It looks like an insignificant spec of dust, but if scientists are right, it could be the ancestor of us all.

Meet Otavia antiqua, a microscopic, sponge-like African fossil that could be the earliest known animal:

The creature, Otavia antiqua, was found in 760-million-year-old rock in Namibia and was as tiny as it may be important.

"The fossils are small, about the size of a grain of sand, and we have found many hundreds of them," said study leader Anthony Prave, a geologist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K.

"In fact, when we look at thin sections of the rocks, certain samples would likely yield thousands of specimens. Thus, it is possible that the organisms were very abundant."

From these tiny "sponges" sprang very big things, the authors suggest. As possibly the first muticellular animals, Otavia could well be the forerunner of dinosaurs, humans-basically everything we think of as "animal."

Read more at National Geographic: Link (Photo: Anthony Prave/University of St. Andrews)

Before there were forests, wispy plants fell on each other in their struggle to reach the sun, like clumsy teenagers unsure of their growing bodies. Then one plant evolved a simple woody stem. It could grow taller than the other plants, and it stole light from them. It poisoned them with shade. Wars ensued that have lasted hundreds of millions of years. Trees of many kinds arose and struggled with each other to be taller. Any species that does not participate in battle loses out in the darkness of the understory—any species except a few. Those in the clan of the sandalwood evolved a way out of the darkness. They survived by stealing from the trees what they had spent their tall stems fighting for.

Sandalwood discovered deceit. Its roots kissed the roots of trees and slipped inside them to steal. But sandalwood still needed to grow up a little and put out a few green leaves to have enough sugar to thrive. And then came mistletoes. Mistletoe is a common name for several independent lineages descended from sandalwood. Like their ancestors, mistletoe species sink their roots into trees. Unlike those ancestors, they do so in the sky.

The story continues to explain how mistletoe developed its way of reproducing in the treetops. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Darwin Bell)

Ah, the sacrifices that lab mice made. All that perfectly seared tiny organic burger that they have to eat. You know, for science.

Here's how researchers at Harvard University subjected mice to delicious food in order to find out the evolutionary advantage to eating cooked versus raw meat:

"It came out looking like a beautiful little mini hamburger," says Rachel Carmody, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Harvard who cooked up the mini-burgers in Petri dishes.

This feast for furry critters was all in the name of science, of course. Carmody and her colleagues served up the mini burgers as part of an experiment to determine the differences in energy provided by cooked versus raw foods.

It turns out that cooked meat delivers more energy than the raw version — which may have given ancient humans an evolutionary advantage. But the extra energy from cooked food may now translate into unwanted pounds because nutrition labels don't reflect the fact that we process cooked food more efficiently.

Link

One giant leap for evolution.

Alice Gibb from Northern Arizona University and colleagues discovered 6 unrelated species of fish that have evolved the strange ability to jump:

Researchers discovered that at least six different types of fish are able to launch themselves into the air from a solid surface.

The team said this was an evolutionary snapshot of the transition from living in water to inhabiting land. [...]

It suggests that, rather than a rare adaptation that evolved in a select few species, the ability to leap on land is common among bony fishes. So many more of their ancient aquatic relatives might have invaded the land than had previously been thought.

Link

Want to know how a bunch of brawny apes evolved into brainy humans? It all comes down to a pair of tongs and a flame.

People and animals eat basically the same food; the only difference is that we cook our meals. But does the ability to flame-broil a burger and burn a meal really make us that special? According to Harvard anthropology professor Richard Wrangham, it does.

Armed with mounting evidence, Wrangham believes that fire-kissed foods are what separated man from beast, allowing our ancestors to grow bigger brains and evolve into the intelligent creatures we are today.

THE MISSING LINK

The story starts roughly 2 million years ago in the age of the habiline -the so-called “missing link” between humans and apes. Habilines walked upright, made primitive stone tools, and had brains the size of oranges (roughly half the size of our brains today). Like chimpanzees, they subsisted mainly on fruits and veggies, with the occasional bit of raw meat on the side. They had strong teeth to chew all that plant matter, and big guts to process all that fibrous material. For them, digestion took an extremely long time. In fact, it’s believed that their bodies were constantly engaged in processing food. (Even today, chimpanzees spend more than six hours a day just chewing.)

So, how did Homo habilis evolve into Homo erectus? The dominant theory since the 1950s has been that meat-eating was responsible for the shift because it required habilines to gradually develop human intelligence. There’s something to the idea: To hunt game, our apelike ancestors had to reply on more than just physical prowess; they had to be clever and cooperate. The better they got at hunting, the smarter they became.

