In the early 1800s, a naturalist named Alexander Wilson was traveling in Kentucky when the sky suddenly became dark. Wilson believed, he later wrote, that it was “a tornado, about to overwhelm the house and everything round in destruction.”
When Wilson got his wits back, he realized the sun had been blotted out by passenger pigeons.
Last Friday, I was a guest on the radio show Science Friday with photographer Rachel Sussman. We talked about her new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World, for which I wrote the introduction. You can listen here. (And you can read my whole introduction to Sussman’s book here.)
I love writing about evolution’s great transitions–from water to land, from ground to air, and so on. For our species, one of the biggest of those transitions happened when our invertebrate ancestors became vertebrates–complete with our distinctive backbone, muscles, mouths, noses, and eyes. For fifteen years, I’ve been writing about this transition, and it’s been exciting to see more fossils come to light that help us understand how our inner fish got its start. For mynew “Matter” column in the New York Times, I take a look at one of the most interesting of these fossils–what one scientist has dubbed a benchmark for our understanding of the first vertebrates. It’s called Metaspriggina, and here’s a video of an animated reconstruction. Get the rest of the story here.
The New York Times, June 11, 2014
Half a billion years ago, a new study suggests, your ancestors may have looked like this:
This two-inch, 505-million-year-old creature belonged to the lineage that would later produce sharks, eels and other fish — along with birds, reptiles and mammals like us. This early vertebrate, known as Metaspriggina, was something of a mystery for years, known only from a pair of ambiguous fossils. But recently, scientists unearthed a trove of much more complete Metaspriggina fossils.
As they report today in the journal Nature, the new fossils offer a remarkably detailed understanding of the first vertebrates, helping scientists understand how major parts of our own anatomy — from eyes to jaws to our muscles — evolved.
Continue reading “A Long-Ago Ancestor: A Little Fish, With Jaws to Come”
Last month, I wrote in the New York Times about a creepy yet potent way to reverse aging. All you have to do is join an old mouse to a young mouse. As the young mouse’s blood flows through the old mouse’s body, it rejuvenates the heart, skeletal muscle, and even the brain.
When scientists saw just how dramatic this reversal could be, they started investigating how it happens. They suspected that it wasn’t blood as a whole that was responsible for the transformation. Blood is a finely blended consommé of cells and free-floating molecules. It was possible that only certain compounds in young blood are required to counter aging. That would be excellent if true, since it would put a damper on any vampire-like strategies for applying this discovery to people. All old people would need to do was take a pill containing the compounds that bring about the change.
Continue reading “The Secret Ingredient in Young Blood: Oxytocin?”