Museum Quarterly LSU Museum of Natural Science October 2015 Volume 33, Issue 3 Letter from the Director... Museum of Taking advantage of the technological revolution that brought Natural Science us the World Wide Web and iPhones, this issue marks a new Director and electronic format for the Museum newsletter. You will receive an Curators email with a list of articles and all you have to do is click on an individual article to read the full story. A link to download the Robb T. Brumfield entire pdf is also available if you prefer that format. Director, Roy Paul Daniels Professor and Curator of Genetic Resources Here at the Museum the technological revolution has also empowered us with Frederick H. Sheldon a revolutionary new molecular method that allows us to collect vast amounts of DNA George H. data quickly. For example, it would now take me about five minutes to collect all of Lowery, Jr., Professor and Curator of Genetic the DNA sequence data from my PhD back in the 1990s. What is even more remark- Resources able is that this same technology, known as next-generation sequencing, allows us to Christopher C. Austin collect millions of base pairs of DNA sequence data from legacy museum specimens. Curator of George Lowery, Charles Darwin, John Audubon and other legendary collectors could Amphibians & Reptiles have never imagined that specimens they collected would one day have their entire Prosanta Chakrabarty genomes sequenced. Curator of Fishes Jacob A. Esselstyn The common thread in research and science outreach conducted at the Muse- Curator of Mammals um is that it is collections-focused. It is a field in which we quite literally stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. As you’ll read about in the Newsletter, we are J. V. Remsen John Stauffer McIlhenny actively growing the collections so that future scientists here and around the world Professor and will have the same opportunity. You’ll also read that we are using the collections in Curator of Birds ways that the original specimen collector could have never anticipated. It is impos- Rebecca Saunders sible to predict how the Museum’s collections will be used even 50 years from now, Curator of Anthropology but we are dedicated to preserving them so that they will be available for research and science education 1000 years from now. Judith A. Schiebout Curator of Finally, it is with sadness that I report the passing of former Curator of Her- Vertebrate Paleontology petology Dr. Douglas A. Rossman. Doug was a great scientist, mentor, and educa- tor, and the Herpetology Collection saw tremendous growth during his tenure. Doug Sophie Warny AASP Associate Professor continued to be a great supporter of the Museum after his retirement, and we all Curator of Palynology & looked forward to his annual visits from Iowa. He will be missed. Director of Education Robb LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 1 Museum Quarterly, October 2015 LSU Mammal Curator Discovers New Species By Alison Satake BATON ROUGE – LSU Museum of Natural Sci- With extremely large ears, long hind legs that may be ence Curator of Mammals Jake Esselstyn and his inter- used for hopping, long white incisors and very long uro- national collaborators have discovered a new genus and genital hairs, the Hog-nosed rat is so genetically differ- species on a remote, mountainous island in Indonesia. ent from any other species that the scientists described This new discovery is the third new genus described by it as a new genus. This discovery is the cover story of the this group of scientists since 2012, and identifies a ro- Journal of Mammalogy this month. dent with features never seen by the scientific commu- nity before. Long incisors are a trait of shrew rats. But the Hog-nosed rat has especially long incisors. Another dis- On the second morning of their field season in tinct characteristic of the Hog-nosed rat is that it lacks 2013, Esselstyn and Museum Victoria Senior Curator a jaw muscle attachment point found in most mammals of Mammals Kevin Rowe set out in opposite directions called the coronoid process on the dentary bone. from their field camp to check their traps. Unbeknownst to each other, they both caught the same type of animal “I don’t know of any other rodents that have lost in their respective traps the coronoid pro- and immediately knew cess completely,” they were looking at a Esselstyn said. new species. “We had never seen any- The loss of the thing like this. It was coronoid process obviously a new species. indicates a weak We came back to camp jaw musculature and were both surprised and a diet that that the other one had it does not require as well,” Esselstyn said. vigorous chew- ing. The scientists The animal is a found that the new shrew rat with a large, species eats