A new chess film: Critical Thinking
by André Schulz

8/27/2020 –
A new chess film will be released soon: Critical Thinking. The film tells the story of the Miami Jackson High School chess team, which was the first inner city team to win the US National Chess Championship despite incredible adversity, motivated by a dedicated teacher. It was directed by John Leguizamo.


Based on a true story

John Leguizamo was born July 22, 1964, in Bogotá, Colombia, to Luz and Alberto Leguizamo. He was four when his family emigrated to the United States. He was raised in Queens, New York, attended New York University and studied under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg for only one day before Strasberg passed away. The extroverted Leguizamo started working the comedy club circuit in New York and first appeared in front of the cameras in an episode of Miami Vice (1984).

In 1998, he made his Broadway debut in John Leguizamo: Freak, a “demi-semi-quasi-pseudo-autobiographical” one-man show, which was filmed for HBO by Spike Lee.
Excerpt from “Freak


Fast-talking and feisty-looking John Leguizamo has continued to impress film audiences with his versatility: he can play sensitive and naive young men, such as Johnny in Hangin' with the Homeboys (1991); cold-blooded killers like Benny Blanco in Carlito's Way (1993); a heroic Army Green Beret, stopping aerial terrorists in Executive Decision (1996); and drag queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995). Arguably, not since ill-fated actor and comedian Freddie Prinze starred in the smash TV series Chico and the Man (1974) has a youthful Latino personality had such a powerful impact on critics and fans alike.

John Leguizamo makes his directorial feature film debut with a story that hits close to his heart. Set in 1998, Critical Thinking tells the true story of Cuban-American teacher Mario Martinez and his national championship winning chess team at Miami Jackson High School.

The school is hardly supported and the team has to manage without adequate financial support. Nevertheless, the team participates in the municipal school championships hoping to perhaps qualify to the US National School Chess Championship. The students come mostly from socially disadvantaged families, but are passionately motivated by dedicated teacher Mario Martinez, played by John Leguizamo himself. On the way to success, the team has to break with numerous conventions.

Let endgame expert Dr Karsten Müller show and explain the finesses of the world champions. Although they had different styles each and every one of them played the endgame exceptionally well, so take the opportunity to enjoy and learn from some of the best endgames in the history of chess.


Mario Martinez, played by John Leguizamo

The film is based on a true story and takes place in 1998. The people on which the story was based were involved in the production of the film as consultants.


André SchulzAndré Schulz started working for ChessBase in 1991 and is an editor of ChessBase News.

Chess: Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen to meet for first time in 16 years


Kasparov, 57, and Carlsen, 30, will compete at random chess in the 10-player St Louis Champions Showdown, their first encounter since 2004

3686: Oscar Panno v Garry Kasparov, Buenos Aires 1992. All-time legend Kasparov defeated Argentina’s top player. Can you visualise Black’s winning sequence, several moves deep but virtually all forced?


Leonard Barden
Fri 28 Aug 2020
Garry Kasparov will make a rare cameo appearance when the legend, now aged 57, takes on the reigning champion, Magnus Carlsen, in the 10-player Champions Showdown invitation organised by St Louis from 11-13 September.

This will be an historic clash, even though it is only online random chess. The two world champions, widely considered the best players of all time, have faced each other in only one previous official event. That was at rapid and blitz chess in 2004 in Reykjavik, when Carlsen was aged 13 and Kasparov 41, a year before his retirement.


Chess: Carlsen fights back from brink to overcome Nakamura in 38-game epic
Read more

Carlsen, understandably nervous, was crushed in the first and second games but was pressing in the drawn third.

There is more history between the two icons of modern chess. In summer 2009 the Russian briefly became the Norwegian’s coach but owing to a personality clash between Carlsen’s laid-back attitude and Kasparov’s intensity they soon parted ways. They played several informal blitz games then, which were ultra-competitive. As Carlsen put it: “Neither of us likes losing, him especially.”

Since 2017 the 1985-2000 world champion has taken part only in games using FischerRandom, also known as Chess960 or Chess9LX, where a computer makes a random choice of the back row starting array.

Besides Kasparov and Carlsen, the field includes America’s world No 2, Fabiano Caruana, who defeated Kasparov 5-1 at blitz in 2019, the US champion, Hikaru Nakamura, whose match with Carlsen last week drew record audiences, and the prodigy Alireza Firouzja, 17, who Kasparov has never met.

