When Bats and Humans Were One and the Same

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, December 7, 2004

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Scientists have used computer analysis to read evolution backward and reconstruct a large part of the genome of an 80-million-year-old mammal. This tiny shrewlike creature was the common ancestor of humans and other living mammals as diverse as horses, bats, tigers and whales.

Actual DNA molecules cannot survive such lengths of time. Mammal fossils from this period are extremely rare. But by tracking the course of mammalian evolution, scientists can pinpoint when a common ancestor existed and what, in general terms, it was like.

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Resurrecting Genomes

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In tomorrow’s New York Times, I have an article about how to reconstruct a genome that’s been gone for 80 million years. The genome in question belongs to the common ancestor of humans and many other mammals (fancy name: Boreoeutheria). In a paper in this month’s Genome Research, scientists compared the same chunk of DNA in 19 species of mammals. (The chunk is 1.1 million base pairs long and includes ten genes and a lot of junk.) The researchers could work their way backwards to the ancestral genetic chunk, and then showed they could be 98.5% certain of the accuracy of the reconstruction.

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Getting Sexier All The Time

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I have a short piece in today’s New York Times about how male swallows are evolving longer tails, which female swallows find sexy. Here’s the original paper in press at The Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Measuring the effects of natural selection is tough work, the details of which are impossible to squeeze into a brief news article. Scientists have to document a change in a population of animals–the length of feathers, for example–but then they have to determine that the change is a product of genetic change. We are much taller than people 200 years ago, but it’s clearthat most, if not all, of this change is simply a response of our bodies to better food and medicine. The authors of the swallow paper carried out a number of studies that suggest that the length of swallow tails is genetically based, and that those genes are changing. If they’re right–and other experts I contacted think they are–it’s a striking example of how quickly the sex lives of wild animals can evolve.

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Sexier Posterior Evolves Almost Overnight

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, November 30, 2004

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Swallows are getting sexier.

Male barn swallows attract females with long tail feathers, and European researchers have observed that over the last 20 years those feathers have become much longer.

“We’ve demonstrated quite a dramatic change in a short period of time,” said Dr. Anders Pape Moller, an evolutionary biologist at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who conducted the research with Dr. Tibor Szep of the College of Nyiregyhaza in Hungary. The findings are to be published in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

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