The (sadly extinct) Tasmanian Tiger and living wolves provide an excellent example of convergent evolution. They have the same ecological niche, with the Tiger filling the role of a top predator in Australia, while wolves are found throughout the northern hemisphere. But the Tiger is a marsupial, while wolves are placental mammals.
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scientists are wrong (a lot)
I've been following a developing discussion about what characterises scientists (and what happens when some of them go to the 'dark side' of pseudoscience…) and I've just found a posting on Respectful Insolence that I want to share with you. (Follow this link to read the whole thing. And many thanks to Orac for writing it.) […]
Continue readingdarwin’s tomatoes & the evolution of novel features
I was talking about evolution with some students the other day and one of them said, 'But to get new features in an organism you have to have new genes, and mutation can't do that." We talked a bit about transposons and other means of gene duplication, & I also pointed out that changes in […]
Continue readingone very big frog
This is an item that's been in my 'how cool is that?' folder for a while – a very large dinosaur-eating frog!
Continue readingthe thylacine – back from the dead?
Not quite (although that's implied in some of the rather breathless reporting of an extraordinary paper that was published on-line this month). Nevertheless, the real story describes a striking achievement: the cloning of DNA from the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
Continue readingleonardo’s life
Another in the occasional series of 'what I'm reading'. This time it's a modern biography of Leonardo da Vinci: The Science of Leonardo, by Fritjof Capra (2007). It's a beautiful book, from the cover, to the sepia-toned type, to the writing itself. And the author does a beautiful job of making 'the great genius of […]
Continue readingWhy Scholarship is hard work
I'm a bit pressed for time at the moment & thought I'd re-post this one – although it probably reiterates what your teachers have already told you about doing lots of reading around the subject! You've probably found by now that preparing for Scholarship exams involves (among other things) an awful lot of reading. I was reading an […]
Continue readingmissing fingers & pixie dust
There was an article in the Herald last week (I think) which set my pseudoscience detector ringing… it had a title something like "Pixie dust helps man regrow finger". The article itself gushed on about how this guy had lost part of his finger to a bit of sharp-edged machinery, but the missing bit – […]
Continue readingfrom my reading list
I mentioned my reading list in the last post – so this time round I'll let you in on what excites me about one of the books I'm reading at the moment. (I tend to have several on the go at once, so I can dip into whatever matches with what I'm thinking about at […]
Continue readingrapid evolutionary change in lizards
This is another wonderful paper – the result of what may be a unique translocation experiment involving Italian wall lizards (Podarcis sicula: Herrel et al., 2008). (I do read other stuff – I might tell you about some of that next time.)
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