Greetings–
No stomach flu, no head cold. Just a case of playing hooky on a pleasant Friday. Without further ado, here’s Friday’s Late Elk:
I’ve been rather obsessed with how life came on land for my whole career. In my first book, At the Water’s Edge, I delved into the remarkable history of research into this question. I’ve tried to keep up with new studies on this great transition in the years since the book came out.
In the book, I wrote about the apparent oddity of vertebrates walking on land. There are many fish in the sea, and yet only once does it seem that they successfully moved ashore with an anatomy for walking. Mudskippers crutch along the edge of the sea, and frogfish bounce slowly along the ocean floor. But it didn’t seem as if anything quite evolved walking on land like our ancestors did.
Now, in one of those weird surprises that biology delivers with wonderful regularity, scientists have found a fish that really walks. It has even evolved a skeleton much like ours in the process. Making it an even more wonderful story is the fact that this fish lives only in a cave in Thailand, where it walks up waterfalls. Check it out.
(GIF from Flammang et al.,Scientific Reports. Open Access)
As promised last week, here’s the podcast of my conversation with Vincent Racaniello and his team at This Week in Virology.
Here’s a photo from the Strand Bookstore in New York, where I spoke with historian Daniel Kevles in front of a great crowd about CRISPR and human engineering. I’m told the conversation will be going online. I’ll send a link when one becomes available.
June 17: Austin, Texas. Public Lecture for the Stephen Jay Gould Award. Details here
June 23-25: Durham North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Here’s the meeting site.
June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, “Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA.” Details here.
July 31: Keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published March 26, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.