But the “meat made humans” hypothesis rankled biologist Richard Wrangham. In his 2009 book Catching Fire, Wrangham argues that meat-eating alone cannot account for the tremendous physical changes that occurred in the evolution of humans. Instead, he believes that man’s discovery of fire -and more importantly, cooking- did the heavy lifting.

(Image credit: Banksy work, photo by Flickr user Lord Jim)

For decades, many scientists dismissed cooking as a pleasant byproduct of civilization, a symbol of man’s dominion over nature. But Wrangham builds the case that cooking was crucial to human evolution because it made digestion so much more efficient, increasing the amount of energy our bodies derived from what we ate. As a result, humans became better able to think, hunt, sing, dance, paint on walls, and invent new tools. Ultimately, the top chefs were more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass along cooking techniques to their offspring, along with the physical evolutionary changes that come with them -namely, bigger brains.

The idea that cooked food offers more energy than uncooked food doesn’t immediately make sense. After all, recent studies show that cooking can leach food of its calories and nutrients. To understand the answers, we need to look inside -literally.

GUT FEELINGS

Back in the early 19th century, digestion was a mysterious process. But all that changed in 1822, when a 28-year-old Canadian soldier named Alexis St. Martin was accidentally shot in the belly, leaving portions of his lungs and stomach exposed. Thanks to the quick-thinking work of U.S. Army surgeon William Beaumont, the blast didn’t kill St. Martin. However, it did leave him with a fist-sized hole in his stomach that never closed. Immediately, Dr. Beaumont spotted an opportunity; it was a chance to observe human digestion as it happened.

Alexis St. Martin

Beaumont began introducing foods directly into St. Martin’ stomach and watched what happened. He observed the young man digest cooked lean beef; raw, salted beef; raw cabbage, soup, and cooked potatoes. The doctor quickly realized that the more tender and cooked the food, the more swiftly and easily it passed through the bowels. One experiment was especially telling. At noon one day, Beaumont introduced both boiled beef and raw beef into St. Martin’s stomach. By 2 PM, the boiled beef was gone, but the raw beef exhibited only slight maceration.

St. Martin’s stomach showed that consuming cooked foods makes digestion easier and more efficient. Because it’s already warmed and chopped into pieces, it saves the body work. According to Wrangham, that’s why human colons are so much shorter than those of other primates. Digestion is more efficient, which makes longer digestive tracts unnecessary. It’s also why humans have small, blunt teeth and weak jaws compared to apes, who spend their days chewing through tough, raw food.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RAW FOODS

The flip side of eating cooked foods is that humans are no longer adept at eating raw meals. Simply put, our tummies are just not made for that anymore. But the notion runs contrary to the growing raw food movement in America. Proponents claim that strict raw food diets can lower cholesterol and blood pressure and promote weight loss -all of which is true. But the unbalanced diet comes with problems. A recent German study found that, of the women they followed on totally raw diet, 50 percent of them ceased to menstruate entirely. Additionally, men on raw food diets reported significantly decreased sex drives. So, while catwalk-model proportions might be all the rage, for our ancient ancestors, such reduced reproductive capabilities would have been disastrous.

In the end, we don’t just need hot meals to satisfy our hunger; we need them to fuel our libidos. In a sense, prepared foods are old-fashioned aphrodisiacs. For Homo sapiens, cooking is as natural as the birds and the bees.

A Window Into the Stomach -and the Soul

So, whatever happened to Alexis St. Martin, the man whose stomach helped the world understand digestion? In 1833, more than a decade after he started working with Dr. William Beaumont, St. Martin cut ties with the medical community. The man with the transparent stomach got fed up with being a scientific freak show. When he died in 1880, at the age of 86, St. Martin’s family kept his body for four days to make sure it rotted, and then buried it in an unusually deep grave, hoping to deter any medical interest in his remains.

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The article above, a portion of the special section Shocking Moments in the History of Food written by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

We’ve brought you the stories of how some famous logos have *evolved, but what about the future? At Stock Logos, we see how some logos become simpler over time, and that trend is projected into the future. Of course, some of these companies are projected to encounter, um, “circumstances.” Link -via Boing Boing

*Previously: Tech, Car, Hollywood, Food, Beer, and Fast Food.

Did you know that Okapi are closer to ancient giraffes than modern day giraffes?

When its ancestor the palaetragine was roaming the earth 15 million years ago, evolution seemed to favor the tall survivors who could reach trees, until finally down the line we had giraffes. Yet one set of palaetragine ancestors moved into the forest and never had to change much from the original: the okapi.

