Madison Science Pub

Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs
(Full Article off site)
Posted 02/08/2010 — by Skip Evans
(Evolution)
(New York Times)
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: February 4, 2010

Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon. (more)

Whatever Doesn't Kill Some Animals Can Make Them Deadly
(Full article off site)
Posted 12/28/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Evolution)
By SEAN B. CARROLL
Published: December 21, 2009
(New York Times)

Have you ever tried to think up the worst meal you could imagine? How about blue-ringed octopus, floral egg crab, basket shell snails and puffer fish.

Sure, some people may think these are delicacies, and puffer fish is certainly treated as such in parts of Asia. But each dish has something more important in common: they are all deadly. Each of these animals is chock full of a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. (more)

In Snails and Snakes, Features to Delight Darwin
(Full Article off site)
Posted 11/26/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Evolution)
By SEAN B. CARROLL
Published: November 23, 2009
New York Times

Charles Darwin seems to have had a boundless interest in the many forms life takes on earth. He could find something about any animal or plant that piqued his insatiable curiosity, and masses of such observations fueled his prodigious output of books and scientific papers. (more)

Paper Challenges Ideas About 'Early Bird' Dinosaur
(Full article off site)
Posted 10/12/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Evolution)
New York Times

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: October 8, 2009

The "early bird" Archaeopteryx may not be a bird, after all.

The first fossil of the raven-size species was an immediate sensation when it was excavated in 1860, in southern Germany. It had feathers and a wishbone, like birds, but teeth and a long, bony tail, like reptiles. Coming the year after publication of "The Origin of Species," the discovery swayed many scientists into accepting Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. (more)

Fossils Shed New Light on Human Origins
(Full Article off site)
Posted 10/01/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Human Origins)
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ
(Wall Street Journal)

Researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebear they say reveals that the earliest human ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings. (more)

Fossil Find Challenges Theories on T. Rex
(Full article off site)
Posted 09/19/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Evolution)
Paleontologists said Thursday that they had discovered what amounted to a miniature prototype of Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with the oversize head, powerful jaws, long legs — and, as every schoolchild knows, puny arms — that were hallmarks of the king of the dinosaurs.

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier. (more)

Fossil is 'earliest tree-dweller'
(Full Article off site)
Posted 08/02/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Evolution)
Scientists described the finding as the earliest evidence in the fossil record of an "opposable thumb".

In the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, they described how the animal's elongated hands and fingers would have helped it to grip and climb.

This, they say, shows an evolutionary change that allowed animals to live in trees, away from terrestrial predators. (more)

Scientists Find a Microbe Haven at Ocean’s Surface
(Full article off site)
Posted 07/28/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Animals in Action)
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: July 27, 2009
(The New York Times)

The world’s oceans are like an alien world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that 95 percent of them remain unexplored. But the mysteries do not start a mile below the surface of the sea. They start with the surface itself. (more)

Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
(Full Article off site)
Posted 06/27/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Human Origins)
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: June 24, 2009

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter. (more)

Where Art and Paleontology Intersect, Fossils Become Faces
(Full article off site)
Posted 06/07/2009 — by Skip Evans
(Evolution)
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: June 1, 2009

For his first date with a fellow art student, Viktor Deak suggested “Bodies,” the exhibit of flayed and plasticized humans.

She said yes, even though she had already seen it. He thought that was promising. But it was dinner afterward that convinced him this was the real thing.

“Any woman who could go to ‘Bodies’ with me and then eat a steak,” he said, “and still be dainty and fun and all, was a girl I could be with forever.” (more)

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