Life Sciences
milhayser | February 27, 2010
On Laelaps, Brian Switek tells the story of a man who cooled off in an Ethiopian river against all advice, only to meet his death. Brian writes that "like our hominin forebears we can still be prey, and crocodiles are among the animals that have long considered us to be on the menu." Crocs were munching on our ancestors long before the pyramids rose along the Nile, and scientists have even named one ancient monstrosity Anthropophagus, the man-eater. Still, evidence for predation is slim, possibly because hominins who "fell prey to fully-grown crocodiles" were metabolized without a trace…
laelaps | February 27, 2010
Male (right) and female (left, with infant) friends in a population of Chacma baboons. (From Palombit, 2009).
Among other things, friends are people you count on to come to your aid when you need help. If you were at a bar and a stranger started acting aggressively towards you, for example, you would expect your friends to rush over to help you rather than just stand there, mojito in hand. Contrary to our feelings of human exceptionalism, however, ours is not the only species of primate to create and maintain friendships.
For years primatologists have been puzzling over "friendship" in…
grrlscientist | February 26, 2010tags: humane society of the united states, HSUS, H$U$, Feld Entertainment, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, animal rights, animal welfare, lawsuit, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO
In the United States on New Year's Eve, a judge dismissed a federal lawsuit filed by a consortium of animal rights groups including the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The lawsuit alleged that Feld Entertainment, the parent company of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, mistreated elephants in violation of the Endangered Species Act. Now the Circus…
razib | February 24, 2010The IGF1 small dog haplotype is derived from Middle Eastern gray wolves:
Background
A selective sweep containing the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) gene is associated with size variation in domestic dogs. Intron 2 of IGF1 contains a SINE element and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) found in all small dog breeds that is almost entirely absent from large breeds. In this study, we surveyed a large sample of grey wolf populations to better understand the ancestral pattern of variation at IGF1 with a particular focus on the distribution of the small dog haplotype and its relationship to…
clock | February 24, 2010There are 31 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
A New Horned Crocodile from the Plio-Pleistocene Hominid Sites at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania:
The fossil record reveals surprising crocodile diversity in the Neogene of Africa, but relationships with their…
oracknows | February 24, 2010Remember Dario Ringach?
He's the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but who could blame Dr. Ringach? He was afraid for his family. That's because it was more than just threatening e-mails and phone calls, but rather the campaign of intimidation included masked thugs banging on the windows of his house at night,…
laelaps | February 23, 2010
Way back in 2007, when I was still a neophyte science blogger, Rutgers University philosophy professor Jerry Fodor published an op-ed in the London Review of Books called "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings." It was a critique of a straw man version of evolutionary theory characterized by a brand of adaptationism so narrow that (if it were at all true) biologists could be charged with just making things up as they went along. But Fodor was not so much concerned with science as the extension of evolutionary ideas outside of biology. Motivated by his irritation with evolutionary psychology, a…
clock | February 23, 2010Being away at AAAS meeting also meant I did not have much time and opportunity until right now to check what's new in PLoS ONE yesterday and today. But I checked now, after coming back home. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
An Investigation into the Cognition Behind Spontaneous…
tetrapodzoology | February 22, 2010
Welcome to yet another article in the (outstandingly successful, yet recycled from ver 1) series on babirusas. Observant readers will have noticed that, strangely, I've refrained thus far from using a scientific binomial for babirusas, plus I've consistently (I think) referred to them in the plural, and not as a single species. What gives?
Well, the proverbial cat is already out of the bag, but the traditional taxonomy where all babirusas are referred to the single species Babyrousa babyrussa is now defunct and there are good reasons for recognising several species. Babirusa taxonomy was…
edyong | February 22, 2010An assortment of tree-living mammals
In The Descent of Man, Darwin talked about the benefits of life among the treetops, citing the "power of quickly climbing trees, so as to escape from enemies". Around 140 years later, these benefits have been confirmed by Milena Shattuck and Scott Williams from the University of Illinois.
By looking at 776 species of mammals, they have found that on average, tree-dwellers live longer than their similarly sized land-lubbing counterparts. Animals that spend only part of their time in trees have lifespans that either lie somewhere between the two extremes or…
laelaps | February 22, 2010
A restoration of the giant, durophagous shark Ptychodus, courtesy paleo-artist Matt Celeskey.
