Last night I caught parts of Caveman (starring Ringo Starr & a dinosaur) while playing with the puppy – the daughter & her friend were watching it. Um, er, what can I say? …?? I liked the dinosaur, he had personality & panache 🙂 Anyway, Ringo & the other human cast members were scurrying around (in […]
Continue readingA couple of years ago now (before I got into this blogging thing, anyway) there was a brief flurry of media interest over a study that – according to various stories in the press – showed that the Maori population has a higher frequency of a ‘warrior gene’ & that this explained all sorts of […]
Continue readingI was in a schol bio tutorial the other day & one of the students asked a really intriguing question – one that I hadn’t really thought about before. Apparently the class had watched the series Walking with cavemen a few weeks ago, & at some point (she couldn’t remember which species it was) the narrator […]
Continue readingThe human appendix is often held up as an example of a vestigial organ – something that is much reduced in form from the homologous structure in other organisms (though not necessarily also non-functional). Darwin wrote a little bit about our appendix in The descent of man. Now it seems that a research team has done […]
Continue readingAs I was skimming the headlines at SciTechDaily just now, the headline CT scans of 300-million-year-old fossils provide a frightening 3D portrait caught my eye. What could they be talking about? Something with claws & sharp pointy teeth, perhaps? It turned out to be spiders. (Poor spiders, always getting a bad press.) Using computer-assisted tomography scans, scientists […]
Continue readingOne of the 2007 Scholarship exam questions sort of links to an earlier post I wrote, on xenotransplantation. It says Human disorders are increasingly being diagnosed and treated using biotechnological applications such as: • Genetic testing, including testing of adults through to pre-birth diagnosis (for example: pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD) of embryos, amniocentesis or chorionic […]
Continue readingI have to say, at the moment I’m feeling a bit like this chap: Mainly because we are currently ‘between’ registrars & so I don’t seem to have a life! But I shall press on – with a question from the 2006 paper on human evolution.
Continue readingand, from what Brian Switek says over at Laelaps, a whole lot more media hype. The new fossil is a 38-million-year-old primate from Asia, Ganlea megacania (the species name refers to the fact that it has enormous canine teeth). While the paper describing this fragmentary fossil (teeth & bits of jaw) describe it as a seed-eating monkey, […]
Continue readingThose of you who came to the WEB days a few weeks ago (WEB = Waikato Experience of Biology, for those who didn’t) might remember me saying that the human family tree is quite a complex thing. Not only is it a branching tree, rather than the linear model of early palaeoanthropologists, but our understanding of […]
Continue readingWhen you’re studying human evolution (AS 90719), one of the fossil hominins you’ll learn about is Homo erectus. These days this designation includes fossils that were placed in separate taxa, such as H. pekinensis ("Peking man") & "Java man" (named Pithecanthropus erectus by its discoverer, Eugene Dubois, but now recognised as the first H.erectus fossil to be described). The […]
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