Author: Lori Jia
The New York Times, November 22, 2005
Which came first, the snake or the venom?
Bryan Fry, a biologist at the University of Melbourne who has spent the last few years reconstructing the evolutionary history of snake venom, decided to find out.
He had already isolated genes for toxins in cobras, rattlesnakes and other deadly species. And he had discovered related genes in harmless species like garter snakes.
The New York Times, November 8, 2005
In a laboratory at Indiana State University, a dozen green iguanas sprawl tranquilly in terrariums. They while away the hours basking under their heat lamps, and at night they close both eyes — or sometimes just one. They lead comfortable lives pretty much indistinguishable from any ordinary pet iguana, except for one notable exception: the bundles of brain-wave recording wires that trail from their heads.
A team of scientists at Indiana State would like to know what happens in the brains of the iguanas when the lights go out. Do they sleep as we do? Do they shut the whole brain down, for example, or can they keep one half awake?
Discover, October 31, 2005
Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley has been at the frontier of paleoanthropology since the 1970s, when he helped discover fossils of Australopithecus afarensis, a species that includes the famous “Lucy” skeleton. Since then he has focused his efforts on a small region of central Ethiopia, where he discovered a variety of fossils, from 5.5-million-year-old hominids to some of the earliest members of our own species, dating back 160,000 years.
Discover, October 31, 2005
In the past, most of the big news about human evolution came from remote dig sites in places like Africa or Indonesia. In the future, the big news will come from familiar sites closer to home: hospitals. That’s because hospitals are equipped with powerful new scanning machines primarily used to identify tumors, ballooning blood vessels, bone fractures, and a wide range of disorders in people. Those same scanners also make it possible for paleoanthropologists to look inside the fossils of ancient hominids and see things that until now have been shrouded in mystery.
The New York Times, October 11, 2005
Penguins are some of the most improbable animals on the planet. They have wings and feathers but cannot fly. They are not fish, but they have been recorded as deep as 1,755 feet underwater. And the most improbable is the emperor penguin, which waddles across 70 miles of Antarctic ice to reach its breeding grounds. New research on penguin DNA suggests that the emperor also has the most ancient lineage of living penguins.
Scientists have long recognized a link from penguins to petrels and albatrosses. While albatrosses have more conventional bird bodies, they share subtle traits with penguins, like the arrangement of beak bones. They are generally considered the closest living relatives of penguins.
Continue reading “DNA Studies Suggest Emperor Is Most Ancient of Penguins”