colugo
bleimanb | February 6, 2008Scientists in Malaysia have strapped high-tech backpacks onto flying lemurs, humans' closest cousins, to help understand the aerodynamics of how these nifty little creatures glide through the air. The flying lemurs aren't actually lemurs, so from now on we're going to refer to them by their mother's maiden name, colugos. The scientists also didn't "strap" the backpacks on the colugos, they attached them with adhesive, so from now on we're going to say that they were "glued" on.
Domo Arigato, Mr. Colugo
The backpacks use an accelerometer and a memory chip to track the colugos' movements in 3-…
laelaps | November 3, 2007
Today's photo is of a Lesser Tree Shrew (Tupaia minor), sitting still for a split second allowing me to get a somewhat blurry shot. I wasn't initially thinking of putting this one up today, but I thought it would be a topical choice given a new study in Scienceout this week that suggests Colugos (Family Cynocephalidae) may be more closely related to primates than Tree Shrews (Order Scandentia). Using partial genomic data from both groups (plus primates), the research team found that the colugos were more closely related to primates than the tree shrews, although we have yet to see if this…
bleimanb | November 1, 2007We, the Brothers Bleiman, have speculated for years that humans' closest relative outside of the primate group is the colugo or flying lemur. Turns out we were right!
What up, cuz?
Two scientists, one from Penn State the other from Texas A&M, have recently proven that...
...the colugo group is the closest cousin to the primate group. They did this by comparing indels (major reorganizations of genetic sequences) in over 30 different groups of mammals to the indels of humans. Turns out we share 7 indels with colugos, the most of any other group! Of course the colugos, those cheating…