Month: October 2016

Some people dream of swimming with dolphins or riding an elephant, but these bucket list goals often come at the cost of harming the animal. Tourist attractions offering these activities sometimes drug, beat, or isolate the creatures into submission—and TripAdvisor has had enough. As National Geographic reports, the travel website announced this week that they will stop selling tickets to venues that are known for animal cruelty. They’ll also team up with advocacy groups to build a portal to teach tourists about humane wildlife treatment.

“TripAdvisor’s new booking policy and education effort is designed as a means to do our part in helping improve the health and safety standards of animals, especially in markets with limited regulatory protections,” said TripAdvisor president and CEO Stephen Kaufer in an official statement.

Earlier this year, the company—which runs the Viator booking service—told National Geographic’s Wildlife Watch that it “wasn’t TripAdvisor’s place” to guide web users’ ethical choices. Now, they’ve changed their mind. Their policy overhaul was prompted by a long-term protest campaign launched by animal welfare group World Animal Protection. They highlighted TripAdvisor’s affiliations with wildlife tourist venues known for questionable practices, and argued that using these animals for visitors’ enjoyment results in psychological and physical harm for the creatures. (National Geographic’s Wildlife Watch, along with other media outlets, have also reported on TripAdvisor’s affiliation with these businesses.)

The travel company will stop selling tickets to a few of the offending outlets right away, and by early 2017 they will have cut ties with all of them. These include attractions that offer elephant rides, dolphin swims, and chances to get up close and personal with tigers, among others. (According to NPR, Viator claims it doesn’t offer travel bookings that involve blood sport, and TripAdvisor already prohibits reviews for places that allow bullfights or captive hunts.) Around this time, TripAdvisor will also launch its wildlife education portal.

Not all activities involving wildlife are banned, though: TripAdvisor will grant exemptions for horseback riding, petting zoos, aquariums, zoos, or ethical nature sanctuaries.

[h/t National Geographic]

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Unlike humans, birds don’t have voice boxes or vocal cords. The organ that allows them to produce songs and sounds is called a syrinx. There’s a big gap in what scientists know about the origins of this organ, because while birds are closely related to dinosaurs, syrinx fossils are fairly rare. Now, scientists have discovered the oldest fossil evidence of the syrinx in Antarctica, and it dates back between 66 and 68 million years, according to a recent study in the journal Nature [PDF].

The preserved syrinx was found in the partial skeleton of a bird from the Late Cretaceous period on Vega Island, located just off the Antarctic Peninsula. It belonged to Vegavis iaai, an extinct bird related (but likely not ancestral) to modern ducks and geese. The fossil was discovered way back in 1992, according to The New York Times, but the lead author of the present study, paleontology Julia Clarke, only thought to examine its vocal structures and look for the syrinx in 2013. 

 
As you can see in the image above, the syrinx is located deep within birds’ chests, branching into both the right and left lungs. Clarke and her team used CT tomography scans to compare the fossilized syrinx to those of 12 other modern birds and the next-oldest fossil syrinx ever discovered in an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of the organ.

The researchers hypothesize that few other fossilized syrinx examples have been found because it’s a relatively newer feature in bird evolution, and is much younger than some of birds’ other respiratory developments or the ability to fly, which came about during the dinosaur age. Non-avian dinosaurs probably didn’t have these vocal organs, this study suggests, although the evidence isn’t entirely conclusive.

It’s hard to imagine what the dinosaur world sounded like, but this suggests that while avian dinosaurs might have honked in a similar way to geese, using a syrinx, non-avian dinosaurs didn’t make those noises. Clarke’s research has previously pointed to dinosaurs making cooing or bellowing sounds similar to crocodiles. Either way, they probably weren’t roaring.