Two of the most important stages in hominid evolution were the origin of the entire hominid branch some six to seven million years ago and the first movement of hominids out of their African birthplace. This week we now get a new look at both.
Category: Blog
I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before this guy gets a show on cable. Bryan Fry is a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and he spends a lot of his time doing this sort of thing–messing with animals you really really shouldn’t mess with. In addition to being telegenic, he rattles off those delicious Australian phrases, like, “No drama, mate.” (Translation: No problem.)
Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberance. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and grub daddies, cram grapes in her cheeks in imitation of the chipmunks, and ask again and again about where the birds spend Christmas. This is, of course, hog heaven for a geeky science-writer father like myself, but there is one subject that I hope she doesn’t ask me about: how the garden snails have babies. Because then I would have to explain about the love darts.
I’ll be a guest tonight at 7 PM EST on NPR’s talk show On Point, talking about the new wave of dinosaur science. Jack Horner will be on as well, delivering the dirt about his mind-blowing discovery of soft tissue from a T. rex. Should be interesting.
Today Gregor Mendel is a towering hero of biology, and yet during his own lifetime his ideas about heredity were greeted with deafening silence. In hindsight, it’s easy to blame his obscurity on his peers, and to say that they were simply unable to grasp his discoveries. But that’s not entirely true. Mendel got his ideas about heredity by experimenting on pea plants. If he crossed a plant with wrinkled peas with one with smooth peas, for example, the next generation produced only smooth peas. But when Mendel bred the hybrids, some of the following generation produced wrinkled peas again. Mendel argued that each parent must pass down factors to its offspring which didn’t merge with the factors from the other parent. For some reason, a plant only produced wrinkled peas if it inherited two wrinkle-factors.
Continue reading “Move Over, Mendel (But Don’t Move Too Far)”