China, the 2018 Olympiad double gold medallists and tournament favourites for the current 163-nation online version, were knocked out 7-6 by Ukraine on Thursday after a match that will leave their team selectors with some serious questions to answer in Beijing.

The knockout format was a double round six board match where a 6-6 tie would be broken by a single Armageddon game. China were lucky to score 3-3 in the first round where Natalia Zhukova drew by perpetual check in a winning position against the world woman champion, Ju Wenjun.

For the second round China dropped both Ju and the world No 1, Hou Yifan, their replacements scored only half a point, the match went to 6-6 and Ukraine won the Armageddon game. Earlier, Hungary v Germany also went to Armageddon and the German lost on time with the Hungarian having just three seconds left. In Armageddon, White has five minutes on the clock to Black’s four but a draw on the board counts as a win for Black in the scores.

Results: Hungary 7-6 Germany. Ukraine 7-6 China, Armenia 8-4 Greece, Poland 7.5-4.5 Bulgaria. Friday’s quarter-finals: Russia v Hungary, United States v Ukraine, India v Armenia, Azerbaijan v Poland.

England were at full strength and scored a shock win over the strong Armenians, but finished only sixth in their group as they lost 5-1 to Russia, Bulgaria and Croatia while struggling to beat weaker teams. The women’s boards did well, though three of the four juniors had minus scores overall while the normally reliable Michael Adams and Luke McShane dropped points in critical matches.


Chess: England aim for place in top group as 163-team Olympiad begins
Read more

Some of the best Olympiad moments have been where strong grandmasters won elegantly against lesser lights. One such creative performance came from Alexey Shirov, author of the classic Fire on Board, who qualified for a world title match with Kasparov in 1998 but missed out due to lack of financial support. Shirov’s attacking play is a pleasure to watch.

Wolfgang Uhlmann, who died on Monday aged 85, was the former East Germany’s best player and a world title candidate in 1971. His opening repertoire was strikingly narrow for a top grandmaster. As Black, he almost always used the French 1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 and the King’s Indian Nf6 g6 and Bg7.

A vintage Uhlmann performance came in 1958 when the biennial Olympiad was held in Munich, then in West Germany, and Uhlmann led his young GDR team to a 3.5-0.5 victory over the host nation. I was present in the playing hall that day and remember the stunned silence from the large patriotic audience. True to himself, Uhlmann won against Wolfgang Unzicker with a classically styled King’s Indian.

3686 1...Re1+ 2 Kf2 Qh4+ 3 g3 Qxh3 4 Rxe1 Qh2+ 5 Kf1 Qh1+ 6 Qg1 Rxe1+ and wins.

Will automation eliminate data science positions?
Michael Li@tianhuil / 1:00 pm MDT•August 27, 2020

Image Credits: Westend61 (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Michael LiContributor

Tianhui Michael Li is founder of The Data Incubator, an eight-week fellowship to help PhDs and postdocs transition from academia into industry. Previously, he headed monetization data science at Foursquare and has worked at Google, Andreessen Horowitz, J.P. Morgan and D.E. Shaw.
More posts by this contributor

What’s different about hiring data scientists in 2020?
Five building blocks of a data-driven culture

“Will automation eliminate data science positions?”

This is a question I’m asked at almost every conference I attend, and it usually comes from someone from one of two groups with a vested interest in the answer: The first is current or aspiring practitioners who are wondering about their future employment prospects. The second consists of executives and managers who are just starting on their data science journey.

They have often just heard that Target can determine whether a customer is pregnant from her shopping patterns and are hoping for similarly powerful tools for their data. And they have heard the latest automated-AI vendor pitch that promises to deliver what Target did (and more!) without data scientists. We argue that automation and better data science tooling will not eliminate or even reduce data science positions (including use cases like the Target story). It creates more of them!

Here’s why.

Understanding the business problem is the biggest challenge

The most important question in data science is not which machine learning algorithm to choose or even how to clean your data. It is the questions you need to ask before even one line of code is written: What data do you choose and what questions do you choose to ask of that data?

What is missing (or wishfully assumed) from the popular imagination is the ingenuity, creativity and business understanding that goes into those tasks. Why do we care if our customers are pregnant? Target’s data scientists had built upon substantial earlier work to understand why this was a lucrative customer demographic primed to switch retailers. Which datasets are available and how can we pose scientifically testable questions of those datasets?

