How corals tell us climate change is supersizing El Niño, and more…

On this week’s episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:

Massive study redraws bat family tree and uncovers genetic oddities

Bats have some unique traits in the animal kingdom. They’re the only mammals that fly, they are masters of echolocation, they’re disease-resistant and they live a long time, defying the rules of biology that say small animals live short lives. But how? Bat1K, a consortium of 137 scientists in 64 countries, used genomic and fossil evidence to understand more about these unusual adaptations. This week, the team, which included Burton Lim, a biologist at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, showed that bats — and mammalian flight — originated in Europe 65 million years ago, and not in Asia, Africa or North America, as previously thought. The research was published in the journal Nature.

Coral archives reveal a shift in El Niño strength

The El Niño underway in the Pacific Ocean has been called extraordinary, supersized and likely record-breaking. And while El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon, its warming effects are being boosted by climate change. Julia Cole, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Michigan, recently used corals growing around the Galapagos Islands to create a local temperature record of the ocean going back 1,000 years to add to what they’ve learned from similar studies elsewhere in the Pacific. She said the temperature record in this area of the East Pacific indicates that the El Niños from the last 40 to 50 years are unlike anything the area experienced in the last millennium. Her study was published in the journal Science.

How the Surinam toad uses star-shaped fingertip lobes to ‘see’ its prey

Tongue-less, flat and nearly blind, the Surinam toad hunts in murky waters using super-sensitive lobes on its star-shaped fingertips. In a recent study, Duncan Leitch, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues found that the toad senses nearby prey by reading the movement of the water. They also discovered that a large part of its brain is devoted to processing the information from its fingers, with a level of complexity usually associated with the brain of mammals. The research was published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology.

T. rex tooth enamel reveals these dinosaurs were warm-blooded

Paleontologists have spent decades debating whether Tyrannosaurus rex might well have been warm-blooded, quite unlike today’s modern reptiles. And now, scientists have identified the body temperature of T. rex using only its teeth. Aradhna Tripati, a geoscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues studied the chemistry of its tooth enamel, and found its body temperature was about 36 C, similar to large mammals, like elephants that we know today. The study changes what scientists think about T. rex behaviour and where it could have lived. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

Why great white sharks are converging on the East Coast

Spotting the fin of a great white shark slicing through the water sends most people bolting in the opposite direction, but not shark and marine ecology researcher, Neil Hammerschlag. He seeks these ocean predators as part of a conservation program that tracks and tags marine animals to map biodiversity hotspots along North America’s east coast. In the last few years that Hammerschlag’s been studying the great whites off the coast of Nova Scotia, he says he’s seeing some of the same sharks migrate to the region year after year. He says these ocean predators are surprisingly shy creatures, often with a lot of personality.