Biodiversity

The author testing to see if this pebble is indeed a fossil bone

One of my most profound biodiversity ‘wow’ moments as a teenager was seeing the arms of the Mongolian Deinocheirus (‘Terrible hands’) dinosaur emerging from a wall of the London Natural History Museum. The arms are basically all that is known of this awesome species but it has been estimated that, were the whole beast to appear from behind the wall, it would be 3.5 m at the hip and weigh 9 tons, dwarfing almost everything else with which it lived. The arms are 2.6 m long from shoulder to claw tip and the three, cruelly-hooked, razor-sharp claws are about 25 cm long. Compare this with the horror beast of Jurassic Park  – Tyrannosaurus rex. Its arms were a puny one meter long with claws barely reaching 10 cm.

Having never seen dinosaur fossils in situ it was a thrill last week to visit the Flaming Cliffs or Bayanzag in South Gobi. This is the site made famous in the mid 1920s by the flamboyant Roy Chapman Andrews who was supposedly the larger-than-life model for the latter-day Indiana Jones movie character. It was at this site that he discovered not just a great many dinosaur and early mammal fossils, but the first incontrovertible evidence of dinosaur eggs in nests and the first fossilized dinosaur embryos.

View to Ulaanbaatar from a tourist camp on the slopes of Bogd Khan Uul

Okay, so we changed our minds, but we did so for good reasons.

Some 15 months ago I posted a blog about the difficult decisions which led to our dropping Bogd Khan Uul Strictly Protected Area—the world’s oldest nature reserve—from the forest landscapes project we were preparing in Mongolia. In addition I mentioned that the money that was going to be used for the community forestry parts of the project was going to be shifted to give additional support to a $40 million Development Policy Credit to help Mongolia weather the impacts of the global financial crisis. There was a chance that our forest landscapes project might be resurrected in mid-2011 but that would have been too late for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding of the conservation activities planned. So, the forest landscapes project was cancelled.

The GEF money was, however, still available for a good conservation project in Mongolia but there was absolutely no thought that Bogd Khan Uul with all its allegedly illegal apartment blocks and houses would be part of any new project.

Notice any likeness? That's me to the left, and Thopeutica whitteni to the right.

In the last 10 days I’ve been told that two beetles have been named after me, something I find very flattering.  They join a rather bizarre eponymous bestiary of Whitten curiosities. The formal descriptions of these two species have not yet been published so I can’t say too much, but suffice it to say that one is a blind, long-legged cave-restricted beetle, and the other is a dung beetle. But before you scoff too loudly, remember that in Ancient Egypt the dung beetles or scarabs were objects of worship, capable of rolling the sun across the sky the same way they roll balls of dung for their larvae to eat.

Two of ‘my’ species would not exactly trip you up, and would more likely be crushed inadvertently. Both about 2 mm long, one is a blind, pale and pasty springtail found in a cave in Guangxi, and the other is a freshwater snail found in the northern part of Lake Poso in Central Sulawesi.

We’ve written before about a climate-related effort in developing countries known as REDD – or Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation. So one of the outcomes during last month’s U.N. climate conference that I found particularly interesting was an announcement from Google.org. During the conference in Copenhagen, the search giant's philanthropic arm introduced the prototype for an online application that will allow monitoring of forests around the planet.

Apparently, some believed that the overall topic of REDD may have been one of the few bright spots during the two-week conference. To me, it seems like this forthcoming online monitoring tool is no exception – particularly because Google products are often innovative, easy to use and reliable.

The announcement generated quite bit of media buzz, and Google.org’s press release has a nice explanation of why the online application, likely available to the public some time this year, might be so significant:

Traditional forest monitoring is complex and expensive, requiring access to large amounts of satellite data, lots of hard drives to hold the data, lots of computers to process the data, and lots of time while you wait for various computations to finish. … Google supplies data, storage, and computing muscle. As a result, you can visualize forest change in fractions of a second over the web, instead of the minutes or hours that traditional offline systems require for such analysis.