All posts tagged: predators

To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen buys ads to run before Robert Pattinson A24 movie, calls studio ‘sneaky and disingenuous’

To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen buys ads to run before Robert Pattinson A24 movie, calls studio ‘sneaky and disingenuous’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Chris Hansen is getting ahead of the story by buying ads that will run before every screening of A24’s movie about him. Audiences who go to see Robert Pattinson play the infamous To Catch a Predator host in the upcoming thriller Primetime will first be met with a pre-show spot that Hansen himself bought to highlight his streaming network, according to a report by The Hollywood Reporter. In the commercial, he tells audiences to check out his network, TruBlu, which showcases the sort of predator investigations that are featured in the new movie. According to THR, Hansen says in the spot: “Now there are more platforms than ever before where this disturbing crime is being committed. Join us undercover every day on my streaming network, TruBlu.” TruBlu did not immediately return The Independent’s request for comment. Hansen, 66, hosted To Catch …

Tunas became large, warm-blooded predators long after the dinosaur extinction

Tunas became large, warm-blooded predators long after the dinosaur extinction

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tunas did not become large, fast and warm-blooded simply because an asteroid cleared the oceans of competing predators. Their defining traits appeared separately over tens of millions of years, complicating a familiar story about life after mass extinction. The asteroid impact 66 million years ago erased non-avian dinosaurs and many large marine predators. One long-held explanation proposed that tunas and other powerful fishes quickly expanded into the empty ecological roles. A new analysis from Yale University challenges that idea. By combining genetic evidence with fossils, researchers built the most complete time-calibrated evolutionary tree yet for Scombridae, the family that includes tunas, mackerels, bonitos and related fishes. The tree places the family’s origin near the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. Yet the traits that make modern tunas exceptional did not appear together or immediately afterward. Three independent origins of endothermy in Scombridae. Time-calibrated phylogeny of Scombridae estimated using a Bayesian node-dating approach, with branches coloured according to an ancestral state reconstruction of endothermy. (CREDIT: Proceedings of the Royal Society B) “Our results demonstrate the K-Pg extinction did not trigger …

Ancient crocodile-like predators rewrite current knowledge of how animals adapted to the land

Ancient crocodile-like predators rewrite current knowledge of how animals adapted to the land

Published by Jenni Sidey

The first four-legged vertebrates did not grow up like tadpoles after all. That idea has shaped the story of life on land for decades. Early tetrapods, the ancient animals that gave rise to mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, were widely thought to begin life much like modern amphibians. They were believed to hatch into a larval stage and later transform into adult bodies through metamorphosis. But newly described fossils of baby tetrapods suggest that picture is wrong. Writing in Science, researchers report that some of the earliest known hatchlings from the fish-to-tetrapod transition lacked the hallmark features of amphibian larvae, especially external gills. Instead of passing through a frog-like tadpole stage, these animals appear to have developed more directly. “When a lot of us were in high school, we were taught this simplified story of evolution: that some fish evolved into amphibians, and some of those amphibians evolved into reptiles, and some of those reptiles evolved into mammals. And our study shows that this basic underlying premise, that the first four-legged vertebrates grew up like …

‘Two-headed snake’ confuses predators | Popular Science

‘Two-headed snake’ confuses predators | Popular Science

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Only around 600 of the nearly 4,000 known snake species are venomous. The recently discovered Guangxi reed snake (Calamaria incredibilis) in China is not one of those species, but its alternative defense mechanism is strange enough to keep most predators at bay. According to a study recently published in the journal Zoosystematics and Evolution by biologists at the Natural History Museum of Guangxi, C. incredibilis wields its wide, stubby tail like a second head to scare away potential threats. Researchers first spotted the Guangxi reed snake during a biodiversity study in China’s Huaping National Nature Reserve near the nation’s southern border with Vietnam. The mostly nocturnal, non-venomous serpent grows to about eight-inches-long, and is identifiable by its small brown scales and seven darker stripes. Largely docile, it prefers to hide away between rocks and underneath leaves, and prefers a diet of insect larvae and earthworms. Although largely timid, the Guangxi reed snake has evolved a strategy to bluff its …

Why dinosaurs lived much more complex lives than we thought

Why dinosaurs lived much more complex lives than we thought

Published by skeptic

Everything we collectively think about dinosaurs is built on information imbibed over the past decades from a variety of places – from reputable books and documentaries to Hollywood movies that don’t let science get in the way of a good story. But many of the characteristics of these long-lost animals in the public consciousness are most probably wrong, says palaeontologist Dave Hone at Queen Mary University of London. Hone, who literally wrote the book on dinosaur behaviour and has also described several new species of pterosaurs, is on a mission to correct the record. He describes himself as a zoologist of dead animals and uses modern-day comparisons to bring dinosaurs to life. Did Velociraptor really hunt in packs? How did predatory dinosaurs bring down huge herbivores? What were the elaborate frills of Triceratops for? And why did pterosaurs get so much bigger than birds? He spoke to New Scientist about what we know – and don’t know – about these extraordinary creatures. Michael Le Page: Let’s jump straight in. Everyone remembers the pack of Velociraptor …

Were enormous octopuses apex predators in ancient oceans?

