Organisms
pharyngula | April 17, 2009Octopus vulgaris
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 16, 2009This sad chimpanzee at the Mysore Zoo has lost all of his hair. He looks rather Caucasian, I think…
pharyngula | April 13, 2009
My first column in the Guardian science blog will be coming out soon, and it's about a recent discovery that I found very exciting…but that some people may find strange and uninteresting. It's all about the identification of nodal in snails.
Why should we care? Well, nodal is a rather important — it's a gene involved in the specification of left/right asymmetry in us chordates. You're internally asymmetric in some important ways, with, for instance, a heart that is larger on the left than on the right. This is essential for robust physiological function — you'd be dead if you were…
pharyngula | April 10, 2009Abralia veranyi
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 3, 2009Vampyroteuthis infernalis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 2, 2009An aquarium was having a problem with their coral reef and fish disappearing overnight. It wasn't the cephalopod! They dismantled the reef rock and discovered a 4-foot long polychaete worm.
They've given the beast its own tank now. Good thing — I'd pay to go see that.
pharyngula | April 2, 2009
The history of venoms is a wonderful example of an evolutionary process. We're all familiar with the idea of venomous snakes, but the cool thing is that when we examine exactly what it is they're injecting into their prey, it's a collection of proteins that show a nested hierarchy of descent. Ancient reptiles had a small and nasty set of poisons they would use, and to improve their efficacy, more and more have been added to the cocktail; so some lizards produce venomous proteins, while the really dangerous members of the Serpentes produce those same proteins, plus a large array of others.…
pharyngula | April 1, 2009
A fish is a fish, right? They're just a blur of aquatic beasties that most people distinguish by flavor, rather than morphology or descent. But fish are incredibly diverse, far more diverse than terrestrial vertebrates, and there are significant divisions within the group. Most people know of one big distinction, between the Chondrichthyes (fish with cartilaginous skeletons, like sharks and rays) and the Osteichthyes (fish with bony skeletons), but there's another particularly interesting split within the Osteichthyes: the distinction between Sarcopterygians (the word means "fleshy fins",…
pharyngula | March 27, 2009Sepia peterseni
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 24, 2009And I like that. More snail porn was sent my way; this one I can't blithely throw up on the page because, in addition to an extravagantly naked snail, it also has an unclothed mammal…and for some reason, some people freak out over exposed mammalian skin. So warning, warning, warning, nsfw, grow up a little bit, etc., etc., etc. Don't get too hot and bothered over the spectacular and lovely mollusc, either.
pharyngula | March 23, 2009…and suddenly people everywhere are sending you images from their snail and slug porn collections. You are all just plain weird.
pharyngula | March 23, 2009Mary thought we needed more affectionate slugs around here.
(from Margaret Morgan)
pharyngula | March 20, 2009Euprymna tasmanica
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 20, 2009I think you want to read Carl Zimmer's post on bat flight — it has lots of lovely slo-mo videos that show just how amazingly agile bats are.
pharyngula | March 20, 2009I'm not going to say much about this since Ed Yong has an excellent write-up, but a new feathered dinosaur has been discovered, called Tianyulong. As you can see in this image of the fossil, it was bristling with a fuzz of thin fibers — proto-feathers.
(Click for larger image)a, Main slab of the holotype (STMN 26-3). b, Broken slab. The scale bar in b refers also to a. c, Close-up of skull and mandible. d, Interpretive drawing of skull and mandible. e, Close-up of dentition. Abbreviations: a, angular; aof, antorbital fossa; ca, caudal vertebrae; cv, cervical vertebrae; d, dentary; dv, dorsal…
pharyngula | March 18, 2009
Several new and spectacular cephalopod fossils from 95 million years ago have been found in Lebanon. "Spectacular" is not hyperbole — these specimens have wonderfully well-preserved soft parts, mineralized in fine-grained calcium phosphate, and you can see…well, take a look.
(Click for larger image)Keuppia levante sp. nov. from the Upper Cenomanian (Metoicoceras geslinianum Zone) of Hâdjoula (Lebanon). A,
holotype, MSNM i26320a. B, sketch of the holotype.
The arms (all eight of them) are intact, right down to the suckers; muscles and gills are preserved; the animal has an ink sac; there is a…