Originally published October 26, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Author: Lori Jia
Angela write: “As an Archaeologist, I wanted my first tattoo to be something related to culture. The Ouroborus is an ancient symbol of a serpent biting its tail and has been a part of a number of cultures and beliefs including (but not limited to!) Egyptian, Greek (who “borrowed” it from the Phoenicians and gave it the name “ouroborus” meaning “tail-eater”), Norse, Chinese, Aztec, Hindu, and various Native American Indian mythologies. The snake in my tattoo is a custom piece by my tattooist, but the writing is straight from the earliest-known drawing of the Ouroborus in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra drawn around 1600BC.
Last month I wrote in the New York Times about Spore, a highly anticipated game that let you follow life from microbe to intergalactic civilization. I had a couple evolutionary biologists play around with it to get their reaction, and contact a couple others who had had a chance to play the game. They gave it positive–though decidely mixed–marks. In today’s issue of Science, John Bohanon describes the reactions of a number of other biologists, and they really don’t like it at all. Here’s what Ryan Gregory has to say:
In recent years, dinosaurs have gotten awfully cute. They’re no longer Victorian lumps of saggy muscle. A lot of them are not even frightening. They’re fuzzy, feathery little critters. But, as I’ve written before, cuteness is not what drives paleontologists to hunt for these fossils and spend years poring over them in laboratories.
Today brings another case in point. Chinese paleontologists published a report in Nature about a new fossil they’ve named Epidexipteryx hui. The fossil comes from rocks that are somewhere between 152 and 168 million years old. Much of its skeleton was preserved on a slab, along with impressions on the surface of its body that the scientists conclude were feathers.