Like many people, I've always been interested in whales. My interest in whale evolution began when I was teaching about mammal evolution at Massey, and it really got off the ground when I read Carl Zimmer's excellent book, At the water's edge. Now there's a fossil that tells us even more about whales and their […]
Continue readingYear: 2007
evolution has shaped women’s spines! Really?
Last week the NZ Herald carried a story, based on a new scientific paper, about how evolution had affected the shape of women's spines, resulting in an adaptation for weight-bearing during pregnancy. The paper (Whitcome et al. 2007) describes how men & women differ in the shape of their lumbar vertebrae, and relates this to the weight gain […]
Continue readingindigobirds and evolution
I see the level 3 paper had a question on indigobird evolution. This is quite a neat example of rapid sympatric evolution in an animal (& one that I use in my own teaching here at Waikato), so I thought I might flesh it out a bit for you here.
Continue readingsummer slow-down
Just to let you all know – with the summer break coming up I'll probably drop down to just a couple of posts a week. And maybe even a few that aren't really on-topic – still biology/science but maybe on things that are a bit odd, peculiar, or downright strange. But normal service will resume […]
Continue readingfaces of our ancestors
I wish I'd found this page earlier – you might have found it interesting in preparing for your exams. It's a series of images pf reconstructed hominin faces, & a linking story about them. (There's actually a whole book about them – I bought myself a copy earlier this year & I'm enjoying dipping into […]
Continue readingbattle of the brains
A day or so ago people were talking in the tea-room about a clip on TV that showed chimpanzees beating humans hands-down on a test of memory. This piqued my curiosity, because I don't watch a lot of TV & hadn't seen the show. But today I found a link to it – have a look! I […]
Continue readingweird & wacky… science?
Now that things are (sort of) winding down for the year, I thought I'd share some gems of pseudoscience with you. This is an ongoing interest of mine & I'm hoping that you'll apply your critical filters to what follows (& I'd be interested in your comments, too!)
Continue readingwho’d be a cockroach?
Well, OK, they wouldn’t be my bug of first choice. But have a look at this video – would you wish this on a even a cockroach? I’ll admit, it does look pretty gross. As Stephen Jay Gould said (1983), I suspect that nothing evokes greater disgust in most of us than slow destruction […]
Continue readingThe ancient mariners
One of the 'themes' you need to think about, when studying human evolution, is dispersal – just how did human populations spread about the globe, and when did they do it? In September this year a group of scientists got to together to talk about how and when humans might have become seafarers.
Continue readingtree-hugging wolves?
The university has an e-subscription to the journal Science, so each week we get details of the latest issue via e-mail. I was scrolling through one of the July issues when an article's title caught my eye: Aspens return to Yellowstone, with help from some wolves. Really? I thought. What have wolves got to do […]
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