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Fossil Fish With “Limbs” Is Missing Link, Study Says
by James Owen, Apr., 2006
Fossil hunters may have discovered the fish that made humans possible.
Found in the Canadian Arctic, the new fossil boasts leglike fins, scientists say. The creature is being hailed as a crucial missing link between fish and land animals—including the prehistoric ancestors of humans.
Researchers say the fish shows how fins on freshwater species first began transforming into limbs some 380 million years ago. The change was a huge evolutionary step that opened the way for vertebrates—animals with backbones—to emerge from the water.
“This animal represents the transition from water to land—the part of history that includes ourselves,” said paleontologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago.
Shubin was co-leader of a team that uncovered three nearly complete fossils measuring up to nine feet (3 m) long on Ellesmere Island in 2004. The new species, Tiktaalik roseae, had a flattened, crocodile-like head and strong, bony fins…
(read more: National Geo)
(image: T - Shawn Gould, Nat. Geo.; BL - Univ of Chicago; BR - Graham Roberts, NY Times)
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read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik
http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/index.html
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/060501_tiktaalik
Aspiring Biologist: Mammals evolved to survive the dinosaurs...
Recent studies of jaw and ear function in primitive mammal-like reptiles indicate that the larger angular bone, which later became the tempanic ( bone of the skull, partially enclosing the middle ear and supporting the eardrum ) may have supported an eardrum while still part of the…
Iqbal Selvan: Chimpanzee geniuses also exist
A perfect storm of abilities seems to come together to create the Einsteins of the animal kingdom. While testing intelligence, one chimp, named Natasha, had scores that were off the charts in comparison to other chimps. Is she like an ape genius?
Certain apes appear to be much smarter…
Bill Nye “Creationism isn’t for kids”
1. Indohyus
2. Pakicetus
3. Ambulocetus
4. Kutchicetus
5. Protocetus
6. Rhodocetus
7. Basilosaurus
8. Dorudon
9. Squalodon
10. Cetotherium
"Biologists tracing the roots of a global pandemic will take samples in multiple locations, sequence the DNA and map how the virus has evolved through time by looking at how its genes have been modified.
“Once they’ve got the family tree… they can trace back along the branches of the tree all the way back to the origin,” Atkinson said in a telephone interview.
“What we did was apply the same kind of approach to languages.”
The team built a database of cognates such as mother, which is moeder in Dutch, madre in Spanish, mat in Russian, mitera in Greek and mam in Hindi."
Turkey the birthplace of Hindi, English: study
I always assumed the word for mother was similar in most languages because going from a closed mouthed “M” sound to an open mouthed vowel is the simplest vocalization (and babies generally learn words for mother first).
(via slartibartfastibast)(via slartibartfastibast)
A new UCLA study pinpoints uniquely human patterns of gene activity in the brain that could shed light on how we evolved differently than our closest relative. Published Aug. 22 in the advance online edition of Neuron, these genes’ identification could improve understanding of human brain diseases like autism and schizophrenia, as well as learning disorders and addictions.
(Image by Michael Nichols)
Drivers of marine biodiversity: Tiny, freeloading clams find the key to evolutionary success
by PhysOrg staff
What mechanisms control the generation and maintenance of biological diversity on the planet? It’s a central question in evolutionary biology. For land-dwelling organisms such as insects and the flowers they pollinate, it’s clear that interactions between species are one of the main drivers of the evolutionary change that leads to biological diversity.
But the picture is much murkier for ocean dwellers, mainly because the scope of ecological interactions remains poorly characterized for most marine species. In one of the first efforts to examine how species interactions drive diversification of ocean-dwelling organisms, two University of Michigan researchers and an Australian colleague looked at the lifestyle choices within an exceptionally diverse superfamily of tiny clams, the Galeommatoidea.
They found that the fingernail-size-and-smaller clams’ propensity to shack up with much larger, burrowing creatures such as sea urchins, shrimp and worms was a key adaptation that led to the evolutionary success of the superfamily, as measured by its “megadiverse” status among marine bivalves. There are about 500 described species of galeommatoidean clams and many more undescribed species…
(read more: PhysOrg) (images: Kevin Lee/diverkevin.com)
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Journal reference: PLoS ONE
Provided by University of Michigan
