mtDNA & 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 & […]

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a very early tetrapod indeed

I’ve been fascinated by the story of early tetrapod evolution (where ‘tetrapod’ = an animal with 4 legs) for years, since reading Carl Zimmer’s wonderful book At the water’s edge (1998). Our understanding of when & where tetrapods evolved has been steadily extended by a series of fossil finds, most recently the ‘fishapod’ Tiktaalik. This was definitely […]

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a pregnant placoderm

 And what’s a placoderm, you ask? It’s an ancient armoured fish. The placoderms were a group of fish that were common during the Devonian (410 – 360 million years ago), but then became extinct. The reason for the title of this post? A group of Australian researchers (Long et al., 2008) have just reported on a placoderm fossil that contained embryos […]

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