Dinosaurs

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Discover, April 28, 2005

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In the earliest paintings of dinosaurs, from the mid-1800s, they writhe like beached sea serpents or slouch like reptilian potbellied pigs. Now we know better. Dinosaurs stood erect and walked or ran great distances. Many were huge. One species—Argentinosaurus—reached 125 feet long. Now we know dinosaurs had complicated social lives—they raised their young, and they probably lived and hunted together in herds. We even know that the 9,000 species of birds all around us are living, feathered dinosaurs.

We know better because paleontologists are unearthing astounding numbers of fossils. “There are six or seven new species described every year,” says paleontologist Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago. “Even though you’d think it might be slowing down, the pace of discovery has quickened.”

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Life Versus Squiggles

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In the new issue of Smithsonian, I’ve got an article about life on Mars. I’m not writing about anything NASA has actually found, but instead about the difficulty of just recognizing life, even if the evidence is in your hand (or in your rover’s spectrometer). While the chances of life existing today on the surface of Mars aren’t fantastic, a lot of researchers are pretty optimistic that there are fossils to be found. But it turns out that fossils of microbes are even more difficult to identify. You just need to consider some of the fierce debates over some of the oldest fossils on Earth–a topic I’ve written about before on the Loom here.

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“Blinding New Evidence!”

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I have a weakness common to many bloggers–I like to check my site meter to see who’s coming to my blog, and from where. Often I wind up discovering intriguing sites run by people whose interests run along the same lines as mine, such as evolutionary biology. Today, however I was surprised to see a lot of traffic coming from Answers in Genesis, a creationist web site.

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An Off-and-On Switch for Controlling Animals?

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, April 12, 2005

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The 18th-century Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani found that a spark could make a frog’s leg kick. His experiments established that electricity was the hidden force nerves used to control the body. Now researchers at Yale have done Galvani one better. They can make fruit flies walk, leap or fly by shining a laser at the insects, setting off certain neurons inside them.

It’s possible, at least in theory, that this method could someday be developed into a sort of animal remote control. But its biggest promise is as a scientific tool that may shed light on the function of different kinds of neurons. The ability to switch on particular neurons may allow scientists to discover clues about a range of disorders, from Parkinson’s disease to drug addiction.

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