Prehistoric sharks escaped mass extinction by diving deeper

 An artist's illustration of a falcatid shark, one of the three cladodontomorph shark species discovered. These species of sharks were smaller, had unique teeth, and often sported hook-like dangles above their head — unlike modern shark species.

The most severe extinction in the earth's history began 252 million years ago, wiping out 90 percent of ocean species and 70 percent of life on land. Modern sharks and their relatives were among the few that survived this "Great Dying," and new fossil finds hint as to how they may have clung on to life.

A paleontological dig site in southern France, containing sediment from a much younger Cretaceous ocean floor, now have yielded fossilized teeth of a tiny shark relative, indicating that the fish found refuge by swimming to deeper oceans.
ne of the tiny little cladodontomorph shark teeth (scale bar indicates 0.5 mm) discovered in 135 million-years-old rocks, whereas this shark group was thought to have gone extinct 120 million years earlier.

Guillaume Guinot
One of the tiny T-shaped teeth typical of cladodont sharks, less than a millimeter long, discovered in 135 million-years-old rocks.

The collection of millimeter-long teeth belong to three species of cladodontomorph sharks — not massive fish like we know them to be, but tiny, inch-long swimmers — relatives of modern sharks, skates and rays. They thrived in the Permian ocean prior to the extinction and researchers had thought they had perished in the Great Dying — until they were found in soil that was 135 million years fresh.

The tiny sharks, fleeing the acidic coastal waters of the end-Permian, moved to deeper oceans, and lived there for a hundred million years, Guillaume Guinot, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in Geneva, Switzerland, and his colleagues explain in the Tuesday issue of Nature Communications.

"It changes our view of how dramatic this extinction event was," Guinot told NBC News. The find suggests that there may be many more fishes living in deep ocean sediment deposits that haven’t been found yet, and that may indicate that the "extinction wasn’t that dramatic for cartilaginous fishes."

The new findings also allow for the possibility that modern sharks survived the die off in a similar way, by moving to deep open ocean that was perhaps less changed. "These are just ideas," he clarified, because there is no hard, ossified evidence that modern sharks also swam to deeper oceans and died (and fossilized) there.

 
Reposted from NBC News

By Kyle Stock

 

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Gore Verbinski and actors Saginaw Grant and Johnny Depp attend The World Premiere of Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer Films' 'The Lone Ranger' at Disney California Adventure Park

Here’s the recipe for making a summer blockbuster: Buy a proven franchise, lock down one of the most coveted release dates of the year, and spare no expense to get an A-list actor, producer, and director. Unfortunately for studio executives, that’s also the recipe for a flop, as the team behind Walt Disney’s (DIS)The Lone Ranger is realizing all too clearly this morning.

The highly anticipated film didn’t even take in $30 million in theaters this weekend, which is pretty low considering the spectacle’s $225 million budget—a sum no doubt inflated by Johnny Depp, star producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and award-winning director Gore Verbinski. It’s as if the Miami Heat spent lavishly on its three marquee athletes and failed to make the playoffs. Based on an 80-year-old radio series, the film failed to draw young viewers, didn’t impress critics, and may have a tough slog at theaters outside the U.S., given its Wild West setting.

“That’s particularly frustrating given the time, energy, and cost, and when it feels like you have the ingredients to succeed,” says Dave Hollis, executive vice president for sales and distribution at Disney.

In the weird accounting of the entertainment industry, the cost of making a film is marked as an asset. A big paycheck for a star such as Johnny Depp goes on the balance sheet right next to real estate holdings. When it looks like those investments won’t pay off, the company is forced to take a writedown, such as the $200 million lump Disney took on John Carter early last year.

Disney says it is too early—even “reckless”—to be discussing a writedown on The Lone Ranger, but it already has a pretty good idea of how much money it will lose (or gain) on the film. Based on how past films have performed, studios use early box office results to estimate each subsequent window of revenue: the rest of the film’s run in theatres, DVD, and video-on-demand sales, revenue from paid-TV outlets such as HBO, and finally cable and broadcast networks buying the rights to show the film.

