Named after the Norse god Loki, meet Lokiceratops, a new horned dinosaur species
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: You're listening to SHORT WAVE...
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KWONG: ...From NPR.
REGINA BARBER, HOST:
Hey, SHORT WAVErs, Regina Barber here. This time I've got some serious science dorks for our regular science news roundup, starting with Ari Shapiro, who hosts All Things Considered between stints with us. Hey, Ari.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: I am so honored to have the title of science dork. It's a real privilege.
BARBER: And my fellow, like, science queen producer Berly McCoy.
BERLY MCCOY, BYLINE: Hey, Gina.
BARBER: OK, as you both know, we're going to share three science stories in the news that have caught our attention recently.
SHAPIRO: Yeah. Everything from a newly uncovered dinosaur species...
BARBER: To a current species bouncing back from the brink of extinction...
MCCOY: And an impending star explosion that'll be visible to the naked eye.
SHAPIRO: Which, BT-dubs, I heard NASA scientists are calling a once-in-a-lifetime event.
BARBER: All that on this episode of SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.
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BARBER: Alright, Ari, as our guest, which topic do you want to start with?
SHAPIRO: I love dinosaur coverage because we got called out a few years ago by an 8-year-old listener named Leo (ph) for not doing enough dinosaur stories. So Gina, let's start there and continue rectifying this shortcoming. Tell us about the new dinosaur.
BARBER: I got you, Leo. OK. Is name is Lokiceratops rangiformis, and it's named after the Norse god Loki for two reasons. One, because like all ceratops, it has horns on its head. But these blades, they look like the ones on Loki's helmet. And two, because its skull resides in Denmark right now.
SHAPIRO: So that's the first part of the name. What about the second part of the name?
BARBER: Yeah. This is less fun, but still interesting. Like, rangiformis refers to horns not being symmetrical - like caribou.
SHAPIRO: I didn't know caribou have asymmetrical horns.
BARBER: Yeah, I had to look it up.
MCCOY: So, this is a brand new species of ceratops or horned dinosaur, and it all starts with bones found on private land in Northern Montana, which is actually in my neck of the woods. So this area is well-known for a place with lots of fossils. At first, researchers thought it was a known dinosaur called Medusaceratops.
MARK LOEWEN: So, it was pretty cool. We were actually gathered around a table and, you know, we're there together, and we had that eureka moment where, wow, this really is something new.
BARBER: That's paleontologist Mark Loewen. And this discovery was published in the Journal PeerJ last week.
SHAPIRO: Can I just say these names are very mythological? Like Medusaceratops, Lokiceratops - I feel like we're tapping into Greek mythology and the Marvel cinematic universe. Is this pretty typical?
BARBER: Well, not all of them are named that, Ari. But it's a reasonable question.
MCCOY: But they're still cool because over the years, researchers have found five distinct ceratops there, which shows how diverse the horned dino population was and how they were rapidly evolving.
BARBER: Mark and another co-author Joseph Sertich told me that where most dinosaur species live for around 2 million years, these fast-evolving ceratops species might only have existed for 200,000 years.
SHAPIRO: So among this new family of ceratops, what makes Lokiceratops different from the others?
MCCOY: Yeah. So generally, ceratops have horns on the top of their skulls, this bony frill going backwards from its skull and horns on their noses. These head features are thought to be used for attracting mates, but the Lokiceratops does not have the same nose horn, which Joseph says probably means...
JOSEPH SERTICH: Members of his own species found that sex did not have a nose horn. It had big blades on the back of its frill.
SHAPIRO: Whatever does it for you, I guess.
BARBER: Yeah. No, I really liked when he said that. But in all seriousness, Joseph says that really, this discovery is such a big deal because it shows that we're just scratching the surface of, like, the dino diversity in that region during the late Cretaceous period about 78 million years ago.
SHAPIRO: Cool. So let's pivot to an animal that exists in the present day. This is a wildlife success story about a lynx that has come back from the brink of extinction?
MCCOY: Yes, we are talking about the Iberian lynx. So these are medium-sized wild cats. They only live in Spain and Portugal, AKA, the Iberian Peninsula.
SHAPIRO: Got it.
MCCOY: So in 2001, there were only about 60 of these mature cats and soon after, they were listed as critically endangered, but through conservation efforts over the past couple of decades, the total number of lynx is now over 2,000.
BARBER: This is so cool. So just last week, the lynx was officially reclassified from an endangered species to a vulnerable one.
SHAPIRO: That's amazing. How did they make this comeback?
