'Godzilla' platypus discovered in Australia

A giant extinct species of the platypus with powerful teeth has been discovered in Australia, with a scientist on Tuesday describing the duck-billed water animal as a Godzilla-like monster.

The new species, named Obdurodon tharalkooschild, was identified by a single but highly distinctive tooth found in the Riversleigh site in the northeastern Australian state of Queensland - a World Heritage area rich in fossil deposits.

"We'd never seen anything this big so it really knocked our socks off to think that platypus could get this big," said Professor Mike Archer from the University of New South Wales, who described the animal as about twice the size of its modern relative.

"Platypus Godzilla. You can imagine the humorous scenes where somebody looks at the modern platypus and says 'That's not a platypus' and then picks up this monster and says 'That's a platypus'."

The modern platypus, a timid and nocturnal animal which lives in deep waterside burrows and is found only in eastern Australia, lacks any teeth as an adult. Scientists do not believe the newly discovered extinct species was an immediate ancestor.

Archer said the extinct version would have been "positively dangerous" and turns on its head the idea of the creature as small, furry and "cute".

"We already know that the modern platypus has venom on the spurs of the hind leg that can be incredibly painful, that can stop a grown man in his tracks for hours," said Archer.

"If you scale that up to perhaps two to three times the amount of venom in an animal much larger than that, you suddenly start thinking about this animal as a predator."

Scientists had thought that the platypus, which combines bird, mammal and reptile characteristics, had gradually lost its teeth and become smaller over millions of years. But the latest find contradicts that theory because it is much bigger than older, toothed incarnations of the mysterious monotreme.

"Discovery of this new species was a shock to us because prior to this, the fossil record suggested that the evolutionary tree of platypuses was a relatively linear one," Archer explained.

"Now we realise that there were unanticipated side branches on this tree, some of which became gigantic."

Archer said he was confident that the single tooth, which was discovered by Rebecca Pian, a PhD candidate at Columbia University in the United States, was sufficient evidence of a new species.

The tooth proved it was a platypus, and it was very different from any other toothed platypus seen.

"This single tooth that turned up is precisely the one that we needed," he said.

Pian, the lead author of the research published in the US-based Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology, said any new species, even though incomplete, was an important aid in understanding more about the fascinating mammals.

The extinct species is believed to have been a mostly aquatic animal like its modern descendant and would have lived in and around freshwater pools in the forests that covered the Riversleigh area millions of years ago.

It probably fed on crayfish and other freshwater crustaceans, as well as small vertebrates such as frogs and turtles, said Suzanne Hand of UNSW's School of Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Archer said scientists already had concerns about the long-term viability of the platypus given the animals' long and steady decline over millions of years, and the discovery only added to these.

The find indicates that where there could have once have been more kinds of platypus, these have now vanished.

Mysterious disease turning starfish to 'slime'

Scientists are struggling to find the trigger for a disease that appears to be ravaging starfish in record numbers along the US West Coast, causing the sea creatures to lose their limbs and turn to slime in a matter of days.

Marine biologists and ecologists will launch an extensive survey this week along the coasts of California, Washington state and Oregon to determine the reach and source of the deadly syndrome, known as "star wasting disease."

"It's pretty spooky because we don't have any obvious culprit for the root cause even though we know it's likely caused by a pathogen," said Pete Raimondi, chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz's Long Marine Lab.

Signs of sea star wasting syndrome typically begin with white lesions on the arms of the starfish that spread inward, causing the entire animal to disintegrate in less than a week, according to a report by the Pacific Rocky Intertidal Monitoring Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Starfish have suffered from the syndrome on and off for decades but have usually been reported in small numbers, isolated to Southern California and linked to a rise in seawater temperatures, which is not the case this time, Raimondi said.

Since June, wasting sea stars have been found in dozens of coastal sites ranging from southeast Alaska to Orange County, California, and the mortality rates have been higher than ever seen before, Raimondi said. In one surveyed tide pool in Santa Cruz during the current outbreak, 90 to 95 percent of hundreds of starfish were killed by the disease.

"Their tissue just melts away," said Melissa Miner, a biologist and researcher with the Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Network, a group of government agencies, universities and nonprofits that monitor tidal wildlife and environment along the West Coast.

Miner, based in Washington state, has studied wasting starfish locally and in Alaska since June, when only a few cases had been reported. "It has ballooned into a much bigger issue since then," she said.

The syndrome primarily affects the mussel-eating Pisaster ochraceus, a large purple and orange starfish, but Raimondi said that at least 10 species of sea stars have shown signs of the disease since June.

If the numbers of Pisaster ochraceus begin to decrease, mussels could crowd the ocean, disrupting biodiversity, he said. He has studied wasting starfish and will aid in the months-long survey of the animals, along with other state and federal researchers. In addition to on-site sampling, scientists in the coming months will use an interactive map to spot starfish wasting location patterns and help identify a driver for the disease.

Raimondi said he could not estimate, out of the millions of starfish on the West Coast, how many have been affected or could be in the future.

"We're way at the onset now, so we just don't know how bad it's going to get," he said.

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