MOTHER NATURE Mother Nature September 2017

Mother Nature Aug /Sep 2017 Like many other infectious diseases, leprosy was brought to the New World by Europeans in the late 15th century, and it's widely accepted by zoologists that armadillos likely contracted leprosy from these newcomers. As a result, armadillos have become a natural reservoir for the disease. 21 is equipped with an even more robust insurance policy: A pair of screeching lungs. Anytime this species perceives a threat, it will emit extremely loud, alarm- like vocalizations. Depictions of armadillos curling up into tight balls and rolling away, you'd assume that most species would be capable of this defense mechanism. But the only armadillos equipped with this adorable ability are the two species belonging to the Tolypeutes genus, also known as the Brazilian and southern three-banded ar- madillos. All other armadillo species have too many plates, making this kind of flexibility impossible. Dried shell of an armadillo was used in making of music instrument known as charangos, these 10-stringed, lute-like instruments are an integral part of traditional Andean music in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. While they were once commonly made from the dried shell of an armadillo, contemporary incarnations of the charango are now made with wood or sometimes calabash gourds. An ancestor to 90% of flowering plants. what is the flower..? Flowering plants, or angiosperms, make up about 90 percent of all terrestrial plants alive today, but the origin of these colorful and fra- grant flora has remained something of a mys- tery. Because of genetic evidence, researchers believe all 225,000-plus species of angiosperm derive from a single ancestor that lived between 140 million and 250 million years ago, but with- out clear fossil evidence, what this first flower looked like is unknown. That is, until now. Researchers writing in the journal Nature Communications have compiled the single largest set of data on flowering plants, including data points on 792 flowers, with at least one from each angiosperm order, whether living or fossilized. This immense data was then used to build a chronogram using molecular dating. Basically, a computer was used to num- ber crunch a family tree based on differences that arose through mutations between species, reports Discover. These mutations would have arose at a fairly steady rate, so with a large enough data set, you can conceivably just keep tracing traits back until you get to a common ancestor. By stripping away derived traits, it's even possible to zero in on what that last common ancestor must have looked like, with a fairly strong de- gree of certainty. It sounds convoluted, but the method used (Markov Chain Monte Carlo Baye- sian computation) is highly tested and respected. So the first flower isn't just some artist's im- pression. Aside from generating a depiction of the first flower ever, researchers also determined that the plant was likely bisexual, with both male and female parts, and had whorl formations of petal- like organs, in sets of three rather than spiral formations. The flower looks unlike any living species. A reconstruction can be viewed atop the page. What's so useful about this analysis is that it can be tested, either through genetic analysis or by checking it with the fossil record. Some might be surprised by the first flower's sophisticated design. It's important to keep in mind that while this is a representation of the first ancestral flower, that doesn't mean there couldn't have been other quasi-angiosperm predecessors, with rudimentary petals that more closely resembled modified leaves. Still, it's an impressive reconstruction, a glimpse into evolution without any fossils whatsoever.

MOTHER NATURE Mother Nature September 2017 | Page 22