African taxis take on Uber

“I WAS lucky my customers were three big white guys,” says Themba, an Uber driver in Johannesburg recounting a close call with taxi-drivers who tried to block him from collecting passengers at the airport that serves South Africa’s economic hub. “They pushed them out the way and we managed to drive off.”

The ride-hailing app has made a slow start in Africa yet it is fertile ground for a firm offering cheap and safe transport. Most passengers have to choose between overpriced cabs or the back of a motorcycle taxi.

In Abuja, locals use a low-tech version of ride-sharing. Many folks simply stick out a hand at the roadside to hail any passing car before negotiating a fare. Yet locals warn that fake taxis cruise the streets with robbers hiding in the trunk, ready to jump out at a traffic light. In Lagos, some taxi-drivers are even thought to be in cahoots with kidnappers. Not surprisingly, Uber seems to be growing quickly in the few cities where it has launched. In many places rides cost less than a quarter of the fare charged by taxis. And it is adapting to local markets too. In cities such as Nairobi, where few have credit cards, customers can choose to pay for rides using mobile money on their phones, or in cash.

However, the firm is also facing some potholes quite unlike the regulatory barriers erected elsewhere in the world (such as, in Paris and Frankfurt, rules that stop Uber from using unlicensed drivers). Instead of lobbying the government or going to the courts, taxi-drivers in some African cities have taken matters into their own hands.

At the airport and main railway stations in Johannesburg, cabbies crowd around commuters, looking intently at their smartphones before trying to manhandle those who seem to be getting into Uber cars. Shots have been fired in some of these clashes. In Cape Town and Nairobi, Uber cars have been torched and their drivers attacked. The firm has responded by hiring security guards to watch over the main flashpoints in Johannesburg and is testing a panic button that calls armed guards.

Uber also seems to be having some success in winning over taxi-drivers, mainly by signing them up. In Accra, many Uber drivers are also old-fashioned cabbies who have chosen to venture into online ride-hailing. Petrus, an Uber driver in Johannesburg, says he joined the firm three months ago after working for many years behind the wheel of a taxi. “Those who are remaining as taxi-drivers are losing hope,” he says. “Lots of their friends are joining Uber.” Having as many as possible in the drivers’ seats is certainly preferable to having them throwing stones from the side of the road.

from The Economist

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Rewriting the history of the dinosaurs

HOW the dinosaurs died out after ruling the planet for over 150m years was a mystery that consumed palaeontologists throughout much of the 20th century. These days it is mostly accepted that they were done in by the climatic after-effects of the impact of a giant asteroid, specifically the one that carved a vast crater 180km across near the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Now the focus has shifted from how they died out to where they came from in the first place. In a paper just published in Current Biology, a team led by Max Langer at the University of São Paulo reports the excavation of four fossils that shed some intriguing light on two different aspects of that question.

The fossils, found by Sergio Cabreira at the Lutheran University of Brazil, come from the Santa Maria formation in the south of the country. One of them, at 230m years in age, is one of the oldest dinosaur fossils ever found. Typically, such ancient finds are nothing more than bone fragments, but this specimen, named Buriolestes schultzi, is in remarkably good shape. It is a distant ancestor of the long-necked sauropods such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. Those giant animals, which stood up to 16 metres high and weighed 50 tonnes or more, were vegetarians.

B. schultzi seems to have been both diminutive—about 1.5 metres long—and carnivorous. Its teeth are curved and have serrated edges, traits usually associated with meat-eating. That finding raises as many questions as it answers: palaeontologists must now ponder when and why sauropods made the switch from eating meat to eating plants. Size probably had something to do with it: it is difficult to see how an animal the size of Brachiosaurus could have hunted enough prey to support its enormous bulk. But were B. schultzi’s descendants forced to become herbivorous as they grew? Or did they switch to a vegetable diet first, then take advantage of the opportunities for growth that offered?

The other fossils in the find address a different question. Palaeontologists have long thought that dinosaurs rose to dominance at the dawn of the Jurassic period, 201m years ago, by out-competing and rapidly replacing other land animals that emerged earlier. One such group was the lagerpetids, a group of reptiles with some dinosaurian characteristics that arose about 236m years ago, during the Triassic period.

Yet evidence has been mounting that suggests this argument is wrong. Several dinosaur and lagerpetid bone fragments have been found alongside one another in Triassic rocks, hinting that, instead of outcompeting the lagerpetids, the dinosaurs coexisted alongside them for millions of years. The Brazilian discovery builds on these fragmentary finds to deal the rapid replacement argument a fatal blow, by clearly revealing a lagerpetid living alongside a dinosaur more than 30m years before the start of the Jurassic. The worlds’ museums of natural history will have to update their displays.

From The Economist

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