Greg Laden's Blog

New Primate Fossil Informs Us of the Ape-Monkey Split During the Oligocene

Category: Organisms

Not exactly a missing link, but close. Too bad we ruined the term "missing link" just before this important fossil was reported!

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Posted by Greg Laden at 12:39 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Oystercatcher and the Clam

Category: Neurobiology

One of those really cool and useful "evolution stories" gets verified and illuminated by actual research. And blogging!...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 11:57 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Musings on the Aquatic Ape Theory

Category: Anthropology

A theory like this can evolve into a zombie that will eat the brains of science geeks, graduate students, and others, for decades

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:36 AM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Grasping the function of the human penis

Category: Evolutionary Biology

Gallup's work is written up an an all-too-sophomoric article which just falls short of explaining this important biological phenomenon in terms of a pair of headlights, a flashlight, and a little red wagon.

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Posted by Greg Laden at 7:45 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools

Category: Archaeology

Or not. Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 2:01 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Allen's Rule, Phenotypic Plasticity, and The Nature of Evolution

Allen's Rule. One of those things you learn in graduate school along with Bergmann's Rule and Cope's Rule. It is all about body size. Cope's Rule ... which is a rule of thumb and not an absolute ... says that over time the species in...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:21 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder

Homo floresiensis more widely known as the "Hobbit," may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans. A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the anatomy of H. floresiensis. To explore this we first have...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:40 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Aerosteon riocoloradensis: A Very Cool Dinosaur from Argentina

Fossils of a newly discovered species of dinosaur -- a 10-meter-long, elephant-weight predator -- were discovered in 1996 along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado, and are now being reported after a long period of careful study. This dinosaur dates to about 85 million years...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 5:32 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Effective Polygyny in Humans: Turns out it is for real

Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 3:25 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

In the Long Run, Exertion Regulation Wins the Day for Marathon Runners

How do athletes in Olympic level endurance competition do it?...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 11:46 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks