Organisms
pharyngula | May 18, 2007Sepia latimanus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | May 16, 2007Hey, you want some science? My latest Seed column on battling beetle balls is online.
(And I've just arrived in Ann Arbor after a long travel day!)
pharyngula | May 11, 2007
Seaducer sent me this photo, taken on a dive near Bonaire—the colors and shadows and the meaty, fleshy look of the beast give it a wonderfully baleful look.
pharyngula | May 9, 2007Here's something you don't see everyday: a bear kills a moose in someone's driveway, and then rips its heart out and eats it. Even better, Skemono has links to the video. It makes me glad I don't live in Alaska.
People should ask Skatje about the time she met a moose on a camping trip. She did not show up at our tent gnawing on a bloody heart, I guarantee you — but I haven't seen her move that fast since.
pharyngula | May 9, 2007I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the Encyclopedia of Life project. It's to be an online encyclopedia with a substantive page dedicated each species on the planet, and it's endorsed by E.O. Wilson, with sponsorship from some of the most prestigious museums around. It's a fantastic idea that would be incredibly useful.
But then …
The demonstration pages are beautiful, maybe too beautiful. There's the promise of a colossal amount of information in each one, although at this point all they've got are very pretty but nonfunctional images of what the page will look like — but you can see…
pharyngula | May 8, 2007My previous contributions to the basic concepts in science collection were on gastrulation and neurulation, so let's add the next stage, and the one I named the blog after: the pharyngula.
First, though, a few general remarks on developmental stages. In some ways, these are somewhat arbitrary: development is an ongoing process, a real continuum, and what we're doing is picking recognizable moments where we think we see real transitions and highlighting those as significant markers. They can be somewhat fuzzy, although in early development in particular, when the organism is simple, we can…
pharyngula | May 7, 2007This is the weirdest deep-sea video clip: a crinoid scuttling across the sea floor on its feeding appendages. These are supposed to be sessile creatures, a stalk with a flower-like fringe of many slender arms, but it's picked itself up and started crawling.
I swear, I'm going to check under my bed just in case they've ended up there. That's almost as improbable.
pharyngula | May 4, 2007Way back in the early 19th century, Geoffroy St. Hilaire argued for a radical idea, that vertebrates and most invertebrates were inverted copies of each other. Vertebrates have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral heart, while an insect has a ventral nerve cord and dorsal heart. Could it be that there was a common plan, and that one difference is simply that one is upside down relative to the other? It was an interesting idea, but it didn't hold up at the time; critics could just enumerate the multitude of differences observable between arthropods and vertebrates and drown out an apparent…
pharyngula | May 4, 2007planktonic octopus paralarva
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 27, 2007Amphitretus pelagicus
There are many more photos of adorable creatures of the deep sea at this site.
pharyngula | April 20, 2007Sepiadarium austrinum
By the way, did you know that creationists hate cephalopods because they can't stuff them in a sack and throw them in the water to drown? Also because they're cute and lovable and beautiful.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 19, 2007Brian O'Brien of Gustavus Adolphus College has sent along an important message for those of you who like big flowers that stink of rotting meat—they've got one.
In 1993 I obtained seeds of the plant Amorphophallus titanum (common names: Titan Arum; Corpse Flower) from Dr. James Symon, who had made a trip to Sumatra to collect seeds. The plant is considered to be endangered in the wild, and, at the time, was being dug up on a massive scale for use by a commercial concern for the manufacture of an exotic cosmetic formulation.
Amorphophallus titanum is one of the great wonders of the living…
pharyngula | April 17, 2007Kids underfoot? Are they pestering you for entertainment? Tell them to go look up dinosaurs in Dinobase, and to come back when they've got them all memorized. I remember as a kid it was easy to wow the grownups by memorizing a few dozen genera, but now … whoa. There's more minutia there than you'll find in packs of baseball cards, that's for sure.
pharyngula | April 13, 2007Octopus berrima
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 5, 2007A hagfish egg with a 14.3-mm pharyngula-stage embryo inside (arrows). Scale bar, 5 mm.
I've been looking forward to seeing these little jewels in print since I saw Kuratani talk about them at the SICB meetings in January. Hagfish are wonderfully slimy jawless chordates that have been difficult to raise in the lab—although if you poke a whale corpse rotting in the cold deeps you'll find them swarming everywhere. The Kuratani lab has managed to keep animals of the species Eptatretus burgeri alive and healthy in a lab aquarium maintained at cold temperatures (16°C), and has even had success in…
pharyngula | March 31, 2007NOVA is going to be showing a program on the cuttlefish Tuesday evening, 3 April — it's called Kings of Camouflage, and the website for it is also very well done, with nice illustrations of anatomy and behavior, and one excellent clip of color changes. I'm definitely going to tune in, check it out!
pharyngula | March 31, 2007I must disagree with Larry Moran, who accuses the field of evo-devo of animal chauvinism — not that it isn't more or less true that we do tend to focus on metazoans, but I disagree with an implication that this is a bad thing or that it is a barrier to respectability. Larry says we need to cover the other four kingdoms of life in greater breadth, which I agree is a fine idea. I would like to have a complete description of the genome of every species on earth, a thorough catalog of every epistatic interaction between those genes during development, a hundred labs working on each species, and a…
pharyngula | March 30, 2007Octopus mototi
In case you're baffled by the rather arty shot, here's another image:
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 29, 2007The mammalian tree is rooted deeply and branched early!
(click for larger image)All orders are labelled and major lineages are coloured as follows: black, Monotremata; orange, Marsupialia; blue, Afrotheria; yellow, Xenarthra; green, Laurasiatheria; and red, Euarchontoglires. Families that were reconstructed as non-monophyletic are represented multiple times and numbered accordingly. Branch lengths are proportional to time, with the K/T boundary indicated by a black, dashed circle. The scale indicates Myr.
That's the message of a new paper in Nature that compiled sequence data from 4,510…
pharyngula | March 28, 2007It's a b i g picture, slowly scrolling by, of a full-sized blue whale. Load it up and just let the whale swim past your window…it'll take a while.
(via inkycircus)