Several commenters checked out the 3-D video of the world’s oldest fossil brain I posted yesterday and were struck by just how tiny the 300-million-year-old fish’s brain was in comparison to its braincase. Their verdict: shrinkage. In the paleontological sense of the word, not the Seinfeldian one. After death, brains that do not simply disappear sometimes get smaller. In this particular fish, Sibyrhynchus denisoni the brain must have gotten a lot smaller. Check out this image, in which the braincase is in red, and the brain is in yellow. (The scale bar is 5 millimeters.)
Author: Matt Kristoffersen
Paleontologists don’t go looking for brains, and I’m not surprised. I once got to hold a fresh brain in my hands (it was at a medical school–nothing fishy, I promise), and I can vouch that they are marvelously delicate: a custard for thinking. When any vertebrate with a brain dies, be it human, turtle, or guppy, that fragile greasy clump of neurons is one of the first organs to vanish. Scientists must infer what ancient brains were like very often by examining the case that held it–that is, if they can find a relatively intact braincase.
Continue reading “The 300-Million-Year-Old Brain: Now In 3-D”
A few cool items to report this snowy day about Microcosm, my book about life, E. coli, and everything. Continue reading “Microcosm A Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize”
Wired, November 27, 2007
Some of the greatest moments in the history of biology slip from the world’s memory, their anniversaries hardly noticed among the wars, bankruptcies and celebrity detoxifications. But before this month passes, let us stop to remember one of those great moments that came 30 years ago, in November 1977: the death knell of the animal kingdom.
The animal kingdom’s decline came in the form of a three-page paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its lead author, Carl Woese, had spent the previous few years trying to find a way to figure out the relationship of all living things, including microbes. A taxonomist can classify a giraffe, a bat and a human as mammals simply by looking at them. They have hair, for example, and they nurse. But microbes are harder to make sense of. They might simply look like a rod or a sphere.
Continue reading “The Decline and Fall of the Animal Kingdom”
Best Life Magazine, September 22, 2007
If he hadn’t been savaged by a lion, Steven Austad might never have discovered the elasticity of aging. Just out of college, he became friends with a lion trainer who rented animals to movie studios. Soon he was in Hollywood, working with exotic felines. One morning, he was walking Orville, a 300-pound lion, when a duck darted out from some reeds. The 2-year-old lion pounced, and Austad disciplined the big cat with a slap on the head. Orville released the duck, but then pounced on Austad. He knocked Austad down and sunk his teeth into Austad’s knee. Austad didn’t struggle because he knew lions are possessive of their food and Orville might lunge for his neck next. So he waited…for 15 minutes…with the lion gnawing on his leg. Finally, another trainer spotted him and sprayed Orville with a fire extinguisher. Austad spent six days in the hospital and realized that he needed to find a safer, more rewarding way to work with animals. He became a biologist and traveled the world, ending up on the remote savannas of Venezuela, studying a less frisky animal, the opossum. Continue reading “Could He Live to 2150?”