The New York Times, January 11, 2005

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The Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson believes that he has solved a 487-year-old ecological mystery.

In 1518, a spectacular plague of ants devastated some of the earliest Spanish settlements in the New World on the island of Hispaniola. The Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas recorded how entire plantations were wiped out “as though fire had fallen from the sky and scorched them.” Despite the scale of the destruction, the identity of the plague ants has never been discovered.

Continue reading “Plague Ants, Plantains and Scorched Plantations” →

The New York Times, December 30, 2004

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Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case of evolution, the saying is apparently right.The notion that natural selection can create long-term trends toward large size first emerged about a century ago, but it fell out of favor in recent decades. Now researchers have taken a fresh look at the question with new methods, and some argue that these trends are real.

Biologists have recently found that in most animals and plants, bigger individuals are more successful at reproducing than smaller ones, whether they are finches, damselflies or jimsonweed.

Continue reading “In evolution, size does matter” →

The New York Times, December 28, 2004

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Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case of evolution, the saying is apparently right.

The notion that natural selection can create long-term trends toward large size first emerged about a century ago, but it fell out of favor in recent decades. Now researchers have taken a fresh look at the question with new methods, and some argue that these trends are real.

Biologists have recently found that in a vast majority of animals and plants, bigger individuals are more successful at reproducing than smaller ones, whether they are finches, damselflies or jimsonweed.

Continue reading “‘Bigger Is Better’ View of Evolution Gains Credence” →

The New York Times, December 7, 2004

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Scientists have used computer analysis to read evolution backward and reconstruct a large part of the genome of an 80-million-year-old mammal. This tiny shrewlike creature was the common ancestor of humans and other living mammals as diverse as horses, bats, tigers and whales.

Actual DNA molecules cannot survive such lengths of time. Mammal fossils from this period are extremely rare. But by tracking the course of mammalian evolution, scientists can pinpoint when a common ancestor existed and what, in general terms, it was like.

Continue reading “When Bats and Humans Were One and the Same” →

The New York Times, November 30, 2004

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Swallows are getting sexier.

Male barn swallows attract females with long tail feathers, and European researchers have observed that over the last 20 years those feathers have become much longer.

“We’ve demonstrated quite a dramatic change in a short period of time,” said Dr. Anders Pape Moller, an evolutionary biologist at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who conducted the research with Dr. Tibor Szep of the College of Nyiregyhaza in Hungary. The findings are to be published in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

Continue reading “Sexier Posterior Evolves Almost Overnight” →