Palaeophiles and historians of science—Yale just made all of OC Marsh’s correspondence available free online. Spoiler alert: “only” 50 pages of correspondence with chief rival Cope. Less than a dozen with Charles “He lets me call him Chuck” Darwin.
http://peabody.yale.edu/collections/vertebrate-paleontology/correspondence-o-c-marsh
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Laura
“I’m a palaeontologist.”
“Oh cool, I love Time Team/Indiana Jones/history*.” / “You’re not dashing enough to do what Indiana Jones does.” / “Nice, National Treasure was awesome and I love Nicolas Cage.” / “You’re like Lara Croft?”
http://www.palaeontologyonline.com/articles/2013/life-palaeontologist-palaeontology-dummies-part-1/
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Laura
Yesterday was the anniversary of the first publication of “On the Origin of Species”, by Charles Darwin.
You can read this book, and all Darwin’s other writings, completely free online
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Laura
Draft genome sequences of two individuals from Siberia dating to 24,000 and 17,000 years ago add to our understanding of Native American ancestry.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12736.html
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Laura
Himalayan fossils of the oldest known pantherine establish ancient origin of big cats
Tseng, Wang, Slater5, Takeuchi, Li, Liu & Xie
Pantherine felids (‘big cats’) include the largest living cats, apex predators in their respective ecosystems. They are also the earliest diverging living cat lineage, and thus are important for understanding the evolution of all subsequent felid groups. Although the oldest pantherine fossils occur in Africa, molecular phylogenies point to Asia as their region of origin. This paradox cannot be reconciled using current knowledge, mainly because early big cat fossils are exceedingly rare and fragmentary. Here, we report the discovery of a fossil pantherine from the Tibetan Himalaya, with an age of Late Miocene–Early Pliocene, replacing African records as the oldest pantherine. A ‘total evidence’ phylogenetic analysis of pantherines indicates that the new cat is closely related to the snow leopard and exhibits intermediate characteristics on the evolutionary line to the largest cats. Historical biogeographic models provide robust support for the Asian origin of pantherines. The combined analyses indicate that 75% of the divergence events in the pantherine lineage extended back to the Miocene, up to 7 Myr earlier than previously estimated. The deeper evolutionary origin of big cats revealed by the new fossils and analyses indicate a close association between Tibetan Plateau uplift and diversification of the earliest living cats.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1774/20132686.full
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/13/big-cats-oldest-ancestor-found-tibet
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Laura
AND its not extinct, its a living species!
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-species-humpback-dolphin-discovered
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Laura
Not vertebrates, but a good example of using fossils to increase congruence between morphological and molecular systematics.
– Laura
Arthropod fossil data increase congruence of morphological and molecular phylogenies
The relationships of major arthropod clades have long been contentious, but refinements in molecular phylogenetics underpin an emerging consensus. Nevertheless, molecular phylogenies have recovered topologies that morphological phylogenies have not, including the placement of hexapods within a paraphyletic Crustacea, and an alliance between myriapods and chelicerates. Here we show enhanced congruence between molecular and morphological phylogenies based on 753 morphological characters for 309 fossil and Recent panarthropods. We resolve hexapods within Crustacea, with remipedes as their closest extant relatives, and show that the traditionally close relationship between myriapods and hexapods is an artefact of convergent character acquisition during terrestrialisation. The inclusion of fossil morphology mitigates long-branch artefacts as exemplified by pycnogonids: when fossils are included, they resolve with euchelicerates rather than as a sister taxon to all other euarthropods.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130930/ncomms3485/full/ncomms3485.html
Aerodynamic performance of the feathered dinosaur Microraptor and the evolution of feathered flight
Gareth Dyke, Roeland de Kat, Colin Palmer, Jacques van der Kindere, Darren Naish & Bharathram Ganapathisubramani
Nature Communications 4, Article number: 2489 doi:10.1038/ncomms3489
Understanding the aerodynamic performance of feathered, non-avialan dinosaurs is critical to reconstructing the evolution of bird flight. Here we show that the Early Cretaceous five-winged paravian Microraptor is most stable when gliding at high-lift coefficients (low lift/drag ratios). Wind tunnel experiments and flight simulations show that sustaining a high-lift coefficient at the expense of high drag would have been the most efficient strategy for Microraptor when gliding from, and between, low elevations. Analyses also demonstrate that anatomically plausible changes in wing configuration and leg position would have made little difference to aerodynamic performance. Significant to the evolution of flight, we show that Microraptor did not require a sophisticated, ‘modern’ wing morphology to undertake effective glides. This is congruent with the fossil record and also with the hypothesis that symmetric ‘flight’ feathers first evolved in dinosaurs for non-aerodynamic functions, later being adapted to form lifting surfaces.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130918/ncomms3489/full/ncomms3489.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10317155/Dinosaur-theory-provides-insight-into-evolution-of-bird-flight.html
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Laura
Oligo-Miocene climate change and mammal body-size evolution in the northwest United States: a test of Bergmann’s Rule
John D. Orcutt and Samantha S. B. Hopkins
Paleobiology: Fall 2013, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 648-661.