Were enormous octopuses apex predators in ancient oceans?

Published by skeptic

At the time of the dinosaurs, the oceans were teeming with life. Below the waves, giant marine reptiles, such as the fearsome 4m (13ft) long mosasaurs, were the undisputed apex predators. In artistic reconstructions of these ancient oceans, cephalopods – the animal group that includes squid, cuttlefish, octopuses, and their ancestors – are almost always portrayed as prey, often seen desperately swimming away from the jaws of a marine reptile to avoid becoming lunch. However, a remarkable new fossil suggests our view of the ancient oceans is incomplete, and that giant octopuses, perhaps reaching as long as 19m (62ft), may have been the ones doing the hunting. The fossil in question is a giant octopus jaw, belonging to a new species called Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. It is found in Late Cretaceous rocks of Japan, making it between 100 million and 72 million years old. Like other cephalopods, octopuses have a hard beak that looks like a parrot’s bill, used to bite and tear prey, and this fossil example is enormous – larger than that of the …

Giant octopuses were the ocean’s apex predators 100 million years ago

Giant octopuses were the ocean’s apex predators 100 million years ago

Published by Jenni Sidey

A jaw tip worn down by nearly a tenth does not sound like much until you picture what it means. Chipping, cracking, scratches and polish do not appear on their own. Something was hitting back. That is the clue driving a striking new view of early octopus history. Fossil jaws from the Late Cretaceous suggest that some of the earliest known octopuses were not modest, lurking hunters. They were enormous predators, active enough and strong enough to sit near the top of the marine food web, sharing that space with the great vertebrate hunters of their time. The work, led by researchers at Hokkaido University, centers on an awkward problem in octopus evolution. Octopuses are soft-bodied, which means their bodies rarely survive in the fossil record. Bones and shells tell long, readable stories. Octopuses mostly do not. So the team turned to the part most likely to last: the jaws. Convergent evolution among marine top predators in the Paleozoic–Mesozoic. (CREDIT: Science) A fossil record hidden inside stone Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence …

Largest ever octopus was great white shark of invertebrate predators

Largest ever octopus was great white shark of invertebrate predators

Published by skeptic

A reconstruction of the giant octopus Yohei Utsuki/Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Hokkaido University While dinosaurs ruled the land, Cretaceous oceans were home to a fierce and enormous octopus species that may have reached up to 19 metres in length, rivalling the size of the largest predators of the time, including sharks and marine reptiles like plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. These octopuses were active predators, says Yasuhiro Iba at Hokkaido University in Japan. “They could be thought of as the orcas or great white sharks of the invertebrate world – large, intelligent and highly effective apex predators,” says Iba. “These were animals over 10 metres long, with long arms, powerful jaws capable of crushing hard structures and probably advanced behaviour.” Iba and his colleagues looked at 27 large, fossilised octopus jaws dating to between 100 million and 72 million years that had been collected in Japan and Vancouver Island, Canada. A dozen of the octopus jaws were new to science and were locked inside rocks, says Iba. They became visible only when the researchers used …

Predators have a new business model – and humans, not AI, need to catch them, experts warn | Science, Climate & Tech News

Predators have a new business model – and humans, not AI, need to catch them, experts warn | Science, Climate & Tech News

Published by skeptic

For a long time, images and videos of child abuse were hidden away in the darkest corners of the internet, intentionally hard to find. That’s changing. Now, fully commercial sites are springing up all over the open web. The Internet Watch Foundation, the organisation charged with removing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the internet, has seen the number of commercial sites double in the past year alone. Image: Child abuse has become a commercial operation. Pic: IWF Some of them are hidden behind apparently innocent website fronts, others are just sitting in the open, just a few clicks away from your social media feeds. The criminals running these sites aren’t selling access to one or two videos of ‘category A’ material – the worst level of designation content assigned by police. They’re encouraging users to download – and pay for – terabytes of content at a time. But like any business, they need a marketing strategy. They’ve chosen word of mouth. Image: The methods predators are using to spread child abuse material have changed. …