
The last Sumatran rhino died in Malaysia Saturday, making the critically endangered species extinct in that country.
The last rhinoceros was a 25-year-old female named Iman, who passed away at 5:35 p.m. Borneo time, BBC News reported. She had suffered from cancer since she was captured in 2014, and a wildlife official said that painful tumors on her bladder caused her to die sooner than her caretakers had anticipated, according to Sky News.
"Despite us knowing that this would happen sooner rather than later, we are so very saddened by this news," Sabah State Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Christine Liew said, according to Sky.
This was Iman, who died aged 25 from natural causes and was Malaysia's last Sumatran rhino, meaning the species is… https://t.co/rMj58uhdX5— Sky News (@Sky News)1574671204.0
Iman's death comes six months after the death of Malaysia's last male Sumatran rhino, Tam, National Geographic reported. There are around 80 Sumatran rhinos left in Indonesia, the only country the species now calls home.
"The public needs to understand how precarious the survival of Sumatran rhinos is," International Rhino Foundation Executive Director Susie Ellis told National Geographic. "Tam's loss represents roughly one percent of the population."
Sumatran rhinos once lived throughout Asia, even extending as far as India, according to Sky News. But their numbers were decimated by habitat loss and poaching. The species has declined by more than 70 percent in the last 20 years, and is likely the most endangered large mammal on earth, according to the International Rhino Foundation.
Now there are so few Sumatran rhinos that conservationists think the greatest risk to their survival is isolation, National Geographic explained. This is because the female rhinos develop cysts in their reproductive tracts if they do not mate on a regular basis.
Failed attempts to breed Tam and Iman were a case in point: Tam did not have very high quality sperm, but Iman's uterine tumor prevented her from conceiving at all, according to Save the Rhino. Genetic material from both Tam and Iman was gathered in the hopes that their cells could one day be converted into embryos and placed in a surrogate mother.
Both Save the Rhino and the International Rhino Foundation are part of a collaboration called the Sumatran Rhino Rescue alliance. The alliance is fighting to save the species by capturing isolated rhinos and bringing them together for captive breeding. In 2018, they succeeded in capturing a female named Pahu, who appears reproductively healthy and is doing well in a breeding facility, according to National Geographic.
Sumatran rhinos currently live in five fragmented groups in Indonesia, four in Sumatra and one in Indonesian Borneo, Save the Rhino explained. The groups are so small and disparate that it is hard for individuals to find mates.
"Iman's death is a very sad loss for Sumatran rhinos, reminding us all of the urgency to protect these wonderful creatures," Cathy Dean, CEO of Save the Rhino International, said. "All hopes for the species now rest on Indonesia's Sumatran rhinos found on the island of Sumatra and in Kalimantan, in the south of Borneo."
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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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