Whether or not climate plays a causal role in mammal body-size evolution is one of the longest-standing debates in ecology. Bergmann’s Rule, the longest-standing modeladdressing this topic, posits that geographic body-mass patterns are driven by temperature, whereas subsequent research has suggested that other ecological variables, particularly precipitation and seasonality, may be the major drivers of body-size evolution. While paleoecological data provide a unique and crucial perspective on this debate, paleontological tests of Bergmann’s rule and its corollaries have been scarce. We present a study of body-size evolution in three ecologically distinct families of mammal (equids, canids, and sciurids) during the Oligo-Miocene of the northwest United States, an ideal natural laboratory for such studies because of its rich fossil and paleoclimatic records. Body-size trends are different in all three groups, and in no case is a significant relationship observed between body size and any climatic variable, counter to what has been observed in modern ecosystems. We suggest that for most of the Cenozoic, at least in the Northwest, body mass has not been driven by any one climatic factor but instead has been the product of complex interactions between organisms and their environments, though the nature of these interactions varies from taxon to taxon. The relationship that exists between climate and body size in many groups of modern mammals, therefore, is the exception to the rule and may be the product of an exceptionally cool and volatile global climate. As anthropogenic global warming continues and ushers in climatic conditions more comparable to earlier intervals of the Cenozoic than to the modern day, models of corresponding biotic variables such as body size may lose predictive power if they do not incorporate paleoecological data.
http://www.psjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1666/13006
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Laura
18th September, 3pm,
the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology wednesday seminar series kicks off with:
Prof. Per Lundberg, University of Lund, Sweden:
“From individuals to phylogenies”
I will present an eco-evolutionary model based on individual fitness functions from which adaptive radiations and entire phylogenies can be derived. I will demonstrate under what ecological conditions niche conservatism is expected and how that affects the phylogenetic signal in metacommunities emerging from a single lineage. This co-evolutionary theory recovers a number of empirical patterns relating to species coexistence, niche partitioning, sister species distributions, and the biogeography of adaptive radiations.
more on his research: http://www.teorekol.lu.se/staff/plundberg/plundberg.html
Place: Biocenter 3, room 2402 (Telkänpönttö)
Coffee at 14:45, talk at 15:15
PS: also mark in your calendars the upcoming seminars in the near future (a full program of the EEB seminar will be posted soon):
THURSDAY 26.9., 14:00 Corey Bradshaw, University of Adelaide, “Brave New Green World: Managing Threatened Carbon Pools from the Boreal to Australia”. Host: Mar Cabeza
2.10. 16:00 Jason Tylianakis, University of Canterbury, NZ, Global change and ecosystem functioning: the interplay of biodiversity, environmental context and species interactions. Host: Tomas Roslin
Thursday 3.10. Neil Metcalfe, University of Glasgow, “The origins and ecological consequences of variation in aggression and metabolic rate in fish” Host: Heikki Hirvonen
Tuesday 8.10. Alexander Schmidt, University of Goettingen, “Microorganisms in amber and their use in understanding terrestrial palaeoecosystems”, Host: Jouko Rikkinen