Target’s data science team happened to have baby registry data tied to purchasing history and knew how to tie that to customer spending. How do we measure success? Formulating nontechnical requirements into technical questions that can be answered with data is amongst the most challenging data science tasks — and probably the hardest to do well. Without experienced humans to formulate these questions, we would not be able to even start on the journey of data science.
Making your assumptions

After formulating a data science question, data scientists need to outline their assumptions. This often manifests itself in the form of data munging, data cleaning and feature engineering. Real-world data are notoriously dirty and many assumptions have to be made to bridge the gap between the data we have and the business or policy questions we are seeking to address. These assumptions are also highly dependent on real-world knowledge and business context.

In the Target example, data scientists had to make assumptions about proxy variables for pregnancy, realistic time frame of their analyses and appropriate control groups for accurate comparison. They almost certainly had to make realistic assumptions that allowed them to throw out extraneous data and correctly normalize features. All of this work depends critically on human judgment. Removing the human from the loop can be dangerous as we have seen with the recent spate of bias-in-machine-learning incidents. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of them revolve around deep learning algorithms that make some of the strongest claims to do away with feature engineering.

So while parts of core machine learning are automated (in fact, we even teach some of the ways to automate those workflows), the data munging, data cleaning and feature engineering (which comprises 90% of the real work in data science) cannot be safely automated away.
A historical analogy

There is a clear precedent in history to suggest data science will not be automated away. There is another field where highly trained humans are crafting code to make computers perform amazing feats. These humans are paid a significant premium over others who are not trained in this field and (perhaps not surprisingly) there are education programs specializing in training this skill. The resulting economic pressure to automate this field is equally, if not more, intense. This field is software engineering.

Indeed, as software engineering has become easier, the demand for programmers has only grown. This paradox — that automation increases productivity, driving down prices and ultimately driving up demand is not new — we’ve seen it again and again in fields ranging from software engineering to financial analysis to accounting. Data science is no exception and automation will likely drive up demand for this skillset, not down

Repeating radio signal from space fires back up on predicted schedule
By Michael Irving
August 25, 2020

A strange repeating radio signal from space has now been found to have a cycle
Kristi Mickaliger

Back in June, astronomers discovered a hidden pattern within seemingly-random radio signals from space. Based on years of data, it was predicted that the next bursts of activity should flare up around August – and now those signals have come through, right on schedule. The discovery could help us unravel the mystery of these Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

FRBs are pulses of radio signals that throw off incredible amounts of energy within milliseconds, often as one-off events. But a select few have been found to repeat at random – or at least, we thought it was random.

Earlier this year, astronomers discovered a periodic pattern hidden within the rumblings of a repeating radio source called FRB 121102. By analyzing 32 bursts from this repeater over four years, a team found that FRB 121102 follows a 157-day cycle: it flares up into a 90-day period of activity before falling silent for 67 days.

In May when this previous study was published, FRB 121102 was in the quiet phase of this cycle, and the researchers predicted that, based on their data, its next active phase should be between June 2 and August 28, 2020.


And lo and behold, the FRB has sprung back to life, right on schedule. Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China, astronomers observed the location of the signals regularly between March and August. No detections were made until August 17, when FRB 121102 gave off at least 12 bursts in the space of two hours.

This new finding does lend weight to the idea of periodicity in FRB 121102’s emissions, but the exact details of its cycle are still hazy. By combining data from several studies, the team suggests that its cycle actually runs for 156.1 days, with the source active for 99 of those days. Following this new schedule, the team predicts that the object should "turn off" again around August 31 to September 9.

If it continues to fire off bursts after that time, the researchers say this could suggest that the period has either evolved, or wasn’t “real” in the first place.


Other scientists have come to different conclusions about FRB 121102’s periodicity. A team led by Marilyn Cruces at the Max Planck Institute found that the cycle lasts around 161 days, and the source should be active between July 9 and October 14, 2020. After that, it should remain quiet until December 17, when it enters a new active phase that lasts until March 24, 2021.

Time – and future observations – will tell which, if any, of these predictions come true. Either way, FRB 121102 will be watched closely over the next few months, in the hopes that it could give up new clues to what might be behind these strange signals.

