Meet your distant relative, Entelognathus primordialis, possibly the first earthling with a face. Or at least a familiar face.

Entelognathus primordialis (where Entelognathus means “complete jaw”) is described this week in Nature. Discovered in a quarry in China, the remarkably well-preserved fossil is somewhat 3D, displaying a modern type of jaw.

E. primordialis is a placoderm, an early class of fish that lived 430 to 360 million years ago. These fish were covered with an armor of bony plates and gave rise to two later groups—bony fish and cartilaginous fish.

The evolution of jaws is one of the key episodes in the evolution of vertebrates, but the gap between jawed and jawless vertebrates is so large that it has been hard to work out the individual evolutionary steps in the transition. Min Zhu and his colleagues hope to make the link with E. primordialis.

The 419 million-year-old fish fossil has jawbone features previously restricted to bony fishes, but has the full body armor seen in placoderms. It would have been around 20 centimeters (eight inches) long.

Prior to this recent find, most scientists agreed that placoderms had no jaw and were more similar to the cartilaginous fish, like modern day sharks, while the bony fishes are believed to be our ancestors. According to Nature News:

Such fishes went on to dominate the seas and ultimately gave rise to land vertebrates.

In addition to facing off with placoderms, the new study puts cartilaginous fishes into a whole new light—perhaps they are even more evolved than previously thought.

Despite the important role of understory plants in forest ecosystems, climate impact assessments on understory plants and their role in supporting wildlife habitat are scarce in the literature.

That’s part of an abstract in a new paper in Nature Climate Change. A group of researchers at Michigan State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to look at the future of a few bamboo species under different climate change models.

The scientists studied bamboo species that carpet the forest floors of prime panda habitat in northwestern China. Unlike some of the more common, fast growing-species, the bamboo species that serve as understory in the Qinling Mountains only flower and reproduce every 30 to 35 years, which limits the plants’ ability to adapt to changing climate and can spell disaster for a food supply and more.

These mountains are home to about 275 wild pandas, or 17 percent of the remaining wild population. Bamboo makes up 99% of the giant pandas’ diet. Sadly, even under the most optimistic climate change scenario, bamboo die-offs would effectively cause this prime panda habitat to become inhospitable by the end of the 21st century.

The scientists are aware of how important the pandas are in telling this story. “The giant panda is a special species,” says lead researcher Mao-Ning Tuanmu. “People put a lot of conservation resources into them compared with other species. We want to provide data to guide that wisely.”

But the pandas are only a part of the story. Bamboo is a vital part of forest ecosystems—providing essential food and shelter for other wildlife, including other endangered species like the ploughshare tortoise and purple-winged ground-dove. It’s all interconnected. From Science News:

Scientists need to pay more attention, the team writes, to how changes in one part of the ecosystem (like bamboo) affect others within the same ecosystem (like pandas).

Image: MSU

Fewer than 3,200 tigers remain in the wild. Their populations are half what they were a decade ago, due primarily to poaching for medicine, but also to deforestation.

At the recent Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Qatar, Willem Wijnstekers stated, “If we use tiger numbers as a performance indicator, then we must admit that we have failed miserably and that we are continuing to fail.”

Chinese tiger farms aren’t helping, say conservationists, because they have reignited the trade in tiger medicinal products. Although China does not officially permit the sale of goods from the farms, several investigations have revealed they still sell the illegal goods for medicinal purposes.  Unfortunately (and somewhat illogically), the farm-raised tiger parts are considered less effective than those harvested from wild sources. This makes the wild parts more valuable. However, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) is trying to help solve this problem.

In a statement issued prior to CITES, the WFCMS called on traditional medicine practitioners to abandon the use of tiger parts. Its deputy secretary Huang Jianyin said, “We will ask our members not to use endangered wildlife in traditional Chinese medicine, and reduce the misunderstanding and bias of the international community.”

He added, ”The traditional Chinese medicine industry should look for substitutes and research on economical and effective substitutes for tiger products.”

According to the World Wildlife Federation, tigers face extinction by the next Year of the Tiger, in 2022. You can learn more about the plight of tigers here or do something here.