In recent years, dinosaurs have gotten awfully cute. They’re no longer Victorian lumps of saggy muscle. A lot of them are not even frightening. They’re fuzzy, feathery little critters. But, as I’ve written before, cuteness is not what drives paleontologists to hunt for these fossils and spend years poring over them in laboratories.

Today brings another case in point. Chinese paleontologists published a report in Nature about a new fossil they’ve named Epidexipteryx hui. The fossil comes from rocks that are somewhere between 152 and 168 million years old. Much of its skeleton was preserved on a slab, along with impressions on the surface of its body that the scientists conclude were feathers.

Continue reading “Shake Your Jurassic Tail Feather” →

Evolution: Education and Outreach is a relatively new journal that helps teachers, students, and scientists teach evolutionary biology. I’ve just contributed a piece to a special issue on the evolution of the eye. I take a look at a couple examples of eyes evolving in weird ways. One example may be familiar to readers of this blog–the flatfish. The other example, illustrated here, is the stalk-eyed fly. The point I try to make in the piece is that these examples are not just a couple exhibits at a freak show. They tell us something important about the forces at work in evolution. Thankfully, the editors have made the journal open-access, so you can go read it for yourself.

Continue reading “Weird Eyes” →

Jenny writes: “I’m nearing the end of getting my undergrad in Zoology and I decided to do something to commemorate it. I like the simplicity of a Punnett square and I like that such complicated theories that make up Mendelian genetics can be illustrated in 6 lines and 12 letters. And since the letters are ambiguous I decided to go for ‘E’ for my last initial.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published October 18, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

My mother, on whom I depend for all my New Jersey history, passed on a delightful tale of George Washington, Tom Paine, and their passion for chemistry experiments. In early November 1783, Tom Paine paid a visit to George Washington in Rockingham, New Jersey, where Washington was waiting for news of the end of the revolutionary war. One night Paine and Washington got to talking with two colonels about the will-o-the-wisp, the fiery globe that people sometimes claimed to see floating over marshes.

They came up with two plausible hypotheses. The colonels thought that they were produced from some kind of matter in the marches, such as turpentine. Washington and Paine thought it was a gas.

Continue reading “Science and Politics: The Tale of George Washington’s Swamp Gas” →