Sepia pharaonis, male on the left, female on the right
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Don’t be too grossed out, but the University of Wisconsin Madison has put a whole series of high-quality videos of human dissection online. It’s extremely cool, but not for the squeamish—there’s more than just the sight of a cadaver getting hacked up, and the sound of a saw on bone or a chisel being used to peel up the cranium are, ummm, memorable. At least you’re spared the odor and the textures.
I’d almost forgotten how muscular gross anatomy is—it takes some heft and brute force to take apart a body.
(via Mind Hacks)
First I reported that Palaeos was lost, and then that it might be found, but now it looks like we can safely say it is being reborn. The old version of Palaeos has been at least partially restored, but the really important news is that a Palaeos wiki has been set up and people are working on reassembling old content and creating new information in a much more flexible format. If you’ve got some phylogenetic or palaeontological expertise, you might want to consider joining the Palaeos team and helping out with this big project.
Say hello to Selam, or DIK-1-1, a new and very well preserved member of the family discovered in Dikika, Ethiopia. She belongs to the species Australopithicus afarensis and is being called Lucy’s little sister.
She was only a toddler when she died about 3.3 million years ago, and from the teeth the authors estimate that she was about 3 years old. Most of the skeleton is intact, but doesn’t seem to have yet been fully extracted from the matrix.
Some of the surprises: the hyoid bone is chimpanzee-like, and implies chimp-like vocalization abilities. She had a long way to go before she could have a conversation. The fingers are long and curved, and the scapula is more gorilla-like than ours; there is a suggestion of better arboreal ability than we have.
Alemseged Z, Spoor F, Kimbel WH, Bobe R, Geraads D, Reed D, Wynn JG (2006) A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia. Nature 443:296-301.
An old pal of mine, the splendiferously morphogenetical Don Kane, has brought to my attention a curious juxtaposition. It’s two articles from the old, old days, both published in Nature in 1981, both relevant to my current interests, but each reflecting different outcomes. One is on zebrafish, the other on creationism.
For a rather different kind of squid, here’s a pretty image. There’s also a mammal in the picture, which I understand some people might find not quite safe for work, so don’t click through unless you can handle viewing an exposed superficial epithelium.
Whoa…watch this phenomenal video of the Vampire Squid. They’ve caught it feeding and using a few sneaky tricks to escape predators.
Via El PaleoFreak (in Spanish; here’s a translation), I find this strange little cockatoo chick, and even better, take a look at these wonderful simulations of feather development.
We just had one of these!
Well, just to flesh it out a little more with some random links, here are some photos. I was told the second one made someone think of me (warning: body modification!). And, jebus help me, for some reason I thought this photo was very sexy. Or appetizing. I don’t know, something in the midbrain flickered.
Oh, and several of us sciencebloggers were interviewed for an article by Eva Amsen on “Who benefits from science blogging?” It doesn’t mention the benefit of people sending you pictures that tickle the cingulate.
