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Contributions on a small collection of the former Subulinidae Fischer & Crosse, 1877 (Eupulmonata, Achatinoidea) with catalogue of the Glessula and Rishetia species recorded from Myanmar
Full text linkThe taxonomy of subulinid snails in Myanmar has been evaluated, resulting in the recognition of 40 species and subspecies across nine genera: Allopeas, Bacillum, Curvella, Glessula, Opeas, Paropeas, Rishetia, Tortaxis, and Zootecus. Nine species are re-described based on recently collected specimens, and two new species, Glessula mandalayensis Man & Panha, sp. nov. from Mandalay Region and Tortaxis cylindropsis Man & Panha, sp. nov. from Shan State are introduced. The genitalia and radula of Zootecus pullus was studied for the first time. This study also presents a comprehensive list of all subulinid species recorded to date from Myanmar. The type specimens and authenticated museum specimens have been illustrated with accompanying taxonomic remarks and nine species formerly assigned in Glessula are now placed in Rishetia: R. akouktoungensis, R. baculina, R. basseinensis, R. burrailensis maxwelli, R. kentungensis, R. limborgi, R. nathiana, R. pertenuis, and R. pertenuis major.Copyright: © Nem Sian Man et al. This is an open access article distributed under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (Attribution 4.0 International – CC BY 4.0). The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
On the taxonomic status of Burmese Collared Dove Streptopelia (decaocto) xanthocycla
Full text linkAlthough described as a subspecies of Eurasian Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto, the isolated Burmese population S. d. xanthocycla is considered to be a species by some authors, based on presumed morphological differences between the two taxa. To resolve the issue, a whole-genome resequencing-based study was conducted. The results show that Burmese xanthocycla can indeed be considered a separate species, and therefore that Eurasian Collared Dove is monotypic. As no type material exists for the Burmese Collared Dove, a neotype is designated for xanthocycla to clarify its taxonomy.Copyright © 2024 The Authors; This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
On another specimen of Faeroese white-speckled raven Corvus corax varius
Full text linkThe white-speckled raven, a colour aberration of the Faeroese Common Raven Corvus corax varius Brünnich, 1764, has occurred on the Faeroe Islands since at least the Middle Ages and was always prized by collectors. In the second half of the 19th century while the Faeroese raven population was suffering intense persecution, pied individuals were even more severely hunted, and were extinct by the early 20th century. Twenty-six specimens had been recorded so far in different museum collections, but a 27th has now come to light in the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo. The collector is unknown but given the
collection date, 1846, it was probably an islander rather than a foreign collector.Copyright © 2024 The Authors; This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Third time lucky for Forsten's pigeon; taeniura, forsterii, forsteni
Full text linkTemminck’s major work on pigeons became famous partly because of the complementary plates by Knip, even though Knip had used subterfuge to make the published work appear to be hers. It was generally assumed that this permanently ended their partnership as the evidence for renewed cooperation between the two, present in Knip’s second pigeon book, was widely overlooked. A rediscovered letter from Temminck to Knip confirms the renewed partnership, with Temminck supplying specimens of new species of pigeon to be included in Knip’s work. One of these was a Ducula from Sulawesi, collected by the Dutch
naturalist Forsten. Due to a spelling mistake, this species initially did not receive the name intended by Temminck. Although the error was subsequently corrected by Bonaparte, his action is invalid in the eyes of the International code for zoological
nomenclature. Another article in the Code, however, dealing with a different matter, is applicable and rules that the ‘amended’ name is valid after all.Copyright © 2024 The Authors; This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Acting pre-emptively reduces the long-term costs of managing herbicide resistance
Full text linkAbstract - Globally, pesticides improve crop yields but at great environmental cost, and their overuse has caused resistance. This incurs large financial and production losses but, despite this, very diversified farm management that might delay or prevent resistance is uncommon in intensive farming. We asked farmers to design more diversified cropping strategies aimed at controlling herbicide resistance, and estimated resulting weed densities, profits, and yields compared to prevailing practice. Where resistance is low, it is financially viable to diversify pre-emptively; however, once resistance is high, there are financial and production disincentives to adopting diverse rotations. It is therefore as important to manage resistance before it becomes widespread as it is to control it once present. The diverse rotations targeting high resistance used increased herbicide application frequency and volume, contributing to these rotations’ lack of financial viability, and raising concerns about glyphosate resistance. Governments should encourage adoption of diverse rotations in areas without resistance. Where resistance is present, governments may wish to incentivise crop diversification despite the drop in wheat production as it is likely to bring environmental co-benefits. Our research suggests we need long-term, proactive, food security planning and more integrated policy-making across farming, environment, and health arenas.Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. Tis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Seabird transported contaminants are dispersed in island ecosystems
Full text linkSource info: CHEM128817Seabirds are long-range transporters of nutrients and contaminants, linking marine feeding areas with terrestrial breeding and roosting sites. By depositing nutrient-rich guano, which acts as a fertiliser, seabirds can substantially influence the terrestrial environment in which they reside. However, increasing pollution of the marine environment has resulted in guano becoming similarly polluted. Here, we determined metal and metalloid concentrations (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Pb) in Flesh-footed Shearwater (Ardenna carneipes) guano, soil, terrestrial flora, and primary consumers and used an ecological approach to assess whether the trace elements in guano were bioaccumulating and contaminating the surrounding environment. Concentrations in guano were higher than those of other Procellariiformes documented in the literature, which may be influenced by the high amounts of plastics that this species of shearwater ingests. Soil samples from shearwater colonies had significantly higher concentrations of all metals, except for Pb, than soils from control sites and formerly occupied areas. Concentrations in terrestrial primary producers and primary consumers were not as marked, and for many contaminants there was no significant difference observed across levels of ornithogenic input. We conclude that Flesh-footed Shearwaters are transporters of marine derived contaminants to the Lord Howe Island terrestrial environment.Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Accounting for sampling heterogeneity suggests a low paleolatitude origin for dinosaurs