Learn more about ancient species that are still around in this fascinating Environmental Graffiti article.

Link Image Via Charles Miller [Wikipedia]

Let’s start with the teen’s love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected.

Seeking sensation isn’t necessarily impulsive. You might plan a sensation-seeking experience—a skydive or a fast drive—quite deliberately, as my son did. Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.

The entire article is available now in the October issue of National Geographic magazine. Link

(Image credit: Kitra Cahana)

Link

Humans might be one of the only animals to use tools as weapons, but Crack has a great list of animals born with weapons built right into their bodies -like the Giant Amazonian Centipede’s ninja skills, which allow him to catch and eat whole bats. Read about the rest at the link.

Link

While plants normally have pretty colors in order to attract bugs and other pollinators, one type of plant has evolved to attract bats using sound. I wonder what’s on its playlist?

The Marcgravia evenia plant relies on bats to pollinate its flowers. But given that their target animals rely on echolocation rather than eyesight, these plants have evolved leaves that are attractive audibly rather than visually. The plant’s leaves are uniquely dish-shaped, with almost hemispherical concave curves. When the bats go out flying, the leaves return an echo that’s louder and broader than other plants, making them easier for the bats to detect — and halving the time it takes to find the foliage.

Link

Link Image via Image*After

In the eternal struggle for survival, animals are constantly evolving new strategies to win. This arms race is particularly evident when looking at the fight between opossums and snakes. Possums have built up a tolerance to pit viper venom by eating the potential predators. This has also helped them protect themselves from bites from rattlesnakes and copperheads. Even more interestingly though, the viper is constantly evolving more deadly poison:

Rapid evolution of both the snake’s venom and the opossum’s venom defense suggest that the two creatures are in a chemical arms race, having evolved in response to each other, according to researchers at the American Museum of Natural History in an article published in PLoS One.

Learn more over at Discovery News.

Link Image via normanack [Flickr]

Intelligent life evolved in the universe – 0nce. The First Intelligent Species became spacefaring but, unlike the adventures depicted in most science fiction, they found an uninhabited universe. Non-intelligent species were too rudimentary or too far away to be detected. Thus, as both a memorial to themselves and to enliven the universe, the First Intelligent Species seeded the necessary DNA for the eventual evolution of intelligent life in the primordial oceans of every planet that could support life. The First Intelligent Species did not only design the DNA to evolve intelligently, but to parallel their own evolution. An application of the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” on the scale of life itself. Our corner of the universe thereby became the home of Vulcans, Romulans, Cardassians, Humans, Betazoids, and other hominid species which are all decedents of the First Intelligent Species. Therefore, in the eyes of the universe, the many hominid species are closely related despite their disparate home planets.

Of course, the theory itself is science fiction, but the mental exercise helps the scientist to enjoy science fiction, no matter how cheesy the alien design. As a bonus, the graphic at the article has twenty aliens you are invited to help identify. Link

I’d like to give a special thanks to The Proceedings of the Ever So Strange and The Book of Animal Ignorance, both of which greatly contributed to the information in this article.

1. The Texas Horned Lizard’s Blood Shooting Defense

Generally, when you’re being attacked by something that wants to eat you, the last thing you want to do is let them get a taste of your delicious, delicious blood to further entice them. But for critters that aren’t as tasty as us humans, this rule applies less and less. In fact, the Texas horned lizard has blood that tastes so gross that it voluntarily gives predators a taste just to show them that they won’t find any pleasure snacking on the lizard. As if that weren’t strange enough though, the source of the lizard’s blood buffet is even weirder …it launches its fluid sample straight from its eye. Even if the taste of the little critter’s blood wasn’t enough to turn away a potential predator, this horrifying scene certainly is!

Source Image via randomtruth [Flickr]

2. The Hippopotamus’ Blood Sweat

Being the most deadly animal in Africa, the hippo doesn’t have much to worry about in terms of predators. Sure, an occasional lion, croc or hyena might munch on the babies, but once these river monsters grow up, they’re pretty much at the top of the food chain. That’s why their biggest defenses aren’t against other creatures, but against the ravaging African sun and disease-causing bacteria. While rolling around in the mud can work as a natural sunscreen, it’s simply not enough when the majority of their day is spent wading through the river. Instead, hippos have developed their own natural sunscreen, which oozes out of their pores in a shocking, bright red color. This strange secretion has earned the appropriately horrific nickname of “blood sweat,” although it contains neither bodily fluid. Instead, it is made up of a number of highly acidic compounds that absorb ultraviolet light, preventing sunburn, and that inhibit the growth of bacteria. While we usually think of the blood sweat as bright red, it actually comes out clear, turns red and then fades to brown as it becomes exposed to the air.

