TUATARA Naitive to New Zealand, the tuatara is not like any other vertibrate alive today.
A tuatara is born. Eggs incubate in the ground for a year, and the reptiles routinely live to be 100 — plenty of time to enjoy crunching on the weta, below
As a femur-shaped island paradise that snapped away from the Gondwana supercontinent some 80 million years ago, New Zealand is famously home to eccentric forms of wildlife that look like pets for a Hobbit.
TUATARA Naitive to New Zealand, the tuatara is not like any other vertibrate alive today.
A tuatara is born. Eggs incubate in the ground for a year, and the reptiles routinely live to be 100 — plenty of time to enjoy crunching on the weta, below.
There is the kiwi, of course, with its dense, furlike feathers, its catlike whiskers and its long, slender, curving bill tipped by a pair of ultrasensitive nostrils; and the kakapo, a heavy, flightless, nocturnal parrot with the flat-cheeked face of an owl; and the giant weta, a cricket the size of a human hand that displays by waving its formidably serrated rear legs high in the air as if brandishing a pair of saws.
Yet the animal that may well be New Zealand’s most bizarrely instructive species at first glance looks surprisingly humdrum: the tuatara. A reptile about 16 inches long with bumpy, khaki-colored skin and a lizardly profile, the tuatara could easily be mistaken for an iguana. Appearances in this case are wildly deceptive. The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back” — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.
In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Certain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.
For example, the tuatara has a third eye at the top of its skull, the legendary if poorly understood pineal eye, which is found in only a sprinkling of reptile species and which vision researchers suspect harks back to nature’s original eye — pretty much a few light-sensitive cells on a stalk. A tuatara’s teeth likewise follow the no-nonsense design seen in dinosaur dentition, erupting directly from the jawbone and without the niceties of tooth sockets and periodontal ligaments that characterize the teeth of all mammals and many reptiles. Some researchers are looking at tuataras for clues to how dental implants, which are inserted directly into the jaw, might be improved.
Yet in a startling counterpoint to the notion of the tuatara as a holdover from Triassic Park, researchers lately have discovered that a few regions of tuatara DNA appear to be evolving at hyperspeed, possibly the fastest mutation rate yet clocked in a vertebrate genome. The quick-changing sequences are limited to so-called neutral regions of the tuatara’s DNA, affecting filler codes, rather than the molecular blueprints for how to build a tuatara. The researchers have yet to determine what the observed hypermutability is all about, but obviously, said David M. Lambert of Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia, an author of the study, “the processes that govern skeletal morphology are decoupled from the biological processes that govern changes in DNA.”
Moreover, while the modern tuatara resembles its distant ancestors anatomically, life aboard a long-isolated land mass clearly has wrought major changes in the reptile’s physiology and behavior, pushing the tuatara to Guinness-worthy extremes. A famous Gary Larson cartoon may have featured a crocodile on the witness stand angrily telling the prosecutor, “Well, of course I did it in cold blood, you idiot! I’m a reptile!” but in reality crocodiles and a vast majority of other reptiles do very little when the thermometer drops and their blood runs cold — except maybe die. Not so for tuataras.
“Their biology is quite distinctive,” said Charles Daugherty of the Allan Wilson Center for Molecular Ecology and Evolution at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. “They have a unique type of hemoglobin, and their enzymes are set to function at lower temperatures than in most reptiles.” As a result, tuataras remain active at night, and in weather just a few degrees above freezing, said Dr. Daugherty, “at temperatures at which most reptiles couldn’t survive.”
Yes, tuataras are out and about, working the night shift, hunting down other New Zealand fauna similarly adapted for the cold. “They like to eat wetas,” said Stephanie S. Godfrey, a postdoctoral researcher at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who has studied parasite transmission among tuataras. “Walking through the forest at night, you can hear the tuataras eating — crunch, crunch, crunch.”
Mark Twain’s Autobiography Flying Off the Shelves
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: November 19, 2010
“Autobiography of Mark Twain,” a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir, they kept their expectations modest with a planned print run of 7,500 copies.
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
“Autobiography of Mark Twain” is a smash hit across the country.
Now it is a smash hit across the country, landing on best-seller lists and going back to press six times, for a total print run — so far — of 275,000. The publisher cannot print copies quickly enough, leaving some bookstores and online retailers stranded without copies just as the holiday shopping season begins.
“It sold right out,” said Kris Kleindienst, an owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, which first ordered 50 copies and has a dozen people on a waiting list. “You would think only completists and scholars would want a book like this. But there’s an enduring love affair with Mark Twain, especially around here. Anybody within a stone’s throw of the Mississippi River has a Twain attachment.”
Farther upriver, at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, Paul Ingram, the book buyer, said he initially ordered 10 copies, but they disappeared almost immediately.
“We are dearly hoping we’ll get more copies in a couple of weeks,” Mr. Ingram said. “I’m sure every bookseller in the world is saying, ‘I should have been sharper, I should have thought this one through more carefully.’ ”
Earlier this week, the book was out of stock at a handful of Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago, Boston and Austin, Tex. On Borders.com, it is back-ordered for at least two to four weeks. Some independent booksellers said they had been told, much to their despair, that they would not receive reorders until mid-December or even January.
“It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla. “In this age of instant books, why does it take so long to reprint it?”
Those who have been lining up to buy it seem to be a mix of Twain aficionados, history buffs and early Christmas shoppers who gravitate toward big, heavy classic biographies as gifts.
“It’s totally the Dad book of the year,” said Rebecca Fitting, an owner of the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “It’s that autobiography, biography, history category, a certain kind of guy gift book.”
Many booksellers said the memoir has a perfect holiday-gift quality: a widely adored author, a weighty feel, and a unique story behind its publication. (Twain ordered that the book be published a century after his death.)
Most of the content was dictated to Twain’s stenographer in the four years before he died, at 74 in 1910. It is more political than his previous works, by turns frank, funny, angry and full of recollections from his childhood, which deeply influenced books like “Huckleberry Finn.”
A younger generation of readers is discovering Twain for his political writings, Ms. Fitting said.
“He’s surprisingly relevant right now,” she added. “When you look at how much he wrote and the breadth of the subjects he wrote about, you know that if he were alive today, he would totally be a blogger.”
Steve Kettmann, an American writer living in Berlin, said that he tried to buy a copy during a visit to a Borders in Orlando, Fla., but was told that they were sold out and would not receive more copies for four to six weeks. (He went to another Borders nearby, found two copies, and bought them both.)
“I just think that there’s a feeling out there by a lot of people that Mark Twain is one of our greatest writers, and there’s something particularly American about his combination of wit and insight,” Mr. Kettmann said. “He was a wonderful showman. And he was cool, let’s face it. That’s part of it.”
Alex Dahne, a spokeswoman for the University of California Press, said the book was the biggest success the publisher has had in 60 years.
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