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 […]
Take a look at today’s Google doodle and guess what it’s celebrating? If you don’t know, the answer is here More about the subject can be found here (I know Matthew disdains my use of Wikipedia entries but that is often the most comprehensive source of information!) As the alert reader said who sent me […]
by Greg Mayer Farish A. Jenkins, Jr., Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and Alexander Agassiz Professor in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, died on November 11, 2012. Farish made major contributions to vertebrate paleontology, functional morphology, and evolutionary biology. He had been ill with cancer for some time, but had continued to work […]
You’ve probably heard of Simon Conway Morris if you’re a layperson interested in science, and you’ll certainly have heard of him if you’re an evolutionary biologist. He’s a very famous paleobiologist who works out of Cambridge University, and is renowned for his work on the Burgess Shale fossils. If you’ve read Steve Gould’s famous book […]
by Greg Mayer Earlier this year my friend Chris Noto and his colleagues Derek Main and Stephanie Drumheller published a paper describing injuries to turtle and dinosaur bones from the Cretaceous that show evidence that they were preyed upon by crocodiles. Besides the irresistible alliteration, their paper serves to show that we can sometimes learn […]
Last year Russell Garwood, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester (ergo Matthew Cobb’s colleague), published a paper in Nature Communications along with several collaborators (reference below). The results were striking: fossil harvestmen (arachnids sometimes known as “daddy long-legs”) from 305 million years ago are strikingly similar to modern species—so similar, in fact, that they […]
by Greg Mayer David Koch, billionaire industrialist and bankroller of right wing causes, has announced that he will donate $35 million to the National Museum of Natural History (aka the USNM) for an overhaul of its dinosaur hall. The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen writes: In 2009 he gave the Smithsonian $15 million to create […]
by Greg Mayer Jerry gave a talk yesterday at the MCZ which most WEIT readers couldn’t attend (although you can get a general idea of it by watching this video of an earlier talk by Jerry), so I thought I’d give folks the opportunity see another evolution talk, “Why Study Fossils?” by Chris Noto. (The […]
You’d think that Darwin’s Beagle collections had been pretty well worked over, but it turns out that we didn’t even know everything that Darwin collected. According to the Associated Press, Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleobotanist at the University of London, found a cache of 314 slides of specimens collected not only by Charles Darwin, but by […]
Hot off the presses from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we have a paper in which a theropod dinosur, Microraptor gui (a feathered dino closely related to the ancestor of modern birds) was found with a bird in its stomach. M. gui is famous for being a “four-winged” dino that had all […]
