Top Photo: Advokaat doing fieldwork in Malaysia. Photo credit: uu.nl/en/news
You may think you’re having a bad day when you lose your homework or house keys, but can you imagine losing something as big as a continent?
Scientists have been looking for, and finally found, a 3,100-mile-long piece of continent that broke off from Australia more than 150 million years ago! The lost continent, known as Argoland, had seemingly disappeared. But scientists saw evidence of what Argoland left behind in the form of a basin hidden deep below the ocean.
Geologists at Utrecht University were able to follow the path of the lost continent by evaluating the structure of the seafloor. They expected to find Argoland where the islands of Southeast Asia are located today. However, there was no large continent where they expected to find it. The Utrecht University geologists, Eldert Advokaat and Douwe van Hinsbergen, knew that the land must have gone somewhere. So what happened to the lost continent? It turns out that Argoland broke apart into fragments.
“We were literally dealing with islands of information, which is why our research took so long. We spent seven years putting the puzzle together,” said Advokaat. “The situation in Southeast Asia is very different from places like Africa and South America, where a continent broke neatly into two pieces. Argoland splintered into many different shards. That OBSTRUCTED our view of the continent’s journey.”
Argoland was in fact once part of the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwana. Scientists believe that Argoland started splintering around 300 million years ago before ultimately splintering off 155 million years ago. Van Hinsbergen said that understanding how the world’s geography looked throughout history, and the process of how it has evolved, is important for our understanding of Earth science.
“Those reconstructions are vital for our understanding of processes like the evolution of biodiversity and climate, or for finding raw materials,” said van Hinsbergen. “And at a more fundamental level: for understanding how mountains are formed or for working out the driving forces behind plate tectonics; two phenomena that are closely related.”
Feline Face-off Facts Revealed
While some pet cats may seem ALOOF, evidently they can make dozens of different faces to communicate with other cats, to show they’re friendly or to warn their foes!
Researchers Lauren Scott and Brittany Florkiewicz studied the facial expressions of cats visiting the CatCafe Lounge in Los Angeles. Scott, who works for the University of Kansas Medical Center, recorded just over three hours of felines making faces at each other!
She categorized the interactions of the cats as “friendly,” “aggressive” or “ambiguous.” She and Florkiewicz then took a close look at this feline facial footage for some fun and informative findings.
“Like domesticated dogs, the domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus) has experienced significant socio-ecological changes due to domestication. In recent years, there has been increased interest in studying domestic cat facial signals to improve their welfare,” the researchers wrote in the article published in last month’s “Behavioural Processes.”
The study involved 53 short-haired adult cats at the LA cafe and noted if the face-making cat was male or female. Pulled back whiskers, eye bulging, ears back and flattened—cats can use different combinations of individual signals to communicate with each other.
The study identified 26 different types of facial muscle movements by the cats, which combined for 276 different faces! Males made faces more frequently on film—413 vs. 275 by female felines. And out of the 688 facial signals observed, researchers found that just over half of them were made in “affiliative” (more friendly or connecting) interactions, and just under half were made in “non-affiliative” (unfriendly) interactions.
Researchers hope their findings will help pet owners and shelter workers keep the peace and build bonds between cats.
