A 161 million-year-old Mongolian fossil not only reveals a new species of salamanders, but also provides proof that much of the evolution of salamanders occurred in Asia.

For more than three years, scientists from the University of Chicago and Peking University in Beijing have been collecting thousands of salamander fossils, many of which preserve the entire skeleton and impressions of soft tissues, from seven excavation sites in Mongolia and China. Prior to the discovery in 1996 of the Chinese sites, scientists had complete salamander fossils dating back only to the Tertiary period, which began 65 million years ago.

"It's remarkable to have the earliest-known salamanders with so much diversity, so many specimens and such high-quality preservation," said Neil Shubin, Ph.D., professor and chairman of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and lead author in the study. "Usually when you find the earliest-known animal, you only have one representative. But we have thousands. It's a real opportunity to look at how salamanders have evolved."

To date, the scientists have discovered five new species of salamanders from the Asian sites--one of which, Chunerpeton tianyiensis, is described in the March 27, 2003, issue of the journal Nature. According to the paper, the newly found species closely resembles the North American hellbender, a common salamander currently found in Asia, as well as in the Allegheny Mountains near Pittsburgh, Penn.

According to Shubin, the presence of Chunerpeton (a member of the Cryptobranchae family) in the Middle Jurassic period of China implies that the split between the two oldest families – hynobiids and cryptobranchids – occurred in Asia. "The new cryptobranchid shows extraordinary morphological similarity to its living relatives," noted the study authors. "Indeed, extant cryptobranchid salamanders can be regarded as living fossils whose structures have remained little changed for more than 160 million years."

"What this tells us," Shubin said, "is that the major families of salamanders are probably relatively ancient. The distribution of the families today is a relic of what happened in the distant past. The diversity of species in this find, combined with molecular data and study of characteristics from living salamanders, leads to the inescapable conclusion that almost all the major groups of salamanders evolved very early," he said, "And not much has happened since." Excerpted from a story by Catherine Gianaro, Medical Center Public Affairs

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A study led by Mark Ratain, M.D., Professor in the Department of Medicine and Chairman of the Committee on Clinical Pharmacology, showed that the presence of specific gene alterations can help doctors predict which colorectal cancer patients are likely to experience severe side effects from the new chemotherapy drug irinotecan.

Olaf Schneewind, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Chairman of the Committee on Microbiology, and colleagues discovered how Staphylococcus aureus, a common cause of life-threatening infections, manages to acquire iron from its host's red blood cells, a critical step in causing disease. The results appeared in the 7 February 2003 issue of Science.

Elliot Gershon, M.D., Foundations Fund Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, and colleagues are the first to implicate a gene complex ?| found on the long arm of chromosome 13 ?| to increased susceptibility to development of bipolar disorder, a disease that affects 2 million American adults. The results appeared in the May 2003 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

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