Living Fossil Plants - Ginkgo, Metasequoia, Wollemia

Living Fossil Plants - Ginkgo, Metasequoia, Wollemia A living fossil  is a species that is known from fossils looking just the way it looks today. Among animals, the most famous living fossil is probably the  coelacanth. Here are three living fossils from the plant kingdom. Afterward, we will point out why living fossil is no longer a good term to use. Ginkgo, Ginkgo biloba Ginkgoes are a very old line of plants, their earliest representatives being found in rocks of Permian age  some 280 million years old. At times in the geologic past, they have been widespread and abundant, and the dinosaurs surely fed upon them. The fossil species Ginkgo adiantoides, indistinguishable from the modern ginkgo, is found in rocks as old as Early Cretaceous (140 to 100 million years ago), which appears to have been the ginkgos heyday. Fossils of ginkgo species are found throughout the northern hemisphere in rocks dating from Jurassic to Miocene times. They disappear from North America by the Pliocene and vanish from Europe by the Pleistocene. The ginkgo tree is well-known today as a street tree and ornamental tree, but for centuries it appears to have been extinct in the wild. Only cultivated trees survived, in Buddhist monasteries in China, until they were planted across Asia starting about a thousand years ago. Ginkgo Photo GalleryGrowing GinkgoesLandscaping with Ginkgoes Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides The dawn redwood is a conifer that sheds its leaves every year, unlike its cousins the coast redwood and giant sequoia. Fossils of closely related species date from late in the Cretaceous  and occur all over the northern hemisphere. Their most famous locality is probably on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic, where stumps and leaves of Metasequoia sit still unmineralized from the warm Eocene Epoch some 45 million years ago. The fossil species Metasequoia glyptostroboides was first described in 1941. Its fossils were known before that, but they were confused with those of the true redwood genus Sequoia and the swamp cypress genus Taxodium for more than a century. M. glyptostroboides was thought to be long extinct. The latest fossils, from Japan, dated from the early Pleistocene (2 million years ago). But a living specimen in China was found a few years later, and now this critically endangered species is thriving in the horticultural trade. Only about 5000 wild trees remain. Recently, Chinese researchers described a single isolated specimen in Hunan province whose leaf cuticle differs from all other dawn redwoods and exactly resembles the fossil species. They suggest that this tree is truly the living fossil and that the other dawn redwoods have evolved from it by mutation. The science, along with much human detail, is presented by Qin Leng in a recent issue of Arnoldia. Qin also reports vigorous conservation efforts in Chinas Metasequoia Valley. Wollemi Pine, Wollemia nobilis The ancient conifers of the southern hemisphere are in the araucaria plant family, named for the Arauco region of Chile where the monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) lives. It has 41 species today (including the Norfolk Island pine, kauri pine and bunya-bunya), all of them scattered among the continental fragments of Gondwana: South America, Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand and New Caledonia. Ancient araucarians forested the globe in Jurassic times. In late 1994, a ranger in Australias Wollemi National Park in the Blue Hills found a strange tree in a small, remote canyon. It was found to match fossil leaves going back 120 million years in Australia. Its pollen grains were an exact match to the fossil pollen species ​Dilwynites, found in Antarctica, Australia, and New Zealand in rocks as old as Jurassic. The Wollemi pine is known in three small groves, and all specimens today are as genetically alike as twins. Hard-core gardeners and plant fanciers are very interested in the Wollemi pine, not just for its rarity but because it has beautiful foliage. Look for it at your local progressive arboretum. Why Living Fossil Is a Poor Term The name living fossil is unfortunate in some ways. The dawn redwood and Wollemi pine present the best case for the term: recent fossils that appear identical, not just similar, to a living representative. And the survivors were so few that we may not have enough genetic information to explore their evolutionary history in depth. But most living fossils dont match that story. The plant group of cycads is an example that used to be in the textbooks (and may still be). The typical cycad in yards and gardens is the sago palm, and it had supposedly been unchanged since Paleozoic time. But today there are about 300 species of cycad, and genetic studies show that most are only a few million years old. Besides genetic evidence, most living fossil species differ in small details from todays species: shell ornamentation, numbers of teeth, configuration of bones and joints. Although the line of organisms had a stable body plan that succeeded in a certain habitat and lifeway, its evolution never stopped. The idea that the species became evolutionarily stuck is the main thing wrong about the notion of living fossils. There is a similar term used by paleontologists for fossil types that disappear from the rock record, sometimes for millions of years, and then appear again: Lazarus taxa, named for the man that Jesus raised from the dead. A Lazarus taxon is not literally the same species, found in rocks millions of years apart. Taxon refers to any level of taxonomy, from the species through the genus and family up to the kingdom. The typical Lazarus taxon is a genus- a group of species- so that matches what we now understand about living fossils.

