Organisms
pharyngula | March 10, 2006
Last year, a new and unusual species of rodent was discovered in Laos, called Laonastes aenigmamus, or kha-nyou. Here's the skull:
It's notable mainly because of that unusual jaw. It's hystricomorphous—an obscure term that refers to how the jaw is muscled, in this case with a large masseter muscle (the big chewing muscle you can feel towards the back of your cheek), which inserts into a large hollow or fossa in the jaw—and has a reduced coronoid process (one of the two 'prongs' of the jaw), and it's teeth are bilophodont, referring to a pattern of paired bumps on their surfaces (there are…
pharyngula | March 10, 2006Sepia officianalis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 9, 2006
Remember Snuppy, the cloned puppy? He's been living under a cloud for a while now, since one of his creators was Woo-Suk Hwang, the Korean scientist who was found to have faked data and exploited his workers, and there was concern that perhaps the dog cloning experiment was also tainted.
Put those fears to rest. Two groups of researchers have independently analyzed Snuppy and its putative clone parent, and both agree that it is most likely a clone. The nuclear markers between the two were identical, while mitochondrial markers were different—exactly what you'd expect in this kind of clone,…
pharyngula | March 7, 2006
…on a crustacean? Kiwa hirsuta is a new decapod crustacean discovered living near hydrothermal vents in the Pacific. It's eyeless as well as hairy.
I'm sure there's a dumb blonde joke in this somewhere, or since it was discovered by a French team, something about unshaven armpits. I wonder how low the comments are going to sink on this one; go ahead and vent and get it out of your system.
pharyngula | March 3, 2006Octopus sp.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 2, 2006
I've been savoring this lovely used book I picked up a little while ago, The Book of Spiders and Scorpions by Rod Preston-Mafham, and am appreciating more than the fact that it is full of beautiful photography of spiders and lots of general information on arachnid behavior and physiology; it's also true that spiders are awfully sexy beasts. They are playful and romantic and kinky and enthusiastic and ferocious and savage and exotic, and really know how to have a good time. I thought I'd share a few of the pretty pictures and details of the arachnid sex life with the readers of Pharyngula—so…
pharyngula | February 28, 2006
People are so cruel. I was busy all evening with this talk (which went well, I think), and lots of people flood my mailbox with news of the giant squid at the NHM.
You know I can look out my window and see everything covered in over a foot of snow. You know I'm about as far from any sea as you can get. And you know you can get me pining for abyssal pelagia with this kind of thing—you all must love to torment me. Could you at least send tickets to London with this kind of news?
Oh, well. It is a thing of beauty at any rate, and I will just have to worship it from afar.
pharyngula | February 28, 2006It's up: a taxonomically organized and prettily illustrated collection of posts about invertebrates. You know you must go read it.
pharyngula | February 27, 2006Bone is a sophisticated substance, much more than just a rock-like mineral in an interesting shape. It's a living tissue, invested with cells dedicated to continually remodeling the mineral matrix. That matrix is also an intricate material, threaded with fibers of a protein, type II collagen, that give it a much greater toughness—it's like fiberglass, a relatively brittle substance given resilience and strength with tough threads woven within it. Bone is also significantly linked to cartilage, both in development and evolution, with earlier forms having a cartilaginous skeleton that is…
pharyngula | February 24, 2006Moroteuthis robusta
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | February 23, 2006Say hello to Castorocauda lutrasimilis, a primitive mammalioform from the middle Jurassic—164 million years ago. Despite its great age, it has evidence of fur and guard hairs still preserved in the fossil, and was rather large for its time. It's estimated to have weighed about 500g (about a pound) and was over 400mm (over a foot) long in life, and as you can see from the reconstruction, shows signs of being aquatic. In size and lifestyle, it probably resembled the modern platypus.
