Takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri) are one of the world’s most endangered birds. There are only around 120 still surviving in Fiordland, although a few more now live on predator-free islands off the New Zealand coast. (If you go to Tiritiri Matangi Island in the Hauraki Gulf you’ll be bound to see them.) But while the birds […]
Continue readingCategory: new science stories
the joys of essay-marking (no, seriously)
One of the benefits of reading (& marking) students’ essays is that you find a whole pile of new papers that are worth reading. (I expect them to go to the scientific literature for information & examples, and support for their ideas, & I will confess to getting just a leetle tetchy when they don’t….) […]
Continue readingfish fingers, anyone?
Fish with fingers, whales with legs – the sub-title of Carl Zimmer’s 1998 book on the evolution of amphibians & whales – seems even more apt with the announcement of a new fossil find: a fish whose pectoral fins contained bones homologous to tetrapod fingers (Boisvert et al. 2008).
Continue readingkiwi conservation & ancient DNA
I think I first woke up to the potential of ancient DNA (aDNA) research when I was part of the team developing the Evolution for Teaching website. My friend Dave Lambert, who was then with the Allan Wilson Centre at Massey (Albany) was working with aDNA to study microevolution in Adelie penguins in Antarctica, and […]
Continue readingapparent beneficial effect of Bt-cotton crops
Way back in 2004, the first of the ‘new’ Scholarship exams asked students to: Compare and contrast the ecological and evolutionary outcomes of releasing herbicide tolerant and insect resistant GM plants. It’s an interesting question. I suspect that a lot of the answers would have focused on the potential negative environmental effects of releasing these GM […]
Continue readingculture in chimpanzees
When Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees making tools, it became clear that here was yet another example of the continuum between humans and non-human primates. Use and manufacture of tools was not something that distinguished humans from their close relatives, & chimps could be said to have a form of culture. Now here’s a paper that […]
Continue readingthe ambiguity of pseudogenes
I said the other day that there’s always something new to learn, & I love that my job gives me lots of opportunities to do this. Here’s a case in point. In my second-year paper on evolution, I talk a little bit about pseudogenes. I’m not actually a geneticist & so for this part of […]
Continue readingblack robins & tomtit hybridisation
The black robin (Petroica traversi) is one of the world’s most endangered birds – there are only around 250 or so in existence. But it’s also one of the success stories of NZ’s conservation efforts – brought back from the brink of extinction. However, this has come at a genetic cost to these little black […]
Continue readinggenetic underpinnings of thumbs
I’ve just had a quick look at a paper on the likely role of genetic enhancers in the development of human thumbs. Not exactly rocket science has already done an excellent job of commenting on it, so this is really just a heads-up – go over there to read the whole thing. The paper reports on […]
Continue readingthe peculiar platypus
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 […]
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