancient skeleton of a roughly 3-year-old girl that belonged to Australopithecus afarensis — the same species as Lucy, a famous 3.2-million-year-old partial female skeleton found in 1974 — suggest that these early members of the human evolutionary family split time between scrambling up trees and walking on the ground, say paleobiologist David Green of Midwestern University in Downers Grove, Ill., and anthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Scientists have argued for more than 30 years about whether A. afarensis was built mainly for walking or possessed physical attributes suitable for ascending trees as well. Shoulder blades of a fossil child discovered in 2000 in Dikika, Ethiopia, indicate that Lucy’s crew could indeed scale trees beginning early in life, Green and Alemseged report in the Oct. 26 Science.

A. afarensis inhabited East Africa 3 million to 4 million years ago.

Lucy and her cohorts spent plenty of time on foot but climbed trees to forage for fruits and to escape predators, Green proposes. Based on the new analysis of the Dikika fossils, he says, “juvenile members of A. afarensis may have been more active climbers than adults.”

A previous analysis of the Dikika child, dubbed Selam by its discoverers, suggested that the youngster’s shoulder blades — partly encased in rock at the time — resembled those of gorillas. Green and Alemseged have since freed the fossils from surrounding rock. Comparisons to other hominid fossils, modern apes and humans suggest that Selam’s shoulder blades are generally apelike enough to have enabled regular tree-climbing.

As in living apes, Selam and Lucy had upward-pointing shoulder sockets, Green and Alemseged say. People are born with slightly downward-pointing shoulder sockets that eventually shift to face laterally.

A bony ridge on the back of Selam’s shoulder blades runs diagonally, as in living apes, the researchers add. The same ridge runs horizontally across the top of people’s shoulder blades.

The full story at Science News here.