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 […]
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black 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 […]
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 readingenvironmental 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 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.
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