Wall Street analysts, meanwhile, are doing the same thing. Lazard Capital’s Barton Crockett says Disney might take a $190 million writedown on the film. A Cowen & Co. analyst puts the loss at $150 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Bloomberg Industries analyst Paul Sweeney says Disney will know its final return on The Lone Ranger in the next couple of weeks, though he doesn’t think a writedown will be announced before the company’s next earnings release on Aug. 6.

So why does Disney take such big gambles on major motion pictures? Because the payoff can be enormous, and it can afford to take its chances. Studio entertainment made up just 13 percent of Disney revenue last quarter and less than 5 percent of its operating income. Most of Disney’s business these days comes from its TV properties, including an 80 percent stake in ESPN, followed by its parks and resorts.

If Disney’s studio executives green-light a massive hit such as its seminal Pirates of the Caribbean, they trigger a lucrative chain of sequels, toy sales, and amusement park rides. If they roll out a stinker like John Carter, the flop virtually disappears on financial statements.

Disney may write down more than $100 million on The Lone Ranger, but it still has almost $5 billion of film and TV costs listed as assets on its recent financial statements.

“It’s a hit or miss business,” Sweeney says. “One year you’re going to have Titanic, and the next year you’re not.”

 
Stock is an associate editor for Businessweek.com. 

Reposted from  http://www.businessweek.com/

Giving Mom’s Book Five Stars? Amazon May Cull Your Review

By DAVID STREITFELD

Harriet Klausner

Giving raves to family members is no longer acceptable. Neither is writers’ reviewing other writers. But showering five stars on a book you admittedly have not read is fine.

After several well-publicized cases involving writers buying or manipulating their reviews, Amazon is cracking down. Writers say thousands of reviews have been deleted from the shopping site in recent months.

Amazon has not said how many reviews it has killed, nor has it offered any public explanation. So its sweeping but hazy purge has generated an uproar about what it means to review in an era when everyone is an author and everyone is a reviewer.

Is a review merely a gesture of enthusiasm or should it be held to a higher standard? Should writers be allowed to pass judgment on peers the way they have always done offline or are they competitors whose reviews should be banned? Does a groundswell of raves for a new book mean anything if the author is soliciting the comments?

In a debate percolating on blogs and on Amazon itself, quite a few writers take a permissive view on these issues.

The mystery novelist J. A. Konrath, for example, does not see anything wrong with an author indulging in chicanery. “Customer buys book because of fake review = zero harm,” he wrote on his blog.

Some readers differ. An ad hoc group of purists has formed on Amazon to track its most prominent reviewer, Harriet Klausner, who has over 25,000 reviews. They do not see how she can read so much so fast or why her reviews are overwhelmingly — and, they say, misleadingly — exaltations.

“Everyone in this group will tell you that we’ve all been duped into buying books based on her reviews,” said Margie Brown, a retired city clerk from Arizona.

Once a populist gimmick, the reviews are vital to making sure a new product is not lost in the digital wilderness. Amazon has refined the reviewing process over the years, giving customers the opportunity to rate reviews and comment on them. It is layer after layer of possible criticism.

“A not-insubstantial chunk of their infrastructure is based on their reviews — and all of that depends on having reviews customers can trust,” said Edward W. Robertson, a science fiction novelist who has watched the debate closely.

Nowhere are reviews more crucial than with books, an industry in which Amazon captures nearly a third of every dollar spent. It values reviews more than other online booksellers like Apple or Barnes & Noble, featuring them prominently and using them to help decide which books to acquire for its own imprints by its relatively new publishing arm.

So writers have naturally been vying to get more, and better, notices. Several mystery writers, including R. J. Ellory, Stephen Leather and John Locke, have recently confessed to various forms of manipulation under the general category of “sock puppets,” or online identities used to deceive. That resulted in a widely circulated petition by a loose coalition of writers under the banner, “No Sock Puppets Here Please,” asking people to “vote for book reviews you can trust.”

