Mary thought we needed more affectionate slugs around here.
(from Margaret Morgan)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
(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.
In this new tradition, my wife picks out some image that isn’t a squid and has me post it — I think it’s maybe to broaden my interests, and occasionally to send me a message.
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Oh, right! It’s our wedding anniversary! It’s been 29 years of fidelity for a pair of infidels so far.
The hyper Japanese narration somehow made me think of The Calamari Wrestler.
One of the evolutionary peculiarities of my favorite lab animal, the zebrafish, and of cypriniform fishes in general, is that they lack teeth. They lost them over 50 million years ago, and don’t even form a dental lamina in development. So this photo of a cypriniform, Danionella dracula, gave me a bit of a start beyond just the nice fangs and the ghoulish name.
The story doesn’t give much detail, but I’m going to have to look into this. Those are not true teeth, but spiny outgrowths of bone directly from the jaws.
