Organisms
pharyngula | November 13, 2006
Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week's issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I'm late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn't just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin…
pharyngula | November 10, 2006Abraliopsis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | November 9, 2006Synergy! Ooblog leads me to a spectacular painting of carnotaurs mating (did they always get a flight of pterosaurs at the climax?), and then by way of The Two Percent Company, I found this enlightening poster of mammals mating (hey, how many of the first 20 have you done?)…with the unfortunate consequence of death by STD. Put two and two together, and what conclusion do we arrive at?
Dinosaurs didn't use condoms.
pharyngula | November 9, 2006So stop rubbing it in. Here's an article about the superiority of the bird visual system: it doesn't just have better acuity, it can process information faster. We're adapted to a sedate stroll, they're adapted to high speed aerobatics…and guess which one of us is crazy enough to pilot multi-ton vehicles at frightening speeds?
pharyngula | November 7, 2006Maybe with a little butter and garlic.
This article makes a troubling point: if cephalopods are so smart, shouldn't we feel some guilt about eating them?
I think I actually agree with some of the ethical issues raised, and probably should hesitate to kill and eat something like the octopus. However, it also commits the sin of lumping an extraordinarily diverse clade like the Cephalopoda into one poorly characterized gemisch. Yes, the Pacific octopus is a very clever beastie, but those schools of small, fast-breeding squid that get netted and chopped up for calamari? Not so much. The article…
pharyngula | November 5, 2006Now this is cool:
Just as sometimes humans are born with little tails, it seems that a few bottlenosed dolphins are born with vestiges of hindlimbs. The genetic toolbox for making limbs is all there, and sometimes it can get re-expressed, revealing these fascinating atavisms.
pharyngula | November 4, 2006
This odd marine worm, Xenoturbella bocki, is in the news right now, and I had to look it up in Pechenik's Biology of the Invertebrates(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) to remind myself of what it was. Here's the complete entry:
Xenoturbella bocki
This marine worm, first described in 1949 as an acoel flatworm and later claimed as either an early metazoan offshoot or a primitive deuterostome, has recently been affiliated with primitive bivalve molluscs, based upon a study of gamete development (oogenesis) and an analysis of sequence data from both 18S rRNA and mitochondrial genes. Little is known about…
pharyngula | November 3, 2006Argonauta nodosa hatchling
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | October 29, 2006Reconstruction of Priscomyzon in dorsal (top) and left lateral (bottom) views. b, Macropthalmia stage of Lampetra showing anterior location of orbit and smaller oral disc, both positioned in front of the branchial region. The total length of the specimen is 116 mm. Drawings in a and b are scaled to show equivalent head lengths: from anterior limit of the oral disc to rear of the branchial region. Horizontal bars indicate the anterior–posterior span of the oral disc in each species.
The life of a parasite must be a good one, and often successful; the creature at the top of the drawing above is…
pharyngula | October 29, 2006
Strange things are found in the sea, like this mysterious gelatinous blob bobbing about in the Norwegian fjords.
On Oct. 1 Rudolf and his brother Erling were diving when he spotted the unusual object.
"It was 50-70 centimeters (19.5-27.5 inches) in diameter and looked like a huge beach ball. It was transparent but had a kind of thick, red cord in the middle. It was a bit science-fiction," Svensen told newspaper Bergens Tidende's web site.
It's something cool: a large squid egg sac. Mmmmm…two-foot diameter ball of squid eggs.
pharyngula | October 25, 2006It's too bad avian faces are so expressionless, because you have to wonder what these two birds were thinking.
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 23, 2006Physiologists have been studying the activity of shrimp on a treadmill—the movie is charming, especially if you like an excess of whirling limbs.
You can tell it's not a Bally's ad by the absence of lycra and proudly outthrust breasts.
pharyngula | October 20, 2006Argonauta nodosa
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
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 | October 15, 2006How could I forget the big lady at the Natural History Museum? We also got to meet Archy.
Cute, isn't she? She was also impressive in person—that's one big squid.
pharyngula | October 13, 2006Amphitretus pelagicus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.