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.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
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.
Santino is my hero. He was kept imprisoned in a cage, and his response was to throw rocks at his obnoxious captors. He’d scavenge the prison yard at night for whatever loose stones he could find, and he’d cache them for the morning. When there weren’t enough rocks, he’d pound the concrete retaining wall to knock loose chips of stone. Then when the jailers would show up, zip, zip, zip, a rain of stones on them. You have to respect that kind of defiance and planning.
Santino is a tough guy. Santino is also a chimpanzee.
Doesn’t that make you wonder a bit? Chimpanzees fight back at being caged, and they do so with forethought and resourcefulness. I imagine our ancestors felt the same way at every obstacle to their life, from marauding leopards to bad weather, and they stoked a bit of rage to fight back (which was probably ineffective in dealing with a thunderstorm, requiring slightly cleverer strategies). It’s a start; it’s a way of using your brain to resist, and I think it’s a very human approach to a problem.
Unfortunately, the story does not have a happy ending, and this also tells us something about modern humanity. Santino was not a placid clown for the crowds, so his keepers fixed him: Santino has been castrated.
I think they should have taught him how to use an AK-47 and turned him loose in his native habitat to instruct his brothers and sisters in better ways to defend themselves.
This may shock you, but the Trophy Wife is not perfect. She doesn’t quite get the cephalopod fetish, and thinks I’m a bit…weird. I know! It’s unbelievable that there’s only one person on the planet who thinks that, and I’m married to her! So, anyway, just to appease the spouse, I’ll try to regularly throw in a non-cephalopodian creature. This week, here’s something from back home in our mutual birth state of Washington, a crab being eaten by a sea anemone. Try not to read anything Freudian into it — although now that I’ve mentioned it, everyone will be looking for a metaphor here.
(via Deep Sea News)
