Life Sciences
laelaps | July 14, 2008
The type skull of Velociraptor mongoliensis. From Osborn, et al. 1924.
By the summer of 1993 Velociraptor had become a household name. Although Deinonychus had long been my fleet-footed favorite the olive-green "clever girls" of Speilberg's film soon outshone all of their relatives and gave Tyrannosaurus a run for it's money.* Velocriaptor is hardly a new dinosaur, however. It was discovered during the famous expeditions to Mongolia made by the AMNH in the 1920's, the team setting out to find the "birthplace" of all mammals and coming back with loads of new dinosaurs. Velociraptor…
clock | July 13, 2008Who Dares Sings, And Who Sings Wins: Bold Birds Get The Girl:
Humans often choose partners based on behavioural keys that are displayed during social interactions. The way we behave in different social contexts can reflect personality traits or temperament that may inspire long-term love. Behavioural norms that we perceive as sexually attractive are not culturally or evolutionarily arbitrary.
Disproving Conventional Wisdom On Diversity Of Marine Fossils And Extinction Rates:
It took a decade of painstaking study, the cooperation of hundreds of researchers, and a database of more than 200,000…
edyong | July 11, 2008
If you've never had the pleasure of swimming among a coral reef, you might want to get your chance sooner rather than later. Yesterday, the journal Science published the first comprehensive global assessment of the status of the world's reef-building corals, and it's results don't make for comforting reading. Almost a third of the 700-plus species surveyed face extinction; no group of land-living species, except possibly for the amphibians, are this threatened.
A team of 39 scientists led by Ken Carpenter, director of the Global Marine Species Assessment gauged the extinction risk faced by…
gregladen | July 10, 2008Wild game is good. More wild game and fewer cattle, in some habitats, would better. But when wild game is extracted en masse from a wild area (usually a rain forest, usually in Africa) and shipped to a city, or an enclave of logger's camps, or overseas to nostalgic African populations in Europe, it is no longer called wild game, or venison, or just food or meat.
It is called bushmeat, and bushmeat (in modern parlance) is bad.
Havalook:
Although illegal wildlife poaching is conducted worldwide, the impact in Africa has been devastating. Unsustainable commercial hunting for bushmeat will…
clock | July 10, 2008This is very cool - African Bushmeat Expedition is a project which takes high school students to Africa where they both learn the techniques and at the same time do something very useful - track the appearance of wild animal meat in the market:
Although illegal wildlife poaching is conducted worldwide, the impact in Africa has been devastating. Unsustainable commercial hunting for bushmeat will inevitably lead to species extinction. In turn, localized species extinction impacts the health of native ecosystems. Marketing of illegal bushmeat can also have serious ramifications because pathogens…
gregladen | July 9, 2008p>Welcome to the One Hundred and Ninth Edition of The Tangled Bank, the Weblog Carnival of Evolutionary Biology. This is the LOL edition of the Tangled Bank....
Carnival business ...
The main page for The Tangled Bank is here. The previous edition of The Tangled Bank was here, at Wheatdogg, and the next edition of the Tangled Bank will be here, at Blue Collar Scientist.
And now, on with the show. ...
In Small Things Considered...
Rational redesign of bacterial signaling proteins based on amino acid co-evolution at Chance and Necessity is a bit of Peer Reviewed Research Blogging…
gregladen | July 9, 2008Welcome to the One Hundred and Ninth Edition of The Tangled Bank, the Weblog Carnival of Evolutionary Biology. This is the LOL edition of the Tangled Bank....
Carnival business ...
The main page for The Tangled Bank is here. The previous edition of The Tangled Bank was here, at Wheatdogg, and the next edition of the Tangled Bank will be here, at Blue Collar Scientist.
And now, on with the show. ...
In Small Things Considered...
Rational redesign of bacterial signaling proteins based on amino acid co-evolution at Chance and Necessity is a bit of Peer Reviewed Research Blogging, covering an…
cortex | July 9, 2008I've got a profile of ecologist Jianguo Liu in the latest Conservation Magazine:
When the Wolong Nature Reserve was established in Southwestern China in 1975, it was hailed as a landmark achievement of the environmental movement. The reserve, which covers more than 200,000 hectares, contains more than 10 percent of the wild giant panda population and has received extensive financial and logistical support from both the Chinese government and numerous environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund. At first glance, the Wolong reserve would appear to be a model of a protected…
clock | July 8, 2008There are 57 new articles in PLoS ONE this week, and it is hard to choose which ones to highlight!
Superfast Vocal Muscles Control Song Production in Songbirds:
Birdsong is a widely used model for vocal learning and human speech, which exhibits high temporal and acoustic diversity. Rapid acoustic modulations are thought to arise from the vocal organ, the syrinx, by passive interactions between the two independent sound generators or intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of sound generating structures. Additionally, direct neuromuscular control could produce such rapid and precisely timed acoustic…
grrlscientist | July 7, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Canyon Towhee, Pipilo fuscus, in Chaco Canyon.
Image: Dave Rintoul, June 2008 [larger view].
News of Birds in Science
According to an article that was just published in the journal BioScience, penguin populations are declining sharply due to the combined effects of overfishing and pollution from offshore oil operations and shipping. Dee Boersma, professor of biology and the Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, reports that Patagonian (magellanic) penguins,…
sheril | July 7, 2008As I've written in the past, species are constantly blinking in and out of existence. This may or may not be of concern depending on your scale of interest. After all, extinction is the only real certainty.
Last month Andy Revkin asked, 'Does the world need leatherback turtles? '
Need, eh? Well, maybe he's posing the wrong question... We don't fully understand the ecological role of sea turtles, but we do know their numbers are a shadow of former abundance. Their loss is reflective of a growing global trend: the loss of ocean species through fishing down food webs and incidental bycatch…
grrlscientist | July 4, 2008I have lived with companion animals for my entire life. Cats, dogs, a variety of bird species ranging from finches to chickens, parrots and lories, tropical fish, goldfish and koi, hermit crabs, ants, stick insects, golden hamsters, dwarf hamsters, mice, rats, guinea pigs, bunnies .. and that's just the short list of animals who lived in my bedroom with me! So you would think that I am an expert at dealing with the death of a companion animal, but honestly, nothing could be farther from reality. I still have not gotten over the deaths of several of my pets (and cannot even say their names…
bioephemera | July 4, 2008
GONE
Isabella Kirkland, 2004
The sixty-three species painted in Gone have all become extinct since the mid-1800's and the colonization of the new world.
Isabella Kirkland's Taxa series are beautiful, intricate, large-scale indictments of humanity's destructive potential. Drawing stylistic cues from 17th and 18th century European still lifes, Kirkland's huge oil paintings depict species driven to extinction or near-extinction, introduced/invasive species, and illegally traded species.
GONE (detail)
Isabella Kirkland, 2004
Each of the paintings is accompanied by an outline key that…
tetrapodzoology | July 3, 2008
Time for more borhyaenoids. Finally, we get round to the taxa that you might have seen or read about in prehistoric animal books: the sabre-toothed thylacosmilids, the supposedly bear-like borhyaenids, and the gigantic and even more bear-like proborhyaenids. We previously looked at basal borhyaenoids here, and at the mostly scansorial, mustelid-like hathlyacinids and prothylacinids here. Here we go...
We begin with the borhyaenids (yes, borhyaenid borhyaenoids), a group of about ten genera of superficially dog- or thylacine-like borhyaenoids. The oldest (Nemolestes) is from the Early Eocene…
grrlscientist | July 3, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, endangered species, estimating extinction risk, demographic heterogeneity, demographic stochasticity, environmental stochasticity, Mechanistic stochastic models, Brett Melbourne
The endangered pelagic thresher shark, Alopias pelagicus.
More than half of the world's shark species are under the threat of extinction
due to overfishing by humans, especially for sharkfin soup.
Image: Kevin Markey, 2004 (Pacific Shark Research Center).
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released a report in 2007 indicating that more than 16,000 animal species…
clock | July 2, 2008Malagasy Chameleon Spends Most Of Its Short Life In An Egg:
There is a newly discovered life history among the 28,300 species of known tetrapods, or four-legged animals with backbones. A chameleon from arid southwestern Madagascar spends up to three-quarters of its life in an egg. Even more unusual, life after hatching is a mere 4 to 5 months. No other known four-legged animal has such a rapid growth rate and such a short life span.
Newcomer In Early Eurafrican Population?:
A complete mandible of Homo erectus was discovered at the Thomas I quarry in Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led…
clock | July 2, 2008There are 62 articles published this week in PLoS ONE. There are also two Journal Clubs going on right now - here and here. Here are some of my picks for the week - go read, rate, comment and send trackbacks:
A Comparison of Wood Density between Classical Cremonese and Modern Violins:
Classical violins created by Cremonese masters, such as Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu, have become the benchmark to which the sound of all violins are compared in terms of their abilities of expressiveness and projection. By general consensus, no luthier since that time has been able to…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate variation, climate change, penguins, El Nino, marine zoning, P. Dee Boersma
Adélie penguins, Pygoscelis adeliae, and chicks.
(a) Adélie penguin chicks may get covered in snow during storms, but beneath the snow their down is warm and dry. (b) When rain falls, downy Adélie chicks can get wet and, when soaked, can become hypothermic and die.
Images: P. Dee Boersma.
According to an article that was just published in the journal BioScience, penguin populations are declining sharply due to the combined effects of overfishing and pollution…
laelaps | July 1, 2008It is one thing to remember the date of an anniversary and quite another to truly recognize the significance of it. When it comes to Charles Darwin it seems that we have too much of the former and not enough of the latter, especially concerning what transpired 150 years ago today. Many are saying that today is the 150th birthday of natural selection, yet this is not really true. William Wells, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth all preceded both Darwin and A.R. Wallace in print, each scratching the surface of the idea of natural selection but either misconstuing it as a preservative mechanism…
tetrapodzoology | July 1, 2008
Distractions distractions distractions. Mayfly chameleons. Sea monster carcasses. Avian supertrees. Fake tiger photos. New pterosaurs. Frogs. But... must... complete... borhyaenoid... articles... For the intro, go here. Time now to crack on with hathlyacynids and prothylacinids. If you don't care, let me note that this is (to my knowledge) the biggest amount of information yet made available on these animals outside of the technical literature. Yes yes, I feel your love, thank you...
Hathlyacynidae is the biggest and longest-lived borhyaenoid clade, with members that range in age from Late…