by Greg Mayer Jerry has recently noted a forthcoming book on the Cambrian by the infamous Stephen Meyer. There is a brand new book, The Cambrian Explosion, by the famous Douglas Erwin of the USNM and even more famous James Valentine of UC-Berkeley, that you might want to read if you really want to learn […]
by Greg Mayer The Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is becoming a hotbed of evolutionary activity. I already posted about their Darwin Day celebrations, and now I want to announce an upcoming event in their Spring Lecture series: Life and Death in a Cretaceous Coastal Swamp by my colleague, Prof. Chris Noto. The lecture […]
by Greg Mayer There have been a number of interesting comments by readers on my post on the recent paper on the radiation of placental mammals by Maureen O’Leary and colleagues. I want to respond briefly to a few of them here. Biogeography. Does this paper imply that the origin and geographic distribution of the […]
by Greg Mayer The Geological Society (London) is having a special meeting today to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Piltdown hoax. There will also be a tour of a new special exhibit at the Natural History Museum (which also has a nice Piltdown website). It was exactly 100 years ago today that Charles Dawson, […]
by Greg Mayer The Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main, one of Europe’s great natural history museums, has announced the discovery in Laos of one of the world’s largest known daddy longlegs by Senckenberg researcher Peter Jager. The apparently new species is now being studied by Jager and his Senckenberg colleague, Ana Lucia Tourinho. Daddy […]
I won’t discuss this new observation in detail, since the detail is mostly of interest to specialists, but it’s still a cool observation. A new paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA by Alexander Schmidt et al. (reference at bottom) describes specimens of two groups of arthropods—flies and mites—from Italian amber (fossilized resin) that is […]
Sexual selection, which is a subset of natural selection, is defined as “selection based on mate choice.” It usually, but not always, takes the form of males competing for access to females, and results in the development of either armaments in males that help them compete in the battle for mates (antlers on deer, horns […]
From BBC Science News via a series of tweets, including Barbara King, Steve Ashley, and finally an email from Matthew Cobb, an amazing fossil finds its way to us. As reported by Nick Crumpton, a fossil “death march” of a horseshoe crab was found in the Solenhofen limestone—the same formation that yielded the famous transitional […]
