More to read: The Tangled Bank–The Tangled Bank is a semi-regular banquet of posts from various blogs on biology. Thanks to the powers that be for including one of mine in the latest issue. Go read it for the rest, which are fascinating.
Dinosaur-eating Mammals (You heard me right): Jeff Hecht at New Scientisthas a good write-up of the discovery of a dog-sized 130-million year old mammal with dinosaur bones in its gut. Most mammals may have been humble little critters during the Age of the Dinosaurs, but at least a few seemed to have turned the tables.
Continue reading “Dinosaur-Eating Mammals (You Heard Me Right)”
The New York Times, January 11, 2005
Dr. Steven A. Benner is bracing for what could be a spectacular year. When the Huygens mission parachutes into the hazy skies of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, he will be among the researchers anxiously awaiting a report.
After several days, Dr. Benner and his colleagues will receive the Huygens measurements of Titan’s chemical composition. They will comb through the data to see whether the moon harbors life.
But Dr. Benner, a professor of chemistry at the University of Florida, will not limit his search to familiar life forms of the sort that exist on Earth. He is casting a wider net, in hopes of discovering creatures that defy conventional biology — what Dr. Benner calls “weird life.”
Continue reading “In the Search for Life on Titan, the Challenge Will Be Recognizing It”
The New York Times, January 11, 2005
The Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson believes that he has solved a 487-year-old ecological mystery.
In 1518, a spectacular plague of ants devastated some of the earliest Spanish settlements in the New World on the island of Hispaniola. The Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas recorded how entire plantations were wiped out “as though fire had fallen from the sky and scorched them.” Despite the scale of the destruction, the identity of the plague ants has never been discovered.
Continue reading “Plague Ants, Plantains and Scorched Plantations”
The more time I spend talking to biologists, the more they remind me of detectives. I have two stories in tomorrow’s New York Times that make this connection particularly clear. In the first, E.O. Wilson attempts to solve the mystery of a plague of ants that devastated some of the earliest Spanish settlements in the New World. In the second, I look at another mystery–is there life on Saturn’s moon Titan. The space probe Huygens will be falling into its hazy atmosphere on Friday to see what lurks under its cloak. I inteviewed University of Florida chemist Steven Benner who will be trying to search for signs of life in Huygens’s data. But if Titan does have life, it may not be based on DNA or even need liquid water. So how do you look for something you’ve never seen before?