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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environmental change and evolution
I was talking with a senior Bio teacher a few days back & she said it would be good if I could deconstruct some of the questions in 90717 (patterns of evolution), as this was an area where her students seemed to have difficulty. I’m not exactly going to do that here. But one of the […]
Continue readinginterference competition in wolves & coyotes
This post is based on an interesting paper that I’ve had in my blogging folder for a while now. The researchers (Berger & Gese, 2007) looked at the impact of interference competition between wolves and coyotes on the coyotes. The study was based in the Greater Yellowstone Ecological Area, & was possible because wolves were […]
Continue readinga 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 […]
Continue readinga 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 […]
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 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.)
Continue readingtooth wear & diet in paranthropus
There's been quite a lot of conjecture, over the years, about what our early ancestors ate. Much of the evidence has been indirect: size of teeth, size of chewing muscles (which can be estimated from measurements of the places where muscles attach to the skull), ridges & crests on the skull, & so on. Teeth […]
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