Cruces' team's work is available in pre-print on ArXiv.

Source: The Astronomer’s Telegram via Science Alert

Invasive jellyfish turn up in tiny Saanich lake

Darron Kloster / Times Colonist

AUGUST 27, 2020

Craspedacusta, a freshwater jellyfish that is about the size of a thumbnail, can be found in Killarney Lake. The jellyfish are are not harmful to humans and are only visible in lakes a few months of the year. FLORIAN LUSKOW, UBC

A tiny lake in Mount Work Regional Park in Saanich is literally under the microscope today, as scientists from the University of British Columbia study an outbreak of freshwater jellyfish.

Killarney Lake, about a kilometre south of the Hartland Landfill and frequented by swimmers and paddleboarders in summer, has a thriving population of craspedacusta, a freshwater jellyfish considered an invasive species.

The small jellyfish, about the size of a thumbnail, are not harmful to humans and are only visible in lakes a few months of the year, usually from August to September, says Florian Lüskow, a graduate student and marine biologist at UBC.

Lüskow and another researcher collected samples at Killarney Lake on Sunday after a tip from a local resident, launching a small boat loaded with scientific equipment that drew attention from local swimmers.

“They couldn’t believe jellyfish are living in the lake. Most think they live in the ocean,” said Lüskow.

He said there have been several reports of craspedacusta jellyfish in Killarney as well as other lakes and ponds in southern B.C. since 1990.

Lüskow said craspedacusta is a non-indigenous species and likely originates from the Yangtze River catchment area in China.

He said the jellyfish has been recorded on all continents, except for Antarctica.

It is almost impossible to prove how the jellyfish ended up in a lake such as Killarney, said Lüskow.

The invasion could have happened in several ways, he said, including from plant materials,birds’ feet, paddleboards, ballast water from boats, or in containers used to stock lakes with fish.

There have been other reports of the jellyfish in Saanich waterways, including Maltby Lake, two kilometres south of Killarney, in the summer of 2018.

It isn’t known how widespread the jellyfish are in the area. The Capital Regional District parks department did not immediately return calls for comment.

Lüskow said little is known about the jellyfish’s effects in ecosystems. There is no evidence of fish consuming freshwater jellyfish, but they might compete for food resources, Lüskow said in an email.

“As research on this invasive species heavily depends on voluntary observers, only a handful of studies addressed their predation impact.”

Lüskow said for most of the year, jellyfish populations only exist in the form of polyps attached to submerged rocks and tree trunks.

He said freshwater jellyfish are an indication of high water quality. “When lakes and ponds are cooling in the autumn, the free-swimming jellyfish disappear, leaving planktonic larvae that settle onto hard substrates and become polyps,” he said. “When the water warms up, polyps asexually reproduce many free-swimming medusae, which are the sexually reproducing life stage, with a short life span closing the annual jellyfish life cycle.”

Lüskow said a pilot study to understand the distribution and impacts on lake ecosystems in B.C. is underway at UBC.

He said researchers are currently studying another site, Hotel Lake near Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast.

He’s asking anyone who sees them in other lakes, ponds or creeks to send him an email at flueskow@eoas.ubc.ca.

I’m Melting!

POLLUTION DISSOLVED THIS SHARK’S TEETH AND SKIN, RESEARCHERS SAY


Scientists recently found a new victim of climate change and pollution: a blackmouth catshark that had its teeth, skin, and other features dissolved away from swimming in contaminated water.

It’s the first time that scientists have seen such extensive environmental damage on a shark, according to The Evening Standard. The team of University of Cagliari scientists aren’t exactly sure what caused the degradation — it could have been climate change-related ocean acidification, chemical pollution, or both — but it’s a stark reminder of the destruction that human activity is wreaking on the delicate ocean ecosystem.

Toxic Avenger

Thankfully, the shark was able to survive, or at least it did up until last July when it was caught by commercial fishers and promptly turned over to the scientists for study.


The team expected that such extensive damage to the shark’s skin and teeth would be fatal. But they found 14 different sea creatures inside its stomach, according to research published in the Journal of Fish Biology. That suggests that the shark was still able to hunt and swallow prey whole, since its teeth had completely dissolved away.
Extreme Case

This shark is the first known to science with such an extreme level of skin and tooth damage, but scientists have long known that ocean acidification was hurting shark populations.

