The media sure love an extreme story. Don’t we all? Last week we got exploding palm trees from Madagascar and gargantuan rats from Uruguay.
The palms, Tahina spectabilis, appear to be a bit odd. Rather than the grow-fast, reproduce-massively, die-young of most r-selected species, these plants grow slowly, reproduce once, and then die old. A single massive breeding event after about a hundred years (during which it becomes the “tallest tree of its type” in the forest) totally exhausts its resources. Apparently they have been overlooked because there are so few of them, perhaps a hundred individuals. I wonder whether they are all the result of a previous breeding event, or if there are a variety of ages. I’m sure there’s interesting population modeling being done to figure out how they can continue to persist. Certainly there is interesting biogeography, as its relatives occur in the Middle East, Thailand, and China.
The fossil rat is more accurately described as a hippopotamus-like guinea pig. Its skull had been languishing in a box in a museum for a couple of decades. One hopes that with its description more can be sought and found, so that there’s more than an n of one to work with. Pedant that I am, I note that the New York times has not properly italicized its scientific name, Josephoartigasia monesi. If they can’t do that, how will they ever embrace microformats?