Holotype of Castorocauda lutrasimilis [Jinzhou Museum of Paleontology (JZMP) 04-117]. (A) Photograph of the…
pharyngula | February 23, 2006The inaugural edition of the Carnival of the Animalcules is up. It's almost lunchtime, though, and you might want to wait until after you've eaten…especially before reading the one about fast-food toilet water.
pharyngula | February 22, 2006Ah, the life of the female giant Australian cuttlefish…males fight for her affections, and during the mating season she will have sex with 2-8 different males each day, with an average total of 17 copulations per day. She can be picky, too, and rejects most of the mating attempts (yet still manages to mate up to 40 times a day). It must be a good life.
Males have a rougher time of it, I would think. There are many more males than females, and so it's a struggle to get access to one; the bigger, stronger males will guard females, acting as a consort, and use aggressive displays to chase off…
pharyngula | February 22, 2006
My daughter is learning about evolution in high school right now, and the problem isn't with the instructor, who is fine, but her peers, who complain that they don't see the connections. She mentioned specifically yesterday that the teacher had shown a cladogram of the relationships between crocodilians, birds, and mammals, and that a number of students insisted that there was no similarity between a bird and an alligator.
I may have to send this news article to school with her: investigators have found that a mutation in chickens causes them to develop teeth—and the teeth resemble those of…
pharyngula | February 21, 2006Olduvai George shows how to illustrate evolution , with pictures of Eusthenopteron, Pachyaena, and a thylacine.
pharyngula | February 20, 2006As part of the ongoing migration to the new site, I've brought over some strangely popular articles: Tentacle sex, Tentacle sex, part deux, Squid nuptial dances, and Octopus sex. All across the world, people are wondering what the etiquette is if they should find themselves in a romantic situation with an amorous cephalopod, and it is my duty to provide the answers.
If only I'd thought of bringing these over last week, in time for Valentine's Day. I hope no one made any beastly gaffes because they couldn't find these articles in time…
pharyngula | February 20, 2006
I rather like this illustration I ran across in some reading. It's a bit risqué, and reminded me of some ukiyo-e…the kind of thing you don't usually expect to find in a biology journal.
This line drawing was made from a photograph of a male H. lunulata (shaded) copulating with a female. The arrow points to the male's hectocotylus, which is being inserted into the female's mantle cavity.
This site gets a lot of hits in searches for tentacle sex, and I'm going to distract a lot of slavering otaku once again by talking about the real thing. Not the fantasies of Hokusai,Teraoka, orSaeki (warning…
pharyngula | February 20, 2006
When male squid get together with their female friends, they have a couple of nuptial options: they can go ahead and use their charm to court the female, or they can just start poking her with tentacles full of sperm in mating frenzy. Now some of you guys might be thinking the latter option sounds good (what's the point of living the life of a squid if you can't be selfish and uninhibited, right?), while the ladies and gentlemen here might think the former is better. A study of the mating behavior of squid close-up and in the lab suggests that it's true: taking one's time and mating…
pharyngula | February 20, 2006
Yesterday's [21 November 2005] post about squid had a most unsatisfying conclusion, so I feel compelled to mention two things: squidblog has a brief explanation of squid jet propulsion, and I've dug up another older paper on squid movement. Even better, it's about squid nuptial dances and mating.
Here, see? Pretty squid post coitus planting a string of fertilized eggs on the sea floor.
Photo of a large male escorting a female squid (Loligo vulgaris reynaudii) as she attaches an "egg finger" of about 100 eggs to an egg bed.
This work was motivated by growing demand in the South African squid…
pharyngula | February 20, 2006
Doesn't everyone just love cephalopods? I find them to be a fascinating example of a body plan radically different from our own, the closest thing to a truly alien large metazoan on our planet. I try to keep my eyes open for new papers on cephalopod development, but unfortunately, they are rather difficult to study and data is sadly thin and tantalizing.
I just ran across a pair of papers by Jantzen and Havenhand (2003a, b) on squid mating. That's close enough to development for me!
First, let me explain a few general features of squid sex. Males produce elaborate spermatophores,…