In fact, previous research found that spending just nine weeks in acidic water ate away nine percent of a shark’s denticles, the tiny scales that line their bodies.


READ MORE: Shark found without skin or teeth in Sardinia ‘fell victim to contaminated waters and climate change’ [The Evening Standard]

More on ocean acidification: Our Acidic Oceans Are Eating Away at Sharks’ Skin

PBS’s Documentary About Ursula K. Le Guin is Free to Watch This Week

Andrew Liptak

Wed Aug 26, 2020

Screenshot: Sheffield Doc/Fest

Last year, PBS released an in-depth documentary about legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, directed by Arwen Curry.

If you missed it the first time around, the network has put the documentary online to stream for free (via Open Culture), until August 30th, 2020.

The hour-long documentary is a deep dive into Le Guin’s career, interviewing not only her, but other authors like Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and David Mitchell. The documentary premiered in 2018, and is part of the American Masters series, a long-running PBS franchise that examines the works of the nation’s most influential artists and creator

Vast stone monuments constructed in Arabia 7,000 years ago

Date:August 25, 2020

Source:Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Summary:New archaeological research in Saudi Arabia documents hundreds of stone structures interpreted as monumental sites where early pastoralists carried out rituals.Share:


In a new study published in The Holocene, researchers from the Max Planck Society in Jena together with Saudi and international collaborators, present the first detailed study of 'mustatil' stone structures in the Arabian Desert. These are vast structures made of stone piled into rectangles, which are some of the oldest large-scale structures in the world. They give insights into how early pastoralists survived in the challenging landscapes of semi-arid Arabia

The last decade has seen rapid development in the archaeology of Saudi Arabia. Recent discoveries range from early hominin sites hundreds of thousands of years old to sites just a few hundred years old. One enigmatic aspect of the archaeological record of western Arabia is the presence of millions of stone structures, where people have piled rocks to make different kinds of structures, ranging from burial tombs to hunting traps. One enigmatic form consists of vast rectangular shapes. Archaeologists working with the AlUla Royal Commission gave these the name 'mustatils,' which is Arabic for rectangle.

Mustatils only occur in northwest Saudi Arabia. They had been previously recognized from satellite imagery and as they were often covered by younger structures, it had been speculated that they might be ancient, perhaps extending back to the Neolithic.

In this new article led by Dr Huw Groucutt (group leader of the Extreme Events Research Group which is a Max Planck group spanning the Max Planck Institutes for Chemical Ecology, the Science of Human History, and Biogeochemistry) an international team of researchers under the auspices of the Green Arabia Project (a large project headed by Prof. Michael Petraglia from the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the Saudi Ministry for Tourism as well as collaborators from multiple Saudi and international institutions) conducted the first every detailed study of mustatils. Through a mixture of field survey and analyzing satellite imagery, the team have considerably extended knowledge on these enigmatic stone structures.

More than one hundred new mustatils have been identified around the southern margins of the Nefud Desert, between the cities of Ha'il and Tayma, joining the hundreds previously identified from studies of Google Earth imagery, particularly in the Khaybar area. The team found that these structures typically consist of two large platforms, connected by parallel long walls, sometimes extending over 600 meters in length. The long walls are very low, had no obvious openings and are located in diverse landscape settings. It is also interesting that little in the way of other archaeology -- such as stone tools -- was found around the mustatils. Together these factors suggest that the structures were not simply utilitarian entities for something like water or animal storage.

At one locality the team were able to date the construction of a mustatil to 7000 thousand years ago, by radiocarbon dating charcoal from inside one of the platforms. An assemblage of animal bones was also recovered, which included both wild animals and possibly domestic cattle, although it is possible that the latter are wild auroch. At another mustatil the team found a rock with a geometric pattern painted onto it.

"Our interpretation of mustatils is that they are ritual sites, where groups of people met to perform some kind of currently unknown social activities," says Groucutt. "Perhaps they were sites of animal sacrifices, or feasts."

The fact that sometimes several of the structures were built right next to each other may suggest that the very act of their construction was a kind of social bonding exercise. Northern Arabia 7,000 years ago was very different to today. Rainfall was higher, so much of the area was covered by grassland and there were scattered lakes. Pastoralist groups thrived in this environment, yet it would have been a challenging place to live, with droughts a constant risk.

