The duckbilled platypus is such an odd-looking beast that, when the first specimen made it to Europe, it was widely regarded as a fraud. And you can’t exactly blame people for thinking that – they had never seen an animal anything like a platypus before. Now a study of the platypus genome, published earlier this […]
Continue readingCategory: genetics
tuskless elephants – natural selection & genetic drift
In an earlier post I mentioned that natural selection (hunting pressure) had the potential to increase the proportion of tusklessness in African elephants. But I also noted that this was probably not the full story! And in fact it turns out to be quite a complex tale.
Continue readingmtDNA & neandertal/sapiens relationships
When I was at high school, mumblety-mumble years ago, the accepted wisdom was that modern humans and Neandertals were sub-species in the same genus: Homo sapiens sapiens and H. sapiens neandertalensis. That changed, to the view that they were probably separate species, with analyses of new fossil finds. More recently, molecular biology techniques have enabled researchers to compare sapiens & […]
Continue readingpopulation genetics of A1 & A2 milk
This is an item I originally wrote for the Science on the Farm website. But because I briefly mentioned the A1/A2 milk thing in the last post, I thought I could usefully bring this across to the Bioblog as well. The 2006 Scholarship Biology paper included a question on the genetics of A1 and A2 […]
Continue readinghormones, s*x, & fidelity…
At Scicon, Bernard Beckett talked about getting people excited about science by telling stories about cool science stuff. One of his examples was how he told one of his classes about what makes voles monogamous or promisuous. Racy stuff! I remember reading about this some years ago in a book by US author Natalie Angier, […]
Continue readingmore from your inner fish
I’ve just finished reading Your inner fish (Shubin, 2008) – honestly, I can’t recommend it highly enough. But for anyone who hasn’t bought the book yet, let’s look at what another part of our anatomy – our ears – has to tell us about our evolutionary past.
Continue readinga smelly story
At the moment I’m reading Neil Shubin’s book Your inner fish. It’s a wonderful walk through the evolution of life, taking various aspects of our own biology & tracing their evolutionary history. Over lunch I was reading the chapter on the sense of smell, & some of the ideas there really excited me & I […]
Continue readingthe tasmanian tiger’s evolutionary affinities
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.
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 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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