MCCOY: To understand that, I talked to Fernando Najera. He's a wildlife research veterinarian at the California Carnivore Program that's at UC Davis Wildlife Health Center. And he says it was a mix of things - so restoring habitat, minimizing human-caused deaths, like from road kill and poaching, and releasing lynx that were bred in captivity back into the wild.
BARBER: But one huge consideration was the lynx's main prey, and that's the European white rabbit.
FERNANDO NAJERA: So, anything that happened to European white rabbits is going to have an impact on Iberian lynxes.
BARBER: The rabbits are also endangered, largely due to viral outbreaks. Two major ones in the late '80s and the early 2010s really knocked their populations down. So conservation groups trying to protect the lynx knew they had to focus on upping the rabbit populations.
SHAPIRO: So a rebound of a couple thousand lynx is better than 60, but it sounds like there's still work to do, right?
MCCOY: There is. Fernando says people working with the lynx now are focusing on connecting the sub-populations in different areas of the peninsula and continuing to keep an eye on the rabbit population since, theoretically, a viral outbreak could knock it down again.
NAJERA: But achieving this is something that we need to celebrate.
BARBER: And he says he's optimistic people will see the success of bringing the lynx back and apply a similar approach to other species facing extinction, which is almost 30% of all SS species.
SHAPIRO: Thirty percent is a high number.
BARBER: So high.
SHAPIRO: OK. Let's go to our third and final topic of a once-in-a-lifetime star explosion. Is that once in a person's lifetime or once in a star's lifetime?
BARBER: Person's lifetime.
MCCOY: Yeah. So astronomers expect that this summer, you'll be able to see an explosion in a star system in our milky way galaxy with your naked eye.
BARBER: When that happens, it's called a nova, and this one will be in a star system 3,000 light years away, called T Coronae Borealis. And our NPR colleague Joe Hernandez reported on this recently, and the last time this happened in this star system, and it was seen from Earth, was in 1946. So this happens once every 80 years or so, and it's more rare than a solar eclipse.
SHAPIRO: A once-in-a-lifetime event. So is this like a supernova? Is that what you're describing?
MCCOY: Good question. It's a little different. So a nova is a rapid increase in the brightness of a star. So in this case, T Coronae Borealis is a binary star system, and that's made up of a white dwarf - that's a dead star about the size of Earth - and a red giant. So the white dwarf basically sucks material from the red giant, which causes a build up of pressure and heat on the surface of the white dwarf. And eventually, there's an explosion.
BARBER: Yeah. And a nova is different from a supernova because in this case, the white dwarf, like, remains intact, and the cycle can repeat over time. A supernova is only the, like, final explosion of a dying star, so the white dwarf wouldn't exist anymore if it was a supernova.
SHAPIRO: You said it's happening this summer. When should we be looking at the sky to see this?
BARBER: Yeah.
MCCOY: So it could happen at any moment between now and September. And once it does happen, it'll be visible for us for a little less than a week.
BARBER: Astrophysicists are excited about this because we don't usually see a repeated nova event in a human lifetime and because this one is relatively close to our solar system, so they hope to use it to make observations that will help us understand novae more in general.
MCCOY: And the super cool thing here, Ari, is that since the star system is 3,000 light years from Earth, when we do see the explosion, it'll have already happened 3,000 years ago.
SHAPIRO: Can, like, backyard astronomers with a home telescope spot this? What's it going to look like?
BARBER: Yeah. They can just look up in the sky around Coronae Borealis, which is a really easy to find constellation, I'll just be a star. Ari, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.
MCCOY: Thanks, Ari.
SHAPIRO: I love pretending to be a scientist with the two of you.
BARBER: Oh, you don't have to pretend. Everyone is a scientist at heart.
MCCOY: You're a scientist here.
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MCCOY: You can catch more of Ari doing his day job hosting the news on Consider This - NPR's afternoon news podcast.
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BARBER: Before we head out, a quick shout out to our SHORT WAVE plus listeners. We appreciate you, and we thank you for supporting our show. SHORT WAVE Plus helps support our show, and if you're a regular listener, we'd love for you to join so you can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions. Find out more at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
MCCOY: This episode was produced by Gus Contreras and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Patrick Jarenwattananon.
BARBER: Berly, Rachel, Rebecca and I checked the facts, and the audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Thanks again to Alejandra Marquez Janse. I'm Regina Barber.
MCCOY: And I'm Berly McCoy.
BARBER: Thank you for listening to SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.
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