The team's hypothesis is that mustatils were built as a social mechanism to live in this challenging landscape. They may not be the oldest buildings in the world, but they are on a uniquely large scale for this early period, more than two thousand years before pyramids began to be constructed in Egypt. Mustatils offer fascinating insights into how humans have lived in challenging environments and future studies promise to be extremely useful at understanding these ancient societies.



Related Multimedia:
Images of mustatil structures


Journal Reference:
Huw S Groucutt, Paul S Breeze, Maria Guagnin, Mathew Stewart, Nick Drake, Ceri Shipton, Badr Zahrani, Abdulaziz Al Omarfi, Abdullah M Alsharekh, Michael D Petraglia. Monumental landscapes of the Holocene humid period in Northern Arabia: The mustatil phenomenon. The Holocene, 2020; 095968362095044 DOI: 10.1177/0959683620950449

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "Vast stone monuments constructed in Arabia 7,000 years ago." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 August 2020. .

Atlantic sturgeon in the King’s pantry – unique discovery in Baltic Sea wreck from 1495

Wooden barrel with parts of the sturgeon (in orange) Photo: Brett Seymour

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden can now reveal what the Danish King Hans had planned to offer when laying claim to the Swedish throne in 1495: a two-metre-long Atlantic sturgeon. The well-preserved fish remains were found in a wreck on the bottom of the Baltic Sea last year, and species identification was made possible through DNA analysis.

At midsummer in 1495, the Danish King Hans was en route from Copenhagen to Kalmar, Sweden, on the royal flagship Gribshunden. Onboard were the most prestigious goods the Danish royal court could provide, but then, the trip was also very important. King Hans was going to meet Sten Sture the Elder (he hoped) to lay claim to the Swedish throne. It was important to demonstrate both power and grandeur.

However, when the ship was level with Ronneby in Blekinge, which was Danish territory at the time, a fire broke out on board and Gribshunden sank. The King himself was not on board that night, however, both crew and cargo sank with the ship to the sea floor, where it has lain ever since.

Thanks to the unique environment of the Baltic Sea – with oxygen-free seabeds, low salinity and an absence of shipworms – the wreck was particularly well preserved when it was discovered approximately fifty years ago, and has provided researchers with a unique insight into life on board a royal ship in the late Middle Ages. In addition, researchers now also know what was in the royal pantry – the wooden barrel discovered last year, with fish remains inside.

Bones and scutes from the 500-year old sturgeon (Photo: Brendan Foley)

“It is a really thrilling discovery, as you do not ordinarily find fish in a barrel in this way. For me, as an osteologist, it has been very exciting to work with”, says Stella Macheridis, researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University.

When the remains were discovered it was possible to see that they came from a sturgeon pretty early on due to the special bony plates, the scutes. However, researchers were unsure which species it was. Up until relatively recently, it was believed to be the European sturgeon found in the Baltic Sea at the time. However, the DNA analysis revealed it was the Atlantic variety with which King Hans planned on impressing the Swedes. Researchers have also been able to estimate the length of the sturgeon – two metres – as well as demonstrate how it was cut.

For Maria C Hansson, molecular biologist at Lund University, and the researcher who carried out the DNA analysis, the discovery is of major significance, particularly for her own research on the environment of the Baltic Sea.

“For me, this has been a glimpse of what the Baltic Sea looked like before we interfered with it. Now we know that the Atlantic sturgeon was presumably part of the ecosystem. I think there could be great potential in using underwater DNA in this way to be able to recreate what it looked like previously”, she says.

The Atlantic sturgeon is currently an endangered species and virtually extinct.

Diver examines the wooden barrel (Photo: Brett Seymour)

The discovery on Gribshunden is unique in both the Scandinavian and European contexts –such well preserved and old sturgeon remains have only been discovered a few times at an underwater archaeological site.

It is now possible, in a very specific way, to link the sturgeon to a royal environment – the discovery confirms the high status it had at the time. The fish was coveted for its roe, flesh and swim bladder – the latter could be used to produce a kind of glue (isinglass) that, among other things, was used to produce gold paint.

