skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A tricycle driver's wife gave birth to a two-headed baby at the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila, Tuesday night. Salvador Arganda, tricycle driver, said his wife, Chaterian, gave birth to the baby around 8:45 p.m. He said he last saw their baby around midnight at the hospital's neo-natal intensive care unit. Arganda said they had suspicions that Chaterian was carrying two babies because both sides of their families have twin members. He said their suspicion was erased after being told that there was only one baby inside Chaterian’s womb, based on her initial ultrasound. On Saturday, Chaterian went back to the hospital for another ultrasound session and they were told that the baby would come out of her womb head first and that she would have to give birth by caesarean section. Arganda said they were surprised when doctors told them that Chaterian gave birth to a baby with two heads. The tricycle driver said he and his wife are praying for the baby to live. "Sana mabuhay ang bata. Kakayanin naming mag-asawa iyon," he said when asked how will they take care of the child with his meager pay as a tricycle driver. Dr. Ruben Flores, Fabella hospital's director, said the baby's case is called dicephaly monozygotic conjoined twins, which, he said, is a very rare occurrence. Flores said they will use the hospital's resources to sustain the baby's life. Dr. Melissa Juico of the hospital's newborn unit, meanwhile, said they will subject the baby to 2-D (two-dimensional) echocardiogram to determine if the child has only one heart. Juico said the "twins" would not be able to live long enough with only one heart or if they are sharing vital organs. A radio dzMM report said the baby was crying a lot and was very responsive.
Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.
Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.
These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.
For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.
The oldest known animal fossils in the world are preserved in South China's Doushantuo Formation. These fossil beds have no adult specimens - instead, many of the fossils appear to be microscopic embryos.
"Our first unusual finding in this region was the abundance of a clay mineral called smectite," said researcher Tom Bristow, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water - conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes."
The researchers collected hundreds of rock samples from several locations in South China. All their analyses suggest these rocks were not marine sediments.
"Moreover, we found smectite in only some locations in South China, and not uniformly as one would expect for marine deposits," Bristow said. "Taken together, several lines of evidence indicated to us that these early animals lived in a lake environment."
This discovery raises questions as to how and why animals appeared when they did.
"It is most unexpected that these first fossils do not come from marine sediments," said researcher Martin Kennedy, a geologist at the University of California at Riverside.
"Lakes are typically short-lived features on the Earth's surface, and they are not nearly as consistent environments as oceans are," he explained. "So it's surprising that the first evidence of animals we find is associated with lakes, which are far more variable environments than the ocean. You'd expect the first appearance of animals to be in the most conservative, stable environments we could imagine."
It remains possible, Kennedy noted, that animal fossils of similar or older age exist that remain to be found that are marine in origin. However, at the very least, this work suggests "that animals had already taken on the ability to deal with the environmental fluctuations one sees in lake environments," he said. "That suggests that their evolutionary response is much more rapid that I would have supposed, and that the earliest animals were far more diverse than imagined."
If animals did first develop in lakes, one aspect of lake environments that could have spurred on their evolution is how much easier it is for air to percolate through them, given how much shallower they typically are than the ocean.
"The most popular explanation for the evolution of animals has to do with the increase in oxygen in Earth's atmosphere at that time," Kennedy told LiveScience. "It's possible that lakes were the first to benefit from that increase in oxygen."
Meet Zeus, a massive mutt who tips the scales at an amazing 249 pounds.Whic is equivalent to a baby elephant.
