Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Spanish shawl
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
And I like that. More snail porn was sent my way; this one I can’t blithely throw up on the page because, in addition to an extravagantly naked snail, it also has an unclothed mammal…and for some reason, some people freak out over exposed mammalian skin. So warning, warning, warning, nsfw, grow up a little bit, etc., etc., etc. Don’t get too hot and bothered over the spectacular and lovely mollusc, either.
…and suddenly people everywhere are sending you images from their snail and slug porn collections. You are all just plain weird.
(via Dave Littler)
I think you want to read Carl Zimmer’s post on bat flight — it has lots of lovely slo-mo videos that show just how amazingly agile bats are.
I’m not going to say much about this since Ed Yong has an excellent write-up, but a new feathered dinosaur has been discovered, called Tianyulong. As you can see in this image of the fossil, it was bristling with a fuzz of thin fibers — proto-feathers.
There are a couple of noteworthy features in this creature. One is apparent: feathers just didn’t bloom suddenly in evolution, but appeared in steps. This animal has ‘feathers’ that don’t branch like those of modern birds, but instead form more of a furry coat than a set of flat blades.
The other cool thing is that this is an ornithischian dinosaur; most of the other dinosaurs that have been discovered to have feathers were saurischian. What that means might be made more clear by this diagram:
It implies that just maybe the last common ancestor of the saurischia and ornithischia were also covered with proto-feathers, which means that feathers may be a primitive state in this lineage.
Zheng X-T, You H-L, Xu X, Dong Z-M (2009) An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur with filamentous integumentary structures. Nature 458:333-336.
Several new and spectacular cephalopod fossils from 95 million years ago have been found in Lebanon. “Spectacular” is not hyperbole — these specimens have wonderfully well-preserved soft parts, mineralized in fine-grained calcium phosphate, and you can see…well, take a look.