A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins

A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins If you grafted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), added a few hefty tablespoons of paranoia and repression, and translated the whole megillah into Russian, you might wind up with something like the KGB. The Soviet Unions main internal and external security agency from 1954 until the breakup of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the KGB wasnt created from scratch, but rather inherited much of its techniques, personnel, and political orientation from the greatly feared agencies that preceded it. Before the KGB: The Cheka, the OGPU  and the NKVD In the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, the head of the newly formed U.S.S.R., needed a way to keep the population (and his fellow revolutionaries) in check. His answer was to create the Cheka, an abbreviation of The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. During the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920, the Cheka - led by the one-time Polish aristocrat Felix - arrested, tortured, and executed thousands of citizens. In the course of this Red Terror, the Cheka perfected the system of summary execution used by subsequent Russian intelligence agencies: a single shot to the back of the victims neck, preferably in a dark dungeon. In 1923, the Cheka, still under Dzerzhinsky, mutated into the OGPU (the Joint State Political Directorate Under the  Council of Peoples Commissars  of the U.S.S.R. - Russians have never been good at catchy names). The OGPU operated during a relatively uneventful period in Soviet history (no massive purges, no internal deportations of millions of ethnic minorities), but this agency did preside over the creation of the first Soviet gulags. The OGPU also viciously persecuted religious organizations (including the Russian Orthodox Church) in addition to its usual duties of rooting out dissenters and saboteurs. Unusually for a director of a Soviet intelligence agency, Felix Dzerzhinsky died of natural causes, dropping dead of a heart attack after denouncing leftists to the Central Committee. Unlike these earlier agencies, the NKVD (The Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs) was purely the brainchild of Joseph Stalin. The NKVD was chartered around the same time Stalin orchestrated the murder of Sergei Kirov, an event he used as an excuse to purge the upper ranks of the Communist Party and strike terror into the populace. In the 12  years of its existence, from 1934 to 1946, the NKVD arrested and executed literally millions of people, stocked the gulags with millions more miserable souls, and relocated entire ethnic populations within the vast expanse of the U.S.S.R. Being an NKVD head was a dangerous occupation: Genrikh Yagoda was arrested and executed in 1938, Nikolai Yezhov in 1940, and Lavrenty Beria in 1953 (during the power struggle that followed the death of Stalin). The Ascension  of the KGB After the end of World War II  and before his execution, Lavrenty Beria presided over the Soviet security apparatus, which remained in a somewhat fluid state of multiple acronyms and organizational structures. Most of the time, this body was known as the MGB (The Ministry for State Security), sometimes as the NKGB (The Peoples Commissariat for State Security), and once, during the war, as the vaguely comical-sounding SMERSH (short for the Russian phrase smert shpionom, or death to spies). Only after the death of Stalin did the KGB, or Commissariat for State Security, formally come into being. Despite its fearsome reputation in the west, the KGB was actually more effective in policing the U.S.S.R. and its eastern European satellite states than in fomenting revolution in western Europe or stealing military secrets from the U.S. (The golden age of Russian espionage was in the years immediately following World War II, before the formation of the KGB, when the U.S.S.R. subverted western scientists in order to advance its own development of nuclear weapons.) The major foreign accomplishments of the KGB included suppressing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, as well as installing a Communist government in Afghanistan in the late 1970s; however, the agencys luck ran out in early 1980s Poland, where the anti-Communist Solidarity movement emerged victorious. All during this time, of course, the CIA and the KGB engaged in an elaborate international dance (often in third-world countries like Angola and Nicaragua),  involving agents, double agents, propaganda, disinformation, under-the-table arms sales, interference with elections, and nighttime exchanges of suitcases filled with rubles or hundred-dollar bills. The exact details of what transpired, and where, may never come to light; many of the agents and controllers from both sides are dead, and the current Russian government has not been forthcoming in declassifying the KGB archives. Inside the U.S.S.R., the attitude of the KGB toward suppressing dissent was largely dictated by government policy. During the reign of Nikita Khrushchev, from 1954 to 1964, a certain amount of openness was tolerated, as witnessed in the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyns Gulag-era memoir One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (an event that would have been unthinkable under the Stalin regime). The pendulum swung the other way with the ascension of Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, and, especially, the appointment of Yuri Andropov as the head of the KGB in 1967. Andropovs KGB hounded Solzhenitsyn out of the U.S.S.R. in 1974, turned the screws on the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, and generally made life miserable for any prominent figure even slightly dissatisfied with Soviet power. The Death (And Resurrection?) of the KGB In the late 1980s - partly because of the disastrous war in Afghanistan and partly because of an increasingly costly arms race with the U.S. - the U.S.S.R. began to fall apart at the seams, with rampant inflation, shortages of factory goods, and agitation by ethnic minorities. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had already implemented perestroika (a restructuring of the economy and political structure of the Soviet Union) and glasnost (a policy of openness toward dissidents), but while this placated some of the population, it enraged hard-line Soviet bureaucrats who had grown accustomed to their privileges. As might have been predicted, the KGB was at the forefront of the counter-revolution. In late 1990,  then-KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov recruited high-ranking members of the Soviet elite into a  tight-knit conspiratorial cell, which sprang into action the following  August after failing to convince Gorbachev to either resign in favor of its preferred candidate or declare a state of emergency. Armed combatants, some of them in tanks, stormed the Russian parliament building in Moscow, but Soviet President Boris Yeltsin held firm and the coup quickly fizzled out. Four months later, the U.S.S.R. officially disbanded, granting autonomy to the Soviet Socialist Republics along its western and southern borders and dissolving the KGB (along with all other Soviet governmental bodies). However, institutions like the KGB never really go away; they just assume different guises. Today, Russia is dominated by two security agencies, the FSB (The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation), which broadly correspond to the FBI and the CIA, respectively. More worrisome, though, is the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin spent 15 years in the KGB, from 1975 to 1990, and his increasingly autocratic rule shows that he has taken to heart the lessons he learned there. Its unlikely that Russia will ever again see a security agency as vicious as the NKVD, but a return to the darkest days of the KGB is clearly not out of the question.