Tag Archive | developmental biology
The Eel-Like Fish With a Human-Like Spine
By Rob Mitchum Us land animals like to think we’re so special. For instance, our spines are typically organized into five regions — cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral, and caudal — each with their own distinct vertebral anatomy. Because aquatic species often have much simpler spinal morphology, usually split into mere body and tail segments, paleontologists […]
“Graduate Students Can Change Everything”
The unsung heroes of scientific research are the graduate students*. Graduate students provide the enthusiasm to run experiments 7 days a week and all hours of the day and night to generate data for publications and their own thesis projects. The fresh perspective a graduate student brings to an area of research can also provide […]
The Tools We Share With Sharks
Billions of years of evolution has produced an incredible diversity of life – “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful,” as Darwin famously put it. But a fascinating thing about evolution is it has produced such a wide variety of species with a relatively small amount of tools. Many of the roughly 23,000 human genes can […]
The Kids Are Alright: New Genes Can Be Essential
When it comes to genes, evolutionary biologists have traditionally favored seniority. Genes thought to be most essential to life must be ancient and conserved, the assumption goes, handed down from species to species as the basic instructions of life. That sharing is evident in early developmental stages, which 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel observed to be […]