Full text linkDinosaurs dominated Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems for ∼160 million years, but their biogeographic origin remains poorly understood. The earliest unequivocal dinosaur fossils appear in the Carnian (∼230 Ma) of southern South America and Africa, leading most authors to propose southwestern Gondwana as the likely center of origin. However, the high taxonomic and morphological diversity of these earliest assemblages suggests a more ancient evolutionary history that is currently unsampled. Phylogenetic uncertainty at the base of Dinosauria, combined with the subsequent appearance of dinosaurs throughout Laurasia in their early evolutionary history, further complicates this picture. Here, we estimate the distribution of early dinosaurs and their archosaurian relatives under a phylogenetic maximum likelihood framework, testing alternative topological arrangements and incorporating potential abiotic barriers to dispersal into our biogeographic models. For the first time, we include spatiotemporal sampling heterogeneity in these models, which frequently supports a low-latitude Gondwanan origin for dinosaurs. These results are best supported when silesaurids are constrained as early-diverging ornithischians, which is likely because this topology accounts for the otherwise substantial ornithischian ghost lineage, explaining the group's absence from the fossil record prior to the Early Jurassic. Our results suggest that the archosaur radiation also took place within low-latitude Gondwana following the end-Permian extinction before lineages dispersed across Pangaea into ecologically and climatically distinct provinces during the Late Triassic. Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrates are under-sampled at low paleolatitudes, and our findings suggest that heterogeneous sampling has hitherto obscured the true paleobiogeographic origin of dinosaurs and their kin.Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
The Fe/S ratio of pyrrhotite group sulfides in chondrites: An indicator of oxidation and implications for return samples from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu
Full text linkDetermining compositional trends among individual minerals is key to understanding the thermodynamic conditions under which they formed and altered, and is also essential to maximizing the scientific value of small extraterrestrial samples, including returned samples and meteorites. Here we report the chemical compositions of Fe-sulfides, focusing on the pyrrhotite-group sulfides, which are ubiquitous in chondrites and are sensitive indicators of formation and alteration conditions in the protoplanetary disk and in small Solar System bodies. Our data show that while there are trends with the at.% Fe/S ratio of pyrrhotite with thermal and aqueous alteration in some meteorite groups, there is a universal trend between the Fe/S ratio and degree of oxidation. Relatively reducing conditions led to the formation of troilite during: (1) chondrule formation in the protoplanetary disk (i.e., pristine chondrites) and (2) parent body thermal alteration (i.e., LL4 to LL6, CR1, CM, and CY chondrites). Oxidizing and sulfidizing conditions led to the formation of Fe-depleted pyrrhotite with low Fe/S ratios during: (1) aqueous alteration (i.e., CM and CI chondrites), and (2) thermal alteration (i.e., CK and R chondrites). The presence of troilite in highly aqueously altered carbonaceous chondrites (e.g., CY, CR1, and some CM chondrites) indicates they were heated after aqueous alteration. The presence of troilite, Fe-depleted pyrrhotite, or pyrite in a chondrite can provide an estimate of the oxygen and sulfur fugacities at which it was formed or altered. The data reported here can be used to estimate the oxygen fugacity of formation and potentially the aqueous and/or thermal histories of sulfides in extraterrestrial samples, including those returned by the Hayabusa2 mission and due to be returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission in the near future.Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
The genome sequence of the eyed flat-backed millipede, Nanogona polydesmoides (Leach, 1814)
Full text linkWe present a genome assembly from a specimen of Nanogona polydesmoides (eyed flat-backed millipede; Arthropoda; Diplopoda; Chordeumatida; Craspedosomatidae). The genome sequence has a total length of 406.26 megabases. Most of the assembly (95.49%) is scaffolded into 16 chromosomal pseudomolecules. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled, with a length of 16.55 kilobases.Copyright: © 2025 Owen C et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Ecological interactions in the Scratchpads virtual research environment
Full text linkThe Natural History Museum, London has a number of online databases that describe interactions between species, including the HOSTS database of lepidopteran host plants (Robinson et al. 2010) and a database of Dipterocarp Seed Predators. These databases were generally bespoke software, which has increased the technical work necessary to sustain these resources. The decision was taken to migrate these to either the Scratchpads Virtual Research Environment (VRE) (Smith et al. 2011) or to the museum's Data Portal (Scott et al. 2019), depending on the complexity of the existing resource, as both are being sustained by the Informatics Group at the Natural History Museum, London. Resources that can be best represented as a single table were moved to the Data Portal, while those best represented in a relational model were transferred to Scratchpads. In addition, the Phthiraptera.info Scratchpad (Smith and Broom 2019), which already contained ecological interaction data, was migrated to the new system.
This paper describes the implementation within the Scratchpads VRE of a new ecological interactions module that is capable of handling the needs of these projects, while at the same time is flexible to handle the needs of future projects with different data sources.Copyright © Baker E et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor