Ancient Wounds Reveal Triceratops Battles:
How did the dinosaur Triceratops use its three horns? A new study led by Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, located on the campus of The Webb Schools, shows that the headgear was not just for looks. Battle scars on the skulls of Triceratops preserve rare evidence of Cretaceous-era combat.
Birds Survived Mass Extinction That Wiped Out Dinosaurs Because Of Their Larger Brains:
The Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction 65 million years ago may have wiped out the dinosaurs, but those that survived - the ancestors of today's birds - may have done so because of their bird brains.
Natural Selection Not The Only Process That Drives Evolution?:
Why have some of our genes evolved rapidly? It is widely believed that Darwinian natural selection is responsible, but research led by a group at Uppsala University, suggests that a separate neutral (nonadaptive) process has made a significant contribution to human evolution.
White Eyed Birds Diversify Across A Hemispheric Range Faster Than Any Other Bird:
New molecular research shows that birds within the family Zosteropidae--named white eyes for the feathers that frame their eyes--form new species at a faster rate than any other known bird. Remarkably, unlike other rapid diversifications, which are generally confined in their geography, white eyes have managed to diversify across multiple continents and far-flung islands spanning much of the eastern hemisphere.
Pacific People Spread From Taiwan, Language Evolution Study Shows:
New research into language evolution suggests most Pacific populations originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Scientists at The University of Auckland have used sophisticated computer analyses on vocabulary from 400 Austronesian languages to uncover how the Pacific was settled.
Danube Delta Holds Answers To 'Noah's Flood' Debate:
Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions drown the shores of the Black Sea 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter? A geologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and two Romanian colleagues report in the January issue of Quaternary Science Reviews that, if the flood occurred at all, it was much smaller than previously proposed by other researchers.
New Tree Of Life Divides All Lower Metazoans From Higher Animals, Molecular Research Confirms:
A new and comprehensive analysis confirms that the evolutionary relationships among animals are not as simple as previously thought. The traditional idea that animal evolution has followed a trajectory from simple to complex--from sponge to chordate--meets a dramatic exception in the metazoan tree of life.
Butterflies Across Europe Face Crisis As Climate Change Looms:
Climate change will cause Europe to lose much of its biodiversity as projected by a comprehensive study on future butterfly distribution. The Climatic Risk Atlas of European Butterflies predicts northward shifts in potential distribution area of many European butterfly species.
Seabird's Ocean Lifestyle Revealed:
An important British seabird has been tracked for the first time using miniature positioning loggers. The results are giving a team led by Oxford University zoologists information that could help conserve wildlife around Britain's shores.
Rewrite The Textbooks: Transcription Is Bidirectional:
Genes that contain instructions for making proteins make up less than 2% of the human genome. Yet, for unknown reasons, most of our genome is transcribed into RNA. The same is true for many other organisms that are easier to study than humans. Researchers in the groups of Lars Steinmetz at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and Wolfgang Huber at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK, have now unravelled how yeast generates its transcripts and have come a step closer to understanding their function.
Emperor Penguins March Toward Extinction?:
Popularized by the 2005 movie "March of the Penguins," emperor penguins could be headed toward extinction in at least part of their range before the end of the century, according to a paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
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