The study of prehistoric sharks is no easy task. Specialists in other branches of vertebrate paleontology at least have the reasonable hope of discovering complete skeletons of their subjects; except in instances of exceptional preservation the scientists who study sharks typically only have teeth and a few vertebrae to work with. Still, you can tell a lot about a shark by its teeth, and a new study published in Cretaceous Research suggests that one peculiar form was a shell-crushing giant.…
edyong | February 21, 2010Whiptail lizards are a fairly ordinary-looking bunch, but some species are among the strangest animals around. You might not be able to work out why at first glance, but looking at their genes soon reveals their secret - they're all female, every single one. A third of whiptails have done away with males completely, a trick that only a small minority of animals have accomplished without going extinct.
Some readers might rejoice at the prospect of a world without males but in general, this isn't good news for a species. Sex has tremendous benefits. Every fling shuffles the genes of the two…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
tetrapodzoology | February 20, 2010
The bipedal 'boxing' behaviour of babirusas is odd, but arguably odder is a unique sort of 'ploughing' behaviour they've recently been shown to practise. On being presented with an area of soft sand, captive babirusas (mostly males) have been noted to kneel down and push their head and chest forward through the sand, the result being a deep furrow. One obscure report from the 1970s suggests that Sulawesi people associated babirusas with the creation of straight-line furrows. Possible babirusa furrows were reported from south-eastern Sulawesi in 2002, but this behaviour has otherwise gone…
clock | February 19, 2010Yup, traveling, but still manged to take a quick look at what's new in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Novel Acoustic Technology for Studying Free-Ranging Shark Social Behaviour by Recording Individuals' Interactions:
Group behaviours are widespread among fish but…
terrasig | February 18, 2010Reuters and Bloomberg reported earlier this week on an ongoing patent battle (read: pissing match) between Pfizer and Eli Lilly & Co. relating to their erectile dysfunction drugs Viagra and Cialis, respectively.
A US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) appeals committee has ruled that an element of Pfizer's patent on sildenafil, the active chemical in Viagra, is invalid because the drug is insufficiently different from a traditional Chinese medicine called Yin Yang Huo or horny goat weed.
At issue is Pfizer's claim to a method for treating male erectile dysfunction. The patent appeals…
tetrapodzoology | February 18, 2010
In the previous articles we looked at the distribution and phylogenetic position of babirusas, and also at a bit of their behaviour, biology and morphology. While babirusas are famous for the bizarre upper canines that emerge from the dorsal surface of the snout in males, the function of these teeth remains uncertain. As we saw in the previous article, it's been proposed that they function in display, in fighting, or in helping the animal to push its way through dense vegetation. The latter idea is least likely and is unsupported by observations. The fighting idea might seem logical and…
laelaps | February 17, 2010
Detail of a Charles R. Knight mural depicting a family a mastodons.
Fossils often turn up in unexpected places. As people have dug swimming pools, tilled farms, blasted through mountains, and quarried the land for minerals traces of ancient life sometimes come to the surface, from isolated shark teeth to skeletons of our extinct hominin relatives. Even fossil graveyards are found this way every now and then, like the one found in a southern Pennsylvania quarry a little more than a century ago.
In late April 1907 William Jacob Holland, a paleontologist and director of Pittsburgh's Carnegie…
tetrapodzoology | February 17, 2010
Another article on babirusas - yaay! Like many (but not all) pigs, babirusas are omnivorous, and are said to eat invertebrates whenever they find them. They have also been reported to eat fish on occasion, to catch small mammals, and even to catch and eat the juveniles of other babirusas (Leus & Morgan 1995). They eat all kinds of plant material, including fruits, leaves, flowers, berries, nuts, bark and tubers, and they not only browse and dig to obtain such items, they are also surprisingly good at standing bipedally (without support) to feed on leaves. This again is a curious parallel…
clock | February 17, 2010There are 31 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do Not Support Systematic Sacrifice of Infants:
Two types of cemeteries occur at Punic Carthage and other Carthaginian settlements: one centrally situated housing the…