Tag Archive | fossils
Where We Split From Sharks
Over 400 million years ago, fish went through an evolutionary divorce that would someday be very relevant to humans. The split produced the two major groups of fish we see in our world today: those with skeletons of bone, which make up the majority of aquatic life, and those with cartilaginous skeletons, which today include […]
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 […]
Vertebrate Evolution: Heads or Tails?
In the aftermath of a mass extinction, nature tends to get creative. Those lucky species that survive often explode with Seussian abandon into a diverse array of shapes, sizes, and behaviors, capitalizing upon the ecological opportunities left available by their less fortunate peers. Usually, the oddities produced by these “adaptive radiations” are whittled down by […]
A Face Only a Biologist Could Love
In evolutionary biology today, it’s the ugly guys who get famous. But that hasn’t always been the case. When paleontologists were assembling a library of prehistoric life in the 19th century, they wanted to find the fossils they could easily categorize. The freaks, the weirdos, and the oddities were less well received, square pegs that […]
Linkage 7/22: Smarter Dosing and Fossil Diaries
A large portion of medical research is dedicated to designing and testing new and better drugs for treating disease. But what if we could improve treatments with the drugs we already have – and potentially cut costs at the same time? That’s the proposal made in an editorial this week in the Journal of the […]
A Time Machine for Limb Evolution
It’s one of the most significant events in Earth’s history: the moment when a sea creature first stepped – or more likely wriggled – onto land. The momentous occasion 400 million years ago opened up a whole new habitat where life on Earth could evolve and spread out, and made that first bold pioneer and […]
Linkage 5/6: Shubin Honors, The Life Cycle of Drugs, & Bin Laden’s DNA
More Honors for Shubin In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed an order creating the National Academy of Sciences, an organization bringing together the country’s most esteemed scientists to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.” From the original 50 members, the group has blossomed […]
When the Predators are Away…
At the core of ecology is the perpetual battle between predators and their prey. The relationship typically works like a see-saw: when more predators come into an environment, the prey population drops, until the predators start going hungry and dying off, allowing the numbers of prey to rebound, and so on. Ecologists have observed these […]
The Ghosts of Yellowstone
Paleontologists often deal with time scales in the hundreds of millions of years, reading the messages of fossils to learn about life on Earth long before humans arrived on the scene. But bones aren’t limited to providing insight on prehistoric ecosystems. The skeletal fragments left behind by animals at their final resting place can be […]
Linkage 11/19: Snake Fangs & Chinese Bridges
Fangs You Very Much, Evolution Where did the snake get its fangs? It sounds like the lead-in to a Rudyard Kipling Just So stories, but it’s a legitimate evolutionary biology question about one of nature’s deadliest weapons, one that goes back 20 million years ago to the oldest snakes in the fossil record. But even […]
