Climate Relicts: Seeking Clues On How Some Species Survive

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Yale Environment 360, August 29, 2011

Link

A two-hour’s drive north of Madrid is an extraordinary sight: forests of beech trees. It’s not the European beech itself that’s extraordinary. After all, Fagus sylvatica grows across a wide swath of the continent. It’s beech trees in central Spain that are strange. To grow, beeches require a moist, relatively cool climate — a climate that’s almost impossible to find in central Spain. “They’re limited to cool moist valleys in a hot, dry mountain range,” explains Alistair Jump, an ecologist at the University of Stirling who studies the trees.

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More on Scientific American Podcast: Science Tattoos and the Myth of the Parasite-Driven Cat Lady

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Before Irene takes away my Internet connection, let me point you to part two of my interview on Science Talk, the podcast of Scientific American. (If you missed it, here’s part one.)

Talk you on the other side of the maelstrom.

[Update: Part one linked now fixed]

Originally published August 27, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Scientific American interviews me about evolution in the city (and more to come)

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Steve Mirsky, host of the excellent Science Talk, a podcast at Scientific American, talked to me the other day about all sorts of things. Part one of our talk is now online. We talk about my recent story about evolution in New York City. (Scientific American has a special issue dedicated to cities this month.) Listen to the podcast here.

Steve will be posting the second part of the talk soon.

Originally published August 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Ann Coulter Nostalgia: Behold, For *I* Am The Giant Flatulent Raccoon

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

It’s been a while since we’ve treated to the spectacle of Ann Coulter lecturing about evolution, but she’s at it again. She’s just written an op-ed in the wake of Rick Perry’s recent statement that Texas teaches evolution and creationism [his word] because evolution is “just a theory out there.”

Coulter takes this opportunity to remind us that she dedicated a third of her 2006 book Godless to demolishing evolutionary biology. Apparently the scientists who have published over 59,000 papers on the topic of evolution since she published her book didn’t get the memo.

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How many species are there? My latest for the New York Times

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

In 1833, John Obadiah Westwood, a British entomologist, tried to guess how many species of insects there are on Earth. He extrapolated from England to Earth as a whole. “If we say 400,000, we shall, perhaps, not be very wide of the truth,” he wrote. Today, scientists have found over a million species of insects and keep finding more every year.

The question of how many species there are on Earth has been a tricky one ever since Westwood’s day. I’ve written a story for the New York Times about a new estimate that was published today: 8.7 million.

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