Tag: evolution
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PBS Eons: Did An Ancient Pathogen Reshape Our Cells?
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about the evolution of mammals and how we came to not have alpga-gal. There is one – and only one – group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and…
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PBS Eons: Why Does Caffeine Exist?
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the origins of caffeine and why it evolved. Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of flowering plants, again and again?
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Sharks are older than the dinosaurs. What’s the secret to their success?
Live Science has a shark story just in time for Shark Week. Yes, you read that correctly… sharks are much older than dinosaurs. Sharks evolved way back during the Ordovician Period, some 450 million years ago, while dinosaurs are relative youngsters at about 235 million years old. Sharks have made it though all the major…
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A Canine Companion So Nice It (Maybe) Evolved Twice
The New York Times has a story about man’s (and woman’s) best friend. For a long time, we’ve wondered “where did dogs come from?”. Now, after research that has looked at 72 ancient wolf genes, we might finally know. It seems that two different lineages of ancient wolves contributed to the DNA of modern dogs. …
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PBS Eons: Giant Viruses Blur the Line Between Alive and Not
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of giant viruses. In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what we thought we knew about the evolution of microbial life: giant viruses.
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PBS Eons: How to Build a Woolly Mammoth (But Should We?)
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about Woolly Mammoths. Could and should we bring them back… In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the blueprints for building them ourselves.
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PBS Eons: When Ants Domesticated Fungi
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about one of Earth's first farmers… ants! While we’ve been farming for around 10,000 to 12,000 years, the ancestors of ants have been doing it for around 60 million years. So when, and how, and why did ants start … farming?
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How the dinosaur extinction changed plant evolution
Phys.org has a story about plant evolution after the K-Pg mass extinction. Mass extinction always have irreversible effects on the evolution of life on Earth. The end Cretaceous extinction took out about 75% of species, including non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, and other countless others. The Plant Kingdom isn’t always discussed, but it suffered heavy losses,…
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PBS Eons: Why Sour May Be the Oldest Taste
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. It's about the evolution of sour taste. While sour taste's original purpose was to warn vertebrates of danger, in a few animal groups, including us, its role has reversed. The taste of danger became something it was dangerous for us to avoid.
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PBS Eons: How the Smallest Animal Got So Simple
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about mxyozoans, the simplest known animals. They are an example of how the process of evolution can produce some big (or small in this case) surprises.
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PBS Eons: Why We Only Have Ten Toes (It’s a Long Story)
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one discusses the evolution of vertebrate limbs, especially hands and feet. So, how did we get to fix fingers and toes? Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bones are hidden in their fins. Birds have four…
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164 million-year-old plant fossil is the oldest example of a flowering bud
LiveScience has a story about the oldest known example of a flower bud. Researchers in China have discovered a fossil flower bud from 164 million years ago. The new plant species, Florigerminis jurassica, was found in Inner Mongolia. The description was published in the journal Geological Society of London. There are two main types of…
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PBS Eons: Primates vs Snakes (An Evolutionary Arms Race)
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the “Snake Detection Hypothesis”. The Snake Detection Hypothesis proposes that the ability to quickly spot and avoid snakes is deeply embedded in primates, including us – an evolutionary consequence of the danger snakes have posed to us over millions of years.
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Roy Plotnick: I found a fossil!! (or did I?)
Roy Plotnick has a new post over on Medium. In this one, he gives some great tips for those occasions when you’re out on a walk and find a rock and hope it’s a fossil. You are walking along a creek bed when you see an oddly shaped and colored rock. You pick it up…
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PBS Eons: When It Was Too Hot for Leaves
There is a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about environmental change the evolution of early plants. Plants first made their way onto land at least 470 million years ago but for their first 80 million years, leaves as we know them today didn’t exist. What held them back?
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How did birds survive the dinosaur-killing asteroid?
