serotoninsynapse:

The swimming lizard by mtchm on Flickr.

The Marine Iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) is an iguana that has the unique ability among modern lizards to live and forage in the sea. It is found only on the Galapagos Islands, but has spread to all the islands in the archipelago, and is sometimes called the “Galapagos marine iguana”. It mainly lives on the rocky Galapagos shore, but can also be spotted in marshes and mangrove beaches.

On his visit to the islands, Charles Darwin was revolted by the animals’ appearance, writing:

The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft) most disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them ‘imps of darkness’. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.

Neanderthals

Neanderthals looked much like modern humans only shorter, more heavily built and much stronger, particularly in the arms and hands. Their skulls show that they had no chin and their foreheads sloped backwards. The brain case was lower but longer housing a slightly larger brain than that of modern humans. As almost exclusively carnivorous, both male and female Neanderthals hunted. Evidence of a huge number of injuries - like those sometimes seen in today’s rodeo riders - suggests that hunting involved dangerously close contact with large prey animals.

You guys know my opinion on this. This is a very accurate interpretation of the situation.

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I’ve been wasting time looking up political cartoons. And in honor of Darwin’s birthday, let’s see why most other republicans don’t believe in evolution…

Credit: Bill Sanders

Ichthyosaurs

Ichthyosaurs were predatory marine reptiles that swam the world’s oceans while dinosaurs walked the land. They appeared in the Triassic period, dying out around 25 million years before the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. Ichthyosaurs (literally ‘fish-lizards’) evolved from an as yet unidentified land reptile that moved back into the water. These huge animals rapidly diversified from being lizards with fins to developing a much more streamlined, fish-like form built for speed. One species has been calculated to have a cruising speed of 3.6 km/h. These enormous predators remained at the top of the food chain until they were replaced by the plesiosaurs.

What is the oldest organism still alive today?

Scientists at the University of Western Australia have now sequenced the DNA of a patch of Posidonia oceanica, a seagrass of the Mediterranean Sea, to determine its age. And, as it turns out, some parts are up to 200,000 years old, which easily beats that of the previously-believed record-holder, a Tasmanian plant around 43,000 years old.

How could this be possible? The seagrass, also known as Neptune Grass or Mediterranean tapeweed, grows in massive clumps and is continuously growing new branches and expanding. The seagrass reproduces asexually by cloning, and spreads far and wide so that it can survive even if one particular area becomes depleted of natural resources.

To put this age into perspective, 200,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans were just evolving in Africa, while we only reached “behavioral modernity” around 50,000 years ago.

Homo Erectus

Debate continues over whether Homo erectus is a human ancestor. If Homo erectus and Homo ergaster are identified as separate species, Homo erectus would be a sibling rather than a true ancestor. Homo erectus was a successful, long-lived species that migrated out of Africa. Possibly the first humans to live in hunter-gather societies, they also used rafts to travel the oceans. One of the first specimens identified as Homo erectus was the Java Man fossil discovered in 1891. Orginally named Pithecanthropus erectus, it was not recognised as a close humanrelative at first, as old theories held that our ancestors would have had human brains and ape-like bodies, rather than the converse.

Prompted by Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer’s recent column in Science deploring “a pervasive reluctance of teachers to forthrightly explain evolutionary biology,” Popular Mechanics asked Bill Nye for his reaction. “It’s horrible,” Nye replied.

Nye was particularly concerned with the characterization of evolution as “just a theory,” arguing, “People make flu vaccinations that stop people from getting sick. Farmers raise crops with science; they hybridize them and make them better with every generation. That’s all evolution. Evolution is a theory, and it’s a theory that you can test. We’ve tested evolution in many ways. You can’t present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.”

Study Finds Virus to Be Fast Learner on Infecting

Viruses regularly evolve new ways of making people sick, but scientists usually do not become aware of these new strategies until years or centuries after they have evolved. In a new study published on Thursday in the journal Science, however, a team of scientists at Michigan State University describes how viruses evolved a new way of infecting cells in little more than two weeks. The new research suggests that new traits based on multiple mutations can indeed occur with frightening speed.

The Michigan researchers studied a virus known as lambda. It is harmless to humans, infecting only the gut bacterium Escherichia coli. Justin Meyer, a graduate student in the biology laboratory of Richard Lenski, wondered whether lambda might be able to evolve an entirely new way of getting into its host.

Mr. Meyer set up an experiment in which E. coli made almost none of the molecules that the virus grabs onto. Now few of the viruses could get into the bacteria. Any mutations that allowed a virus to use a different surface molecule to get in would make it much more successful than its fellow viruses. “It would have a feast of E. coli,” Dr. Lenski said.

The scientists found that in just 15 days, there were viruses using a new molecule — a channel in E. coli known as OmpF. Lambda viruses had never been reported to use OmpF before. 

Their results suggest the mutations help the viruses do a better job of hooking onto the original molecules after they became scarce, providing a surprising glimpse at how easily viruses can evolve entirely new traits— and thus give rise to new diseases.

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Air-breathing fish that can hop and walk across the floor on their fins hint that walking may have evolved underwater before such animals began migrating on to land, scientists find. 

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mothernaturenetwork:

Why do humans still have body hair?
Hairs serve as motion detectors for alerting us to insects, like bedbugs, before they can bite us.