Tag Archive | paleontology
LabBook January 11, 2013
Genetic history lessons, a rockstar biologist and more in this week’s roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news.
LabBook October 5, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
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 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 […]
Linkage 4/15: TEDxUChicago, Chomsky Wrong?, Big Bangs
TED Comes to Campus This weekend, the students of the University of Chicago are putting together a local edition of the renowned TED conference called TEDxUChicago. The theme, “Reinventing the Life of the Mind,” nicely blends the goals of TED and the University, the idea-sharing mission of the conference sutured to the intellectual spirit of […]
“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 […]