earth- flat, pink nose and for- worms and beetle ward-facing nostrils for larvae. which they named the Above: The Hog-nosed Shrew Rat (Hyorhinomys stuempkei). Photo Kevin Hog-nosed rat, or Hy- C. Rowe. orhinomys stuempkei. LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 2 Museum Quarterly, October 2015 not just subtly different organisms, but really charismatically different,” Rowe said. The scientists described the Few- toothed shrew rat, or Paucidentomys vermidax, in 2012. One of the reasons why scientists have thought that ro- dents have been evolutionarily success- ful is they have incisors for gnawing and molars for grinding. “However, this rat we described in 2012, doesn’t have molars and they really can’t gnaw because of the shape of their incisors. Interestingly, this species has lost the two things that we think made rodents successful,” Esselstyn said. In 2014, the scientists described the Sulawesi water rat, or Waiomys ma- Above: View of the hog-nosed rat’s nose and insisors. Photo by Kevin C. Rowe. masae, which was known to villagers Title Photo: Dr. Jake Esselstyn in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo by Kevin C. Rowe. and their guides but not to the scientific community. Villagers use this animal as a talisman to protect their homes Challenging Study Site against fire. The island of Sulawesi in Indonesia is geograph- ically complex, mountainous and challenging to scien- “Our guides didn’t tell us right away that they tifically sample. Little research has been conducted on had caught it. We were asleep and they were up late the island since the early 20th century. at night discussing whether they should give it to us or keep it for themselves. We were very glad that they “On Sulawesi, there is a lot of ground to cover eventually decided to give it to us, because otherwise and most of it hasn’t been surveyed before, especially at we would have left and never had known about this an- high elevation,” Esselstyn said. imal,” he said. He and his collaborators from Australia and In- These animals Esselstyn and his colleagues have donesia have been studying the region since 2010. Inun- described are new species within new genera, because dated by constant rain, the study site for this discovery the animals could not be placed within any existing was a moss-covered habitat on Mt. Dako at about 1,600 group. After sequencing the DNA from the specimens, meters elevation and a two-day trek from the nearest the scientists had the molecular evidence to confirm the village. species’ unique distinctions. “There’s a lot of biogeographic complexity at Sulawesi. So we’re not too surprised that we’re finding new things. But our team has been a bit surprised by the degree to which these animals are really novel. They are LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 3 Museum Quarterly, October 2015 Mammal Expeditions to Ouachita National Forest By Mark Swanson Considering all of the exotic locations LSUMNS ested in knowing how these species are able to divide curators and students travel to, it can be easy to forget food and other resources while sharing the same space, that there is still a lot of natural history to study right since it could help us understand how animals adapt to here in the American South! Distributions of many their environments and what determines where they small mammal taxa are currently shifting in response to are found. One possibility is that each species of mouse climate change and alterations in human land use pat- is specializing on a particular suite of seeds and insects, terns. Consequently, museum work is never done, and and that they have unique communities of microbi- we need to conduct new surveys and collect voucher al gut symbionts to help them digest their food. These specimens in order to document where species are cur- microbial communities might shift over the range of rently found. Additionally, sur- the host mouse depending prisingly few high quality tissue on environmental conditions specimens of common southern and the other species of mice species are curated in museum present. collections for researchers to conduct studies of molecular In order to gain a clear- systematics, phylogeography, er picture of these phenome- and population genetics. na, I organized a pair of 5 day collecting trips to Ouachi- The Ouachita Moun- ta National Forest this past tains are located at the intersec- summer. Former Esselstyn tion of the ranges of five species lab post-doc Thomas Giarla of mice which do not co-occur Above: A Texas mouse (Peromyscus attwateri) from joined me in June to collect in other places. We are inter- Arkansas. around Fourche Mountain LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 4 Museum Quarterly, October 2015 people what we were doing.