Don’t insult leeches.
Originally published February 7, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, February 7, 2006
The tub full of leeches sat on a table in Mark Siddall’s office at the American Museum of Natural History. The leeches, each an inch long and covered in orange polka dots, were swimming lazily through the water.
One leech in particular attracted Dr. Siddall’s attention. It had suddenly begun undulating up and down in graceful curves, pushing water along its body so that it could draw more oxygen into its skin.
“This is beautiful. Look at that,” Dr. Siddall said. “It’s a very complex behavior. The only other animals that swim in a vertical undulating pattern are whales and seals.”
Continue reading “His Subject: Highly Evolved and Exquisitely Thirsty”
I know what you’re thinking.
You’re thinking, I need more stories about leeches. I want to find out what scientists are learning about how leeches evolved.
And I know that’s not all you want.
You want to watch a leech video.
And you want a podcast about leech evolution.
Well, you’re in luck.
I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings.
The New York Times, January 26, 2006
NEW YORK — Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a six-foot-long, two-legged dinosaur similar to a tyrannosaur or a velociraptor. But it is actually an ancient relative of modern alligators and crocodiles.
The discovery is a striking example of how completely different categories of animals can evolve the same kind of body over and over again.
For almost 60 years, the 210-million-year-old fossil had been hiding in plain sight. It was lodged in a slab of rock dug up in 1947 in New Mexico by a team led by Dr. Edward Colbert, a paleontologist at the natural history museum.
Continue reading “Crocodile fossil shows uncanny convergence”