Posts tagged meeting
Community flood preparedness meeting set for Wednesday, May 25
May 20th
The meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the Boulder Public Library Auditorium at 1001 Arapahoe Ave.
Residents who live along Fourmile Creek, Fourmile Canyon Creek or Boulder Creek and all interested members of the community are encouraged to attend.
Boulder County and City of Boulder employees will present information about the impacts from the Fourmile Canyon Fire and the increased flood potential for properties below the burned area and in the city of Boulder. Individual preparedness and flood safety will also be discussed.
To learn more about flood preparedness and the Fourmile Canyon Fire recovery efforts, visit www.boulderfloodinfo.net and www.bouldercounty.org/fourmilefire.
For more information, contact Emergency Management Coordinator Merrie Leach (303-441-3647 / mleach@bouldercounty.org) or Fourmile Canyon Fire Recovery Manager Garry Sanfaçon (720-564-2642 / gsanfacon@bouldercounty.org).
Joint City Council and Planning Board public hearing for the 2010 Major Update to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan
May 20th
City Council and Planning Board will hold a joint public hearing to consider proposed policy, text and map changes to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan (BVCP) as part of the 2010 Major Update at 6:30 p.m. (or immediately following the Energy Roundtable) on Tuesday, May 24, in City Council Chambers.
The draft 2010 Major Update to the BVCP is available for review at www.bouldervalleycomplan.net.
After the public hearing, Planning Board will deliberate and take action on the BVCP. City Council will consider the adoption of the updated plan at its regular meeting on Tuesday, June 7. Adoption hearings with the Boulder County Planning Commission and Boulder County Commissioners will be held in July and August.
These adoption meetings are the culmination of more than a year’s worth of working with the community, advisory boards and City Council to revise and refine development priorities, standards and preservation for the Boulder Valley over the next five years.
The BVCP is a joint plan between the City of Boulder and Boulder County, providing shared land use decision‑making in the Boulder Valley. The plan sets a course for the future growth and development of the city and the lands just outside the city’s boundaries.
For more information about the 2010 Update to the BVCP, visit www.bouldervalleycompplan.net or contact Chris Meschuk at 303-441-4293 or meschukc@bouldercolorado.gov.
ANCIENT BIPEDAL HOMINID DUBBED ‘NUTCRACKER MAN’ PREFERRED GRASS TO NUTS, NEW STUDY FINDS
May 2nd
The hominid, known as Paranthropus boisei, ranged across the African landscape more than 1 million years ago and lived side-by-side with direct ancestors of humans, said University of Colorado Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, a study co-author. It was long assumed Paranthropus boisei favored nuts, seeds and hard fruit because of its huge jaws, powerful jaw muscles and the biggest and flattest molars of any known hominid in the anthropological record, he said.
In the last several years, research on the wear marks of teeth from Paranthropus boisei by other research teams has indicated it likely was eating items like soft fruit and grasses, said Sponheimer. That evidence, combined with the new study that measured the carbon isotopes embedded in fossil teeth to infer diet, indicates the rugged jaw and large, flat tooth structure may have been just the ticket for Paranthropus boisei to mow down and swallow huge amounts of grasses or sedges at a single sitting, he said.
“Frankly, we didn’t expect to find the primate equivalent of a cow dangling from a remote twig of our family tree,” said Sponheimer.
Published in the May 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was led by University of Utah Professor Thure Cerling. Other authors included Emma Mbua, Frances Kirera, Fredrick Manthi and Meave Leakey from the National Museums of Kenya, Fredrick Grine from Stony Brook University in New York and Kevin Uno from the University of Utah.
“Fortunately for us, the work of several research groups over the last several years has begun to soften prevailing notions of early hominid diets,” said Sponheimer. “If we had presented our new results at a scientific meeting 20 years ago, we would have been laughed out of the room.”
For the new study, the researchers removed tiny amounts of enamel from 22 Paranthropus boisei teeth collected in central and northern Kenya, each of which contained carbon isotopes absorbed from the types of food eaten during the lifetime of each individual. In tropical environments, virtually all trees and bushes — including fruits and leaves — use the so-called C3 photosynthetic pathway to convert sunlight into energy, while savannah grasses and some sedges use the C4 photosynthetic pathway.
The isotope analysis indicated Paranthropus boisei individuals were much bigger fans of C4 grasses and sedges than C3 trees, shrubs and bushes. The results indicated the collective diet of the 22 individuals averaged about 77 percent grasses and sedges for a period lasting at least 500,000 years, said Sponheimer.
The research team also compared the carbon isotope ratios of Paranthropus teeth with the teeth of other grazing mammals living at the same time and in the same area, including ancestral zebras, hippos, warthogs and pigs. The results indicated those mammals were eating primarily C4 grasses, virtually identical to Paranthropus boisei. “They were eating at the same table,” said Cerling.
Paranthropus was part of a line of close human relatives known as australopithecines that includes the famous 3-million-year-old Ethiopian fossil Lucy, seen by some as the matriarch of modern humans. Roughly 2.5 million years ago, the australopithecines are thought to have split into the genus Homo — which produced modern Homo sapiens — and the genus Paranthropus, that dead-ended, said Sponheimer.
“One key result is that this hominid had a diet fundamentally different from that of all living apes, and, by extension, favored very different environments,” he said. “And having a good idea of where these ancient creatures lived and what they ate helps us understand why some early hominids left descendants and others did not.”
The first skull of a Paranthropus boisei individual was discovered by co-author Meave Leakey’s in-laws, Mary and Louis Leaky, in 1959 in Tanzania.
In 2006, a team led by Sponheimer found that a cousin of Paranthropus boisei known as Paranthropus robustus had a far more diverse diet than once believed, clouding the notion that it was driven to extinction by its picky eating habits. Published in Science magazine, the study showed that Paranthropus robustus had a diverse diet ranging from fruits and nuts to sedges, grasses, seeds and perhaps even animals.
So what led to the end of the line for Paranthropus? It could well have been direct competition with Homo — which was becoming skilled in extensive bone and stone technology — or it could have been a variety of other issues, including a slower reproductive rate for Paranthropus than for Homo, he said.
The new study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the CU-Boulder Dean’s Fund for Excellence.
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