fossils
pharyngula | October 26, 2006The remains of Lucy, the famous fossil australopithecine, are going to be touring the US for the next few years. Start lining up. It's opening in Houston.
The six-year tour will also go to Washington, New York, Denver and Chicago. Officials said six other U.S. cities may be on the tour. But they would not release the names, saying all the details had not yet been ironed out.
Minneapolis, maybe? I hope? Otherwise I'm going to have to make a trip to Chicago.
No word yet on whether the Answers in Genesis museum near Cincinnati will be bidding on the exhibit.
pharyngula | October 24, 2006
There is a treasure trove in China: the well-preserved phosphatized embryos of the Doushantuo formation, a sampling of the developmental events in ancient metazoans between 551 and 635 million years ago. These are splendid specimens that give us a peek at some awesomely fragile organisms, and modern technology helps by giving us new tools, like x-ray computed tomography (CT), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thin-section petrography, synchrotron X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM), and computer-aided visualization, that allow us to dig into the fine detail inside these delicate…
pharyngula | October 19, 2006Here's another tetrapodomorph fish to consternate the creationists. These Devonian/Carboniferous animals just keep popping up to fill in the gaps in the evolutionary history of the tetrapod transition to the land—the last one was Tiktaalik.
Skull in lateral view.
This lovely beastie is more fish than frog, as you can tell—it was a marine fish, 384-380 million years old, from Australia, and it was beautifully preserved. Gogonasus is not a new species, but the extraction and analysis of a new specimen has caused its position in the evolutionary tree to be reevaluated.
Here's a little more…
pharyngula | September 30, 2006Nick Matzke hascompiled all the data on hominin cranial capacities into a single chart:
I think I can see a pattern there, can you? He also has data on body size and brain size over there, take a gander at it. It looks like a simple and obvious example of evolutionary change in our lineage, I think.
Alas, it only shows specimens older than 10,000 years. I'm sure that right around 6,000 years ago, there was a sudden, dramatic change as the deity injected a soul into those crania.
pharyngula | September 21, 2006First I reported that Palaeos was lost, and then that it might be found, but now it looks like we can safely say it is being reborn. The old version of Palaeos has been at least partially restored, but the really important news is that a Palaeos wiki has been set up and people are working on reassembling old content and creating new information in a much more flexible format. If you've got some phylogenetic or palaeontological expertise, you might want to consider joining the Palaeos team and helping out with this big project.
pharyngula | September 20, 2006Say hello to Selam, or DIK-1-1, a new and very well preserved member of the family discovered in Dikika, Ethiopia. She belongs to the species Australopithicus afarensis and is being called Lucy's little sister.
She was only a toddler when she died about 3.3 million years ago, and from the teeth the authors estimate that she was about 3 years old. Most of the skeleton is intact, but doesn't seem to have yet been fully extracted from the matrix.
Some of the surprises: the hyoid bone is chimpanzee-like, and implies chimp-like vocalization abilities. She had a long way to go before she could…
pharyngula | September 15, 2006This has been a bountiful week at Chez Pharyngula, and I have received generous gifts from several readers. A full accounting lies below the fold.
Why, yes. Yes, I do.
Readers from Winnipeg visited the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre and reported on what they found there…and they sent me a t-shirt! The sentiment is perfect, and I know you're all jealous now. Hmmm. Winnipeg isn't that far from Morris, and I know lots of the faculty here make trips up that way (especially for the folk festival). Now I've got a few more reasons to pay a visit, even if it is the Bible Belt of Canada. Has anyone…
pharyngula | September 14, 2006He went to the Walcott Quarry for his vacation. And he waved his photos under my nose.
pharyngula | September 9, 2006I got this email from Alan Kazlev, one of the main fellows working on the Palaeos website (a very useful paleontological resource), which I had previously reported as going offline. Plans are afoot to bring it back, and the answer seems to be to wikify it and build it anew, with a more distributed set of contributors. How Web 2.0! I've included the full email below the fold if you'd like more details.
