TO STUDY BLINKING, A SCIENTIST NEEDED A REAL BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

When Jessica Yorzinski chased great-tailed grackles across a field, it wasn’t a contest to see who blinked first. But she did want the birds to blink.

Yorzinski had outfitted 10 great-tailed grackles with head-mounted cameras pointing back at their faces. Like other birds, grackles blink sideways, flicking a semitransparent membrane across the eye. Recordings showed that the birds spent less time blinking during the riskiest parts of a flight. The finding was published last week in Biology Letters.

Yorzinski, a sensory ecologist at Texas A&M, had been wondering how animals balance a need to blink with the need to get visual information about their environments.

She worked with a company that builds eye-tracking equipment to make a custom bird-size headpiece. Because a bird’s eyes are on the sides of its head, the contraption held one video camera pointed at the left eye and one at the right, making the bird resemble a sports fan in a beer helmet. The headpiece was connected to a backpack holding a battery and transmitter. Each bird wore the camera helmet and backpack while Yorzinski encouraged it to fly by chasing it across an outdoor enclosure.

Afterward, she broke down the flight videos into stages, from standing and taking off to landing again. While the birds were in flight, their blinks were quicker than when they were on the ground. And just before landing, they barely blinked.

“Maximizing the visual input they get during these critical stages of being in flight and landing makes a lot of sense,” she said. The birds blinked most often at the moment they hit the ground, perhaps because they needed to blink after holding their eyes open, or to protect their eyes from debris.

Yorzinski plans to do further experiments with birds navigating different environments, such as a forest setting with more obstacles.

Graham Martin, an emeritus professor of avian sensory science at the University of Birmingham in England, said the study is “an interesting piece of work.” But he pointed out that the flights Dr. Yorzinski observed were only a few seconds long. He doesn’t think there’s enough evidence yet to say anything broadly about how birds alter their blinks in flight.

“I think we need to see samples of blinking behavior during longer flights and in other species before any general conclusions are possible,” he said.

— Elizabeth Preston

Before coiling around the world, pythons slithered through Europe

From 20-foot anacondas to species that can comfortably fit on a quarter, snakes slither across much of the world today. That’s in part because they’re remarkably good

at adapting to new environments — for instance, the Burmese python, native to Southeast Asia, is thriving in Florida’s Everglades National Park. Now, researchers have analyzed four fossilized python skeletons unearthed in Germany — part of a region that’s currently free of the scaly creatures — and rewritten the snake family trees.

These results were published this month in Biology Letters.

Last year during a sabbatical at the French National Museum of Natural History, Hussam Zaher, a paleontologist, pored over a 52-page manuscript written in German that contained an illustration of a skull of an unnamed snake species. Zaher was intrigued — he was studying ancient snakes, and this skull had some but not all of the characteristics of modern pythons.

Zaher tracked down the specimen, which measured just over 38 inches long, in the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany. With the help of Krister T. Smith, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, he set off looking for more like it.

Zaher and Smith located four similar skeletons in the collections of history museums and paleontological institutions across Germany. The skeletons, all remarkably intact, had been excavated from the country’s Messel Pit, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The research team found that the four skeletons belonged to a new species of python, which they named Messelopython freyi.

“The fossils there are exquisite,” said Dr. Zaher, who is now at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Based on where the fossils were excavated relative to volcanic rock of a known age, the researchers estimated that the skeletons were at least 47 million years old. That places them squarely in the geological epoch known as the Eocene. But the discovery pushes the snake’s origins back 20 million years.

Finding this species also sheds light on the geographic origin of pythons It now looks like pythons originated instead in the supercontinent known as Laurasia, which was composed of North America, Europe and Asia.

That’s a bit of a surprise, the researchers said, given that pythons aren’t currently found in Europe.

— Katherine Kornei

More mammals are hiding their secret glow

Were platypuses just the beginning?

In October, researchers reported that the already perplexing animals fluoresce a psychedelic blue-green color under black light. The species joined a short list of mammals known to do this, including opossums and flying squirrels.

Since the study came out, others have begun their own investigations, mostly in Australian mammals. Although results are preliminary, the findings suggest we may have to book a larger venue for the mammal rave.

When he heard about the platypus discovery, Kenny Travouillon, curator of mammals at the Western Australian Museum, borrowed a black light lamp and, after confirming that their preserved platypuses glowed, he and his colleagues moved on to the rest of the collection.

But what they saw was encouraging. Bilbies — endangered marsupials with long snouts and rabbit-like ears — had orange and green accents. The quills of hedgehogs, porcupines and echidnas shone bright white, as if dipped in correction fluid.

Some specimens were more reserved: Of two wombat species they examined, only one fluoresced, and “kangaroos didn’t seem to do very much at all,” Travouillon said. The museum plans to team up with a nearby university to do a more systematic study early next year.

Live animals are also being tested.

When a co-worker told Jake Schoen, a conservation technician at the Toledo Zoo, the platypus news, “we got pretty excited about it,” he said. Schoen turned his lens on the zoo’s Tasmanian devils, Spiderman and Bubbles. “The tricky part was having them sit still for a fraction of a second,” he said. Eventually, Bubbles cooperated. When the UV flash went off, voilá: A cool blue glow emerged around her eyes, at the bases of her whiskers and inside the cups of her ears.