We’re just about to start our hangout about the coelacanth. Details are here.
If you’d like to ask a question, go to the event page and post it there.
Originally published April 25, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
National Geographic, April 23, 2013
On July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only to watch it become extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex. The bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was a large, handsome creature, reaching up to 220 pounds and sporting long, gently curved horns. For thousands of years it lived high in the Pyrenees, the mountain range that divides France from Spain, where it clambered along cliffs, nibbling on leaves and stems and enduring harsh winters.
It used to be that many people who studied animal behavior thought dogs were too weird to bother with. We had bred them far away from the “natural” state of animals, so their brain had little insight to offer us.
That’s changed a lot in in the past couple decades. We have transformed wolves into some cognitively remarkable creatures, it turns out, and the diversity of breeds we’ve produced can serve as an unplanned experiment in the genetics of social behavior.
Of course, one of the biggest rules in all science is the more data the better. Which in this case means the more dogs that scientists can study, the more they may be able to discover about them.
All of which is introduction to an article I’ve written in today’s New York Times about a new push to gather Big Data about dogs–and to provide some insights from that data to dog-owners themselves. Check it out!
Originally published April 23, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, April 22, 2013
In 1995, Brian Hare began to wonder what his dog Oreo was thinking.
At the time, he was a sophomore at Emory University, where he was studying animal psychology with Michael Tomasello. Dr. Tomasello was comparing the social intelligence of humans and other animals.
Humans, it was known at the time, are exquisitely sensitive to signals from other humans. We use that information to solve problems that we might struggle to figure out on our own.
If you want to know something about how our ancestors came out of the ocean and onto land, there are just two sorts of fish you should get to know really well. One is the lungfish, our closest aquatic relatives, and the other is the coelacanth, our next-closest. Trout, goldfish, salmon–they are all just distant ray-finned cousins. Lungfish and coelacanths, by contrast, have much in common with us, including a few of the bones that would give rise to our legs and arms. And coelacanths are especially fascinating because until the 1930s, scientists believed that they had gone extinct 65 million years ago. Now they turn out to live off the coasts of both Africa and Indonesia.
Which is why I hope you’ll join me Thursday at 11 am ET to participate in a Google Hangout with a panel of scientists to talk about the latest scientific discoveries about this amazing fish. The occasion is the publication of the coelacanth genome last week.
Continue reading “A most amazing fish: Join our Google Hangout about coelacanths on Thursday”