Hi everyone
For those who don't know me, I was the co-author of Palaeos, until I got
caught up in other projects that consumed all my time. Toby
White of course continued to work on the site (…
pharyngula | August 17, 2006Palaeos is gone! There is a brief note about being unable to support it any longer, and then poof, it's offline. Martin Brazeau has a comment on it's value; you can still see fragments of this great resource in google's cache, but even that will fade too soon.
This is troubling, and it's one of the worrisome aspects of using the net—there's no sense of permanence. It would be good if someone were to step forward and at least archive all of the pages, but the essential feature of the Palaeos site was that it was continually maintained and updated to reflect current information, and that's not…
pharyngula | August 16, 2006
Next time you're cutting up a fresh bird, try looking for the lungs. They're about where you'd expect them to be, but they're nestled up dorsally against the ribs and vertebrae, and they're surprisingly small. If you think about it, the the thorax of a bird is a fairly rigid box, with that large sternal keel up front and short ribs—it's a wonder that they are able to get enough air from those tiny organs with relatively little capability for expanding and contracting the chest.
How they do it is an amazing story. Birds have a radically effective respiratory system that works rather…
pharyngula | August 16, 2006Zimmer has a summary of the latest discoveries in the evolution of the baleen whales. It's beautiful stuff, with the lineage showing their origin from toothed whales, through a phase where they had both teeth and baleen, to their current condition lacking teeth and having only baleen.
pharyngula | August 10, 2006
Phosphatized pre-Cambrian embryos are cool. It's amazing that they've been preserved at all, and they are spectacularly gorgeous. We can learn about the evolution of development from their superficial appearance, but what we really want to do is poke around their interiors and analyze them cell by cell, something that has been hard to do without destroying them in the process. Until now.
A report in Nature (and a too short mention on a researcher's web page) describes the application of synchrotron X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM) to these fossilized embryos to resolve their internal…
pharyngula | August 1, 2006You may recall that Martin Brazeau was going to spend July doing fieldwork—well, he's back, and is going to be telling us about his exciting month in a Canadian cow pasture, if ever you wanted to hear a first-hand account of paleontological research.
pharyngula | July 26, 2006Yunnanozoans and Xidazoon…there are some very pretty early Cambrian critters on display at Sinanthropus.
pharyngula | July 12, 2006(click for larger image)
A new report in this week's Nature clears up a mystery about an enigmatic fossil from the Cambrian. This small creature has been pegged as everything from a chordate to a polychaete, but a detailed analysis has determined that it has a key feature, a radula, that places it firmly in the molluscan lineage. It was a kind of small Cambrian slug that crawled over matted sheets of algae and bacteria, scraping away a meal.
Here it is, a most unprepossessing creature. It was small (less than a 5 inches long), a flattened oval with few striking features, with a small mouth…
pharyngula | July 4, 2006Here I am, in the upper midwest, and I still haven't made it to the Field Museum in Chicago—Chicago is just far enough away that I can't quite make the trip, and it's close enough that it doesn't sound at all exotic. I just have to rely on other people's accounts. (I've also noticed that Megatherium is a spectacular specimen.)
pharyngula | July 3, 2006Lindsay makes a factual error: Minnesota does not have a state fossil. We had a bill introduced almost 20 years ago to make Castoroides ohioensis, a 6-foot long, 250 pound giant beaver, our state fossil…but some people objected to the fact that it's named after Ohio, and I suspect there might have been some concern about the beaver jokes.
We do have a list of potential nominees. I'm rooting for Endoceras proteiforme, myself—a giant nautiloid would be perfect!
pharyngula | June 23, 2006Two short articles in this week's Science link the orb-weaving spiders back to a common ancestor in the Early Cretaceous, with both physical and molecular evidence. What we have is a 110-million-year-old piece of amber that preserves a piece of an orb web and some captured prey, and a new comparative study of spider silk proteins that ties together the two orb-weaving lineages, the Araneoidea and the Deinopoidea, and dates their last common ancestor to 136 million years ago.
Araneoids and Deinopoids build similar looking webs—a radial frame supporting a sticky spiral—but they differ in how…