Live Science has a story about the survival of the birds across the K-Pg boundary. A paper in the journal Science Advances looks at brain size of a fossil birds and theorizes that was a factor that helped them survive. When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago, it triggered a…
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Palaeocast Episode 130: Bats
Palaeocast podcast has a new episode. This one is about bats. After rodents, bats are the second largest group of mammals, representing a staggering 20% of all mammal species. They can be found all over the world, with the exception of cold climates, where they often play incredibly important ecological roles. Their ecologies (ways in…
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Strange Animals That Lived Before the Dinosaurs Reveal the Evolutionary Origin of Tusks
SciTechDaily has a story about animal tusks. Throughout history, many animals have sported tusks, from modern day elephants to the dicynodonts of the Permian. A new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B looks at the evolutionary history of tusks. A wide variety of animals have tusks, from elephants and walruses to five-pound, guinea pig-looking critters…
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PBS Eons: How Ancient Whales May Have Changed the Deep Ocean
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about how whales changed the ocean. It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning…
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Newfound ‘chief dragon’ dinosaur species was actually the size of a chicken
LiveScience has an article about a newly discovered “dragon”. This animal’s name, Pendraig milnerae, means “chief dragon”, but in reality it was about the size of a chicken. It lived about 215 million years ago during the late Triassic Period in what is now modern day Wales and is one of the oldest known dinosaurs…
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PBS Eons: When Mammals Only Went Out At Night
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons over on Youtube. This one is about mammal evolution and our adaptations for being active at night. For decades, scientists believed dinosaurs were diurnal and tiny mammals were nocturnal. But as researchers have uncovered more mammalian fossils and studied the biology of different dinosaur species, they’ve found…
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PBS Eons: How a Supervolcano Ignited an Evolutionary Debate
PBS Eons has a new episode about the eruption of the supervolcano Toba. About 74,000 years ago, ancient humans, in Africa, suffered an evolutionary bottleneck. It seems Toba erupted at around the same time, was it the cause? The research is not clear. The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5…
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ESCONI September 2021 General Meeting – September 10th, 2021 at 8:00 PM via Zoom – “Exploring evolutionary patterns and processes in trilobites”
The speaker at our September 10th general meeting will be Dr. Mark Webster from the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. The topic will be Cambrian trilobites. Here’s a link to his page at the university: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/people/mark-webster/ Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/89231990376?pwd=RUVPTHlwTWNPRTJnV0ovckZZdk1QUT09 Meeting ID: 892 3199 0376Passcode: 916465 One tap mobile+13126266799,,89231990376#,,,,*916465# US…
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PBS Eons: The Creature That Stumped Darwin
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about Toxodon and its evolutionary history. Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in isolation for millions of years. And its fossils would inspire a revolutionary thinker to tackle a bigger mystery than Toxodon itself:…
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PBS Eons: How the Starfish got its Arms
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about echinoderm evolution… how the starfish got its arms. The story of how the starfish got its arms reminds us that even animals that might be familiar to us today can have incredibly deep histories – ones that stretch back almost half…
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PBS Eons: The Traits That Spawned the Age of Mammals
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about early mammals… when and how did mammals arise? Lots of the traits we think of as defining us as mammals show up pretty early, during the time of the dinosaurs. And, in some cases, they show up a lot earlier and in things that…
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Wadi al-Hitan (Valley of the Whales)
Atlas Obscura has a post and podcast about the Valley of the Whales. The Valley of the Whales is a place in Egypt that is just overflowing with whale bones. Its discovery in 1902 provided valuable information about the evolution of the whales. Few sites in the world speak of an evolutionary tale as rich…
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This ancient beetle is the first new species discovered in fossilized poop
Sciencemag,com has a story about a new beetle species, Triamyxa coprolithica, discovered in a coprolite. The fossil dates to about 230 million years ago. Coprolites, which are fossilized dung, can be used to study what plants were eaten by herbivores back when the dung was deposited. Previously, fossilized bone and phytoliths, which are microscopic silica…
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Paleonursery offers rare, detailed glimpse at life 518 million years ago
Phys.org has a story about a newly discovered fossil Lagerstatte. A paper published in Nature details the new deposit, which is located near Kunming, China. It dates to the middle Cambrian about 518 million years ago, which is same age as the Chengjiang locality. For reference, the Burgess Shale dates to about 508 million years…
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Phys.org: When tyrannosaurs dominated, medium-sized predators disappeared
Phys.org has a story about tyrannosaurs… seems they didn’t share much. A new study published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences found that tyrannosaur juveniles out competed medium sized carnivores wherever their adults rose to dominance. The research conducted by Thomas Holtz, a principal lecturer in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology, verified…