In explaining its purge of reviews, Amazon has told some writers that “we do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors.” But writers say that rule is not applied consistently.

In some cases, the ax fell on those with a direct relationship with the author.

“My sister’s and best friend’s reviews were removed from my books,” the author M. E. Franco said in a blog comment. “They happen to be two of my biggest fans.” Another writer, Valerie X. Armstrong, said her son’s five-star review of her book, “The Survival of the Fattest,” was removed. He immediately tried to put it back “and it wouldn’t take,” she wrote.

In other cases, though, the relationship was more tenuous. Michelle Gagnon lost three reviews on her young adult novel “Don’t Turn Around.” She said she did not know two of the reviewers, while the third was a longtime fan of her work. “How does Amazon know we know each other?” she said. “That’s where I started to get creeped out.”

Mr. Robertson suggested that Amazon applied a broad brush. “I believe they caught a lot of shady reviews, but a lot of innocent ones were erased, too,” he said. He figures the deleted reviews number in the thousands, or perhaps even 10,000.
The explosion of reviews for “The 4-Hour Chef” by Timothy Ferriss shows how the system

Timothy Ferriss

has evolved from something spontaneous to a means of marketing and promotion. On Nov. 20, publication day, dozens of highly favorable reviews immediately sprouted. Other reviewers quickly criticized Mr. Ferriss, accusing him of buying supporters.

He laughed off those suggestions. “Not only would I never do that — it’s unethical — I simply don’t have to,” he wrote in an e-mail, saying he had sent several hundred review copies to fans and potential fans. “Does that stack the deck? Perhaps, but why send the book to someone who would hate it? That doesn’t help anyone: not the reader, nor the writer.”

As a demonstration of social media’s grip on reviewing, Mr. Ferriss used Twitter and Facebook to ask for a review. “Rallying my readers,” he called it. Within an hour, 61 had complied.

A few of his early reviews were written by people who admitted they had not read the book but were giving it five stars anyway because, well, they knew it would be terrific. “I am looking forward to reading this,” wrote a user posting under the name mhpics.

A spokesman for Amazon, which published “The 4-Hour Chef,” offered this sole comment for this article: “We do not require people to have experienced the product in order to review.”

The dispute over reviews is playing out in the discontent over Mrs. Klausner, an Amazon Hall of Fame reviewer for the last 11 years and undoubtedly one of the most prolific reviewers in literary history.

Mrs. Klausner published review No. 28,366, for “A Red Sun Also Rises” by Mark Hodder. Almost immediately, it had nine critical comments. The first accused it of being “riddled with errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation.” The rest were no more kind. The Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society had struck again.

Mrs. Klausner, a 60-year-old retired librarian who lives in Atlanta, has published an average of seven reviews a day for more than a decade. “To watch her in action is unbelievable,” said her husband, Stanley. “You see the pages turning.”

Mrs. Klausner, who says ailments keep her home and insomnia keeps her up, scoffs at her critics. “You ever read a Harlequin romance?” she said. “You can finish it in one hour. I’ve always been a speed reader.” She has a message for her naysayers: “Get a life. Read a book.”

More than 99.9 percent of Mrs. Klausner’s reviews are four or five stars. “If I can make it past the first 50 pages, that means I like it, and so I review it,” she said. But even Stanley said, “She’s soft, I won’t deny that.”

The campaign against Mrs. Klausner has pushed down her reviewer ratings, which in theory makes her less influential. But when everything is subject to review, the battle is never-ending.

Ragan Buckley, an aspiring novelist active in the campaign against Mrs. Klausner under the name “Sneaky Burrito,” is a little weary. “There are so many fake reviews that I’m often better off just walking into a physical store and picking an item off the shelf at random,” she said.

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photographs: Phil Skinner/Atlanta Journal Constitution, Drew Kelly for The New York Times