Philippe Verbelen

The newly discovered Rinjani scops owl, or Otus jolandae.

By Douglas Main, OurAmazingPlanet

A new species of owl has been found on an Indonesian island, identified by its unique birdsong. It had escaped scientific detection for so long partially because it looks very similar to a related species.

While on a field expedition in 2003, two members of a research team on opposite ends of the Indonesian island of Lombok independently realized that the owl's calls were unique, according to a PLOS ONE study published Wednesday.

That's quite a coincidence, especially considering that ornithologists didn't think Lombok was home to a unique species of owl despite years of study in the region, said George Sangster, study co-author and a researcher with the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

The new species has been dubbed the Rinjani scops owl, with the scientific name Otus jolandae. It is locally common in the foothills of Mount Rinjani, a large volcano on Lombok, living at altitudes up to 4,430 feet,  according to the study.

"I did not expect to find a new species, and certainly not one that is this common," Sangster told OurAmazingPlanet. "It is a wake-up call for ornithologists: there is still much to learn, and new species can reveal themselves even if you are not looking for them, and in places where no one expected to find something new."

To verify that the species was unique, researchers played this new birdsong to a group of Moluccan scops owls, a related and more widespread species. They didn't respond to the calls. In the area where the unfamiliar songs were heard, however, local Lombok owls responded by whistling back and approaching the speaker the songs were played from, according to the study.

A closer comparison of the new bird and the related species revealed subtle body differences — Rinjani scops owls have slightly different coloration and are slightly smaller, the study noted. DNA analysis confirmed it was a new species, Sangster said. Owls are nocturnal and they use songs to communicate and identify one another. When owls' songs are significantly different, it's a good sign that they may be a different species, Sangster said.

Based on field work, studies of museum specimens and previous research, the scientists think this owl is likely unique to Lombok. Residents of nearby islands were unfamiliar with recordings of the owl, the only exception being one man who ended up being an immigrant from Lombok, the study found.

The owls are known to locals as "burung pok," which is "an onomatopoeic name reflecting the song note of the bird, which may be transcribed as 'pok' or 'poook,'" the authors wrote in the study. [Listen to the owl's call.]

While there are more than 250 known species of owls worldwide, there are undoubtedly many species yet to be discovered, according to the study.

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

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By Larry O'Hanlon
Discovery

It may be too late to stop climate change, but some of its most dangerous effects can be delayed, according to the first study that looks at climate, policies and impacts over time. The study, by a team of primarily U.K. scientists, concludes that while climate change impacts that are avoidable with policy changes are small by 2030 and 2050, an ounce of policy prevention today eventually becomes a pound of cure by 2100.

In other words, strong emissions policies today can delay for decades the climate change troubles that would occur in 2100 or earlier in the absence of any policies.

“It goes to how do you want to hedge your bets with mitigation policies,” said Nigel Arnell of the Walker Institute for Climate System Research at the University of Reading and lead author of the study. “Policy buys quite a lot of time. If you delay impacts, that buys time for adaptation.”

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The team found that the most stringent greenhouse gas emissions policies would give us a 50/50 chance of remaining below a 2-degree Celsius global temperature rise by 2100, which reduces impacts on a wide range of sectors by 20 to 65 percent. That's compared to the “business as usual” path, which puts us at a dangerous 4-degree C temperature rise by 2100.

The impacts that can be avoided by 2100 are also strongly influenced by the date and level at which emissions peak than the rate of decline of emissions, the team concluded. The study, which details impacts over time under different policy regimes to a range of sectors (agricultural, energy, coastal flooding, water resources, etc), was published in Sunday's edition of the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study is being regarded as helpful because it finally and for the first time puts numbers on what climate scientists have long suspected, providing policymakers with something they can use in making decisions, said climate researcher Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and blogger for RealClimate.org.

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“What (scientists) have provided policymakers in the past is not really very useful,” said Schmidt.

Specifics on what can be done and how it could affect different sectors have been largely buried in scientific reports, he said. This study, however, is specific enough that it begins to give policymakers details they can use, he added.

That said, Arnell cautions that the study has a lot of limitations.

Peter Brown

A skull from the Flores site, left, sits alongside a modern human skull.

By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery

New bones attributed to Homo floresiensis — aka the "Hobbit human" — along with other recent findings, are helping to reveal what members of this species looked like, how they behaved and their origins.

The latest findings, described in a Journal of Human Evolution paper, are wrist bones unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores. Since they are nearly identical to other such bones for the Hobbit found at the site, they refute claims that H. floresiensis never existed.

"The tiny people from Flores were not simply diseased modern humans," Caley Orr, lead author of the paper, told Discovery News.

"The new species of human stood approximately 3' 6" tall, giving it its nickname 'The Hobbit,'" continued Orr, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at Midwestern University.

He said that they were "similar to modern humans in many respects." For example, he explained that they walked on two legs, had small canine teeth, and lived what appears to have been an iconic "cave man'" lifestyle.

"Stone tools and evidence of fire use were found in the cave, along with the remains of butchered animals, such as Stegodon (an extinct elephant relative), indicating that meat was a part of diet," Orr said.

He and his colleagues, however, also point out the differences between the Hobbit individuals and modern humans.

The Hobbits had arms that were longer than their legs, giving them a slightly more ape-like structure. Their skulls had no bony chins, so their faces had more of an oval shape. Their forehead was sloping. The inferred brain size was tiny, putting them in the IQ range of chimpanzees.

"Remarkably, the feet were also long relative to the legs, as fantasy fans might expect of a Hobbit," he added.

The Hobbit's wrist looked like that of early human relatives, such as Australopithecus, but the key ancestral candidate now is Homo erectus, "Upright Man."

It is possible that a population of H. erectus became stranded on the Indonesian island and dwarfed there over time. Orr said that "sometimes happens to larger animals that adapt to small island environments."

A problem, however, is that H. erectus is somewhat more modern looking than the Hobbit, so researchers are still seeking more clues.

Another question concerns whether or not the Hobbits ever mated with modern humans. There is evidence that happened to Neanderthals, which have left traces of their genome in modern human DNA. So far, however, conditions have not been right to extract DNA from H. floresiensis bones.

Nonetheless, the Hobbit — which went extinct relatively recently during the Pleistocene — is now better known due to the new discoveries.

"These fossils provide further, clear evidence that H. floresiensis is in no way a pathological modern human, or that its primitive morphology is related simply to its small body size," said Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "Instead, it is clearly its own, unique and very intriguing species."

Kivell added, "What is particularly interesting is that H. floresiensis is associated with such a long, well-documented history of stone tools. (Its primitive hand and wrist were) still apparently capable of making and using stone tools, suggesting that H. floresiensis solved the morphological and manipulative demands of tool-making and tool-use in a different way than Neanderthals and ourselves."

Orr and his team continue to study the Hobbit humans, with at least one other paper about the interesting species in the works.