“The sturgeon in the King’s pantry was a propaganda tool, as was the entire ship. Everything on that ship served a political function, which is another element that makes this discovery particularly interesting. It provides us with important information about this pivotal moment for nation-building in Europe, as politics, religion and economics – indeed, everything – was changing”, says Brendan P. Foley, marine archaeologist at Lund University, and project coordinator for the excavations.

Gribshunden will become the subject of further archaeological excavations and scientific analyses in the coming years.

The research was made possible through a grant from the Crafoord Foundation in Sweden and the Swordspoint Foundation in the USA as well as from Jane and James Orr, Jr. in the USA.

Link to the publication in Journal or Archaeological Science: Reports - Fish in a barrel: Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus) from the Baltic Sea wreck of the royal Danish flagship Gribshunden (1495)

First complete dinosaur skeleton ever found is ready for its closeup at last

Date:August 27, 2020

Source:University of Cambridge

The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began more than a century and a half ago

The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began more than a century and a half ago.

The skeleton of this dinosaur, called Scelidosaurus, was collected more than 160 years ago on west Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The rocks in which it was fossilised are around 193 million years old, close to the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs.

This remarkable specimen -- the first complete dinosaur skeleton ever recovered -- was sent to Richard Owen at the British Museum, the man who invented the word dinosaur.

So, what did Owen do with this find? He published two short papers on its anatomy, but many details were left unrecorded. Owen did not reconstruct the animal as it might have appeared in life and made no attempt to understand its relationship to other known dinosaurs of the time. In short, he 're-buried' it in the literature of the time, and so it has remained ever since: known, yet obscure and misunderstood.

Over the past three years, Dr David Norman from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences has been working to finish the work which Owen started, preparing a detailed description and biological analysis of the skeleton of Scelidosaurus, the original of which is stored at the Natural History Museum in London, with other specimens at Bristol City Museum and the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge.

The results of Norman's work, published as four separate studies in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London, not only reconstruct what Scelidosaurus looked like in life, but reveal that it was an early ancestor of ankylosaurs, the armour-plated 'tanks' of the Late Cretaceous Period.

For more than a century, dinosaurs were primarily classified according to the shape of their hip bones: they were either saurischians ('lizard-hipped') or ornithischians ('bird-hipped').

However, in 2017, Norman and his former PhD students Matthew Baron and Paul Barrett argued that these dinosaur family groupings needed to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named. In a study published in Nature, the researchers suggested that bird-hipped dinosaurs and lizard-hipped dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus evolved from a common ancestor, potentially overturning more than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs.

Another fact that emerged from their work on dinosaur relationships was that the earliest known ornithischians first appeared in the Early Jurassic Period. "Scelidosaurus is just such a dinosaur and represents a species that appeared at, or close to, the evolutionary 'birth' of the Ornithischia," said Norman, who is a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. "Given that context, what was actually known of Scelidosaurus? The answer is remarkably little!"

Norman has now completed a study of all known material attributable to Scelidosaurus and his research has revealed many firsts.

"Nobody knew that the skull had horns on its back edge," said Norman. "It had several bones that have never been recognised in any other dinosaur. It's also clear from the rough texturing of the skull bones that it was, in life, covered by hardened horny scutes, a little bit like the scutes on the surface of the skulls of living turtles. In fact, its entire body was protected by skin that anchored an array of stud-like bony spikes and plates."

Now that its anatomy is understood, it is possible to examine where Scelidosaurus sits in the dinosaur family tree. It had been regarded for many decades as an early member of the group that included the stegosaurs, including Stegosaurus with its huge bony plates along its spine and a spiky tail, and ankylosaurs, the armour-plated 'tanks' of the dinosaur era, but that was based on a poor understanding of the anatomy of Scelidosaurus. Now it seems that Scelidosaurus is an ancestor of the ankylosaurs alone.

"It is unfortunate that such an important dinosaur, discovered at such a critical time in the early study of dinosaurs, was never properly described," said Norman. "It has now -- at last! -- been described in detail and provides many new and unexpected insights concerning the biology of early dinosaurs and their underlying relationships. It seems a shame that the work was not done earlier but, as they say, better late than never."


Journal Reference:
David B Norman. Scelidosaurus harrisonii (Dinosauria: Ornithischia) from the Early Jurassic of Dorset, England: biology and phylogenetic relationships. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2020; DOI: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa061

University of Cambridge. "First complete dinosaur skeleton ever found is ready for its closeup at last." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 27 August 2020. .