Sean Carroll in The Smithsonian Magazine talks about how the alternative color forms of some animals are providing new insights into how animals adapt and evolve:
One of the most widespread phenomena in the animal kingdom is the occurrence of darkly pigmented varieties within species. All sorts of moths, beetles, butterflies, snakes, lizards [...]
In today’s PNAS, The feeding biomechanics and dietary ecology of Australopithecus africanus:
The African Plio-Pleistocene hominins known as australopiths evolved a distinctive craniofacial morphology that traditionally has been viewed as a dietary adaptation for feeding on either small, hard objects or on large volumes of food. A historically influential interpretation of this morphology hypothesizes [...]
The NY Times has a nice article on phylogenetic tree visualisation. Yes, really:
For years now the researchers have sequenced DNA from thousands of species from jungles, tundras and museum drawers. They have used supercomputers to crunch the genetic data and have gleaned clues to how today’s diversity of baobobs, dandelions, mosses and [...]
The Bone Wars occurred during a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two [...]
