Scientific American, June 2001

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Not long ago my friend George, who recently celebrated his second birthday, put some of his vocabulary on display for me. “Tee-wex,” he said, and roared. “Tiesay-watops,” he said, and roared again. “Apatosaw-us.” Roar number three. It is a remarkable thing that children today can speak Latin, but more remarkable still that the only Latin words they speak are the names of dinosaurs. I have yet to hear George or any other child say “Hallucigenia,” or “Ambulocetus,” or “Acanthostega”—although they were as remarkable as any velociraptor.

Dinosaurs have such a powerful grip on the public consciousness that it is easy to forget just how recently humans became aware of them. A two-year-old boy today may be able to rattle off three dinosaur names, but in 1824 there was only one dinosaur to be named, period. The word “dinosaur” didn’t even exist until 1842. Those confused early years, when the world was baffled by the discovery of absurdly enormous reptiles, represent one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science.

Continue reading “Dinos and Darwin” →

The New York Times, May 27, 2001

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Science, May 11, 2001

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Wendy Gibson is a paleontologist without fossils. A microbiologist at the University of Bristol, U.K., Gibson studies trypanosomes, single-celled parasites that cause sleeping sickness and related diseases. Although trypanosomes infect millions of people and countless mammals, they are as evanescent as they are common. No fossil of a trypanosome exists, and, as Gibson notes, “we can’t replay history.” Nevertheless, she and her colleagues have been able to reconstruct the past 100 million years of trypanosome evolution, as continents have split them apart and their hosts have evolved into new forms, including humans.

Continue reading “Genetic Trees Reveal Disease Origins” →

Science, May 11, 2001

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On certain afternoons in Uganda, bright orange butterflies with black-and-white wings gather together on small patches of low grass, sometimes in the hundreds. Such congregations are nothing unusual in the animal kingdom; normally, males convene to try to win the attention of females. But the swarms—known as leks—that Acraea encendana form are bizarre: 94% of the butterflies are females, and they jostle for the attention of the few males, who seem reluctant suitors. “You wouldn’t expect males to be surrounded by all these virgin females and not wanting to mate,” says Francis Jiggins of Cambridge University. Even more bizarre is the cause of their sexual skew: They are plagued with a strain of bacteria known as Wolbachia, which kills males but spares females.

Continue reading “Wolbachia: A Tale of Sex and Survival” →

Natural History, March 31, 2001

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When Tim Griffin and Rodger Kram set out to study how penguins walk, they didn’t expect to be impressed. Compared with long-legged ostriches striding across a plain, waddling penguins come up short. Underwater they may be able to race like torpedoes in tuxedos, but on land they are more apt to evoke laughter than to inspire respect.

Previous research on penguins seemed to back up the laughter with hard numbers. Pound for pound, a penguin on land uses twice as much energy as other animals of its size to walk a given distance. Scientists laid the blame for this expense on waddling, the (presumably) energetically costly business of the bird’s throwing its body first to one side and then to the other as it walks.

Continue reading “The Fine Art of Waddling” →