
Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was voted the worst member of the Trump administration, according to the latest, albeit unscientific, poll from New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins.
Last month, the liberal/progressive journalist and winner of this year's George Polk Award for commentary, asked readers to "select the worst Trump minion." Collins quipped, "No fair saying everybody."
Results were published yesterday, and Pruitt—infamous for denying the science of climate change, gutting critical environmental regulations to push for fossil fuels, and flying first class (until recently)—won the poll in a "landslide."
"They're all terrible," a voter commented on Facebook. "But if you want me to choose: Pruitt. A crook, a fraud, a dangerous man."
"Pruitt, hands down," another wrote. "He is ruining the environment for us AND future generations. I wonder how long it will take to erase the Trump stain on our nation's history?"
Collins noted that the "biggest worry on people's mind was the environment and Pruitt's capacity to screw it up," adding that Pruitt's latest proposed budget would eliminate the EPA's climate change research program as well as a government initiative promoting voluntary emissions reductions.
The Democrats of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce tweeted a sarcastic congratulations to the EPA boss.
Congrats 👋👋 to #PollutingPruitt on being voted the worst cabinet member in the Trump Administration! A real feat gi… https://t.co/zA9maCNt71— Energy and Commerce Committee (@Energy and Commerce Committee)1519913589.0
Pruitt nearly won the distinction the year before, but Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos ended up taking home the dubious prize.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke was voted this year's runner-up. Collins pointed out that Zinke—who has also racked up a serious travel budget like Pruitt—"has bid adieu to five-sixths of the unpaid members of the National Park System Advisory Board—although it's not actually clear that Zinke knows they're gone, since he refused to meet with them."
Incidentally, the former Montana congressman topped another recent poll. The Center for Biological Diversity awarded Zinke its annual Rubber Dodo award for aggressively seeking to tear apart America's public lands, ramping up oil and gas development, and driving endangered species extinct.
Ryan Zinke Wins 2017 Rubber Dodo Award https://t.co/AyqwYghwoG @greenpeaceusa @Earthjustice— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1519779907.0
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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