Source Image via Hrosi.org

3. The Komodo Dragon’s Filthy, Disgusting Mouth

Being stuck on an island with no natural predators, the Komodo dragon already has a good evolutionary hand, growing to become the largest living lizards on earth, reaching almost 10 feet long. But as many lizards will be happy to tell you, “size doesn’t matter,” so the Komodos also evolved a quite nasty way to bring down their prey.

To start with, the Komodos have two small venom glands in their lower jaw that can release toxins that can cause swelling, lowered blood pressure, reduced blood clotting , paralysis, shock, hypothermia and extreme pain. But that’s not enough for these foul lizards. They also have some of the all-around most disgusting mouths of any animal on earth. In fact, their saliva contains E. coli, Staphylococcus, Providencia and other deadly bacteria. Each dragon may have up to 57 different strains of bacteria in their mouth at any given time! While Komodos don’t have any problems hunting smaller animals on their island with a simple bite of the neck and maybe a quick tail whip, they also have it easy when hunting larger creatures like water buffalo (or, occasionally, humans). In fact, the dragon will simply bite the buffalo and then follow it around for a day or two until the prey succumbs to the venom and infections resulting from the Komodo bite.

Scientists still don’t know how the dragons survive with so much nasty stuff in their mouths and they can’t run experiments on the captive populations, because the bacteria die out on dragons that aren’t wild.

Source Image via Mats Stafseng Einarsen [Wikipedia]

4. The Pistol Shrimp’s Shooting Claw

Unless you have some sort of rare phobia, chances are, you’ve never found shrimp all that intimidating. If you met the pistol shrimp though, you might change your mind. This crazy crustacean has one disproportionately large claw with two interlocking parts in place of pinchers. When he pulls it back and releases the pressure built up in his claw, it releases a wave of bubbles that contain so much energy that they are as hot as the surface of the sun. The resulting shock waves knock out predators and prey for the shrimp, making his life pretty chill for a small shrimp in the big ocean.

Source Video Link

5. The Anglerfish’s Extreme Sexual Dimorphism

By now, most of you are at least a little familiar with the anglerfish and its strange dangling light orb. Heck, we even sell a cute anglerfish nightlight in the Neatoshop. But what you might not know is that you’ve probably only ever been introduced to the female anglerfish. While plenty of animals display sexual dimorphism to some level, it’s never been quite as drastic as the differences between the male and female anglerfish. In fact, when scientists first discovered the male anglerfish, they thought he was some kind of parasite that fed off of the female …and in a way, they were right.

The male anglerfish is drastically smaller than the female and he does not have a glowing lure on his head and many are so stunted that they can’t eat at all, which means he has to find a female ASAP if he wants to survive. So the male quickly finds a female, bites down on her side and releases an enzyme that dissolves the skin of his mouth and a little of her body so the two can fuse together. Slowly the male atrophies until all that is left of him is a pair of gonads which release sperm whenever the female’s hormones announce that eggs are being released. Scientists have found some anglerfish females with as many as 8 pairs of male gonads attached to their side.

In a small handful of anglerfish species, things can get even weirder if a male can’t find a mate. In these cases, the male will start growing and increase drastically in size, eventually becoming a female himself.

Source Image via Dr Tony Ayling [Wikipedia]

6. The Spotted Hyena’s Strange Sex Organs

If you’re a mother, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that giving birth is no picnic –but just be thankful you aren’t a spotted hyena mother. These poor creatures have a vagina that is fused shut, so intercourse, urination and birth are all performed through the female’s massively large clitoris. The strange organ matches the male’s penis in both size and hardness.

Scientists are still struggling to understand why the female hyena would have evolved this trait. It certainly doesn’t seem beneficial given that one out of every ten births results in the death of the mother and that almost every first-born cub suffocates during birth.

On the upside, while birth may be a serious challenge for female hyenas, they are one of only a handful of creatures that live in a matriarchal society, so at least they have that trade off going for them.

Source Image via Budgiekiller [Wikipedia]

Obviously, there are tons more weird animals with strange adaptations, but these articles have to stop at some point, so maybe I’ll share more with you guys in a future article down the road. Like always though, feel free to share your knowledge relating to the subject in the comments.

The Miss USA Beauty Pageant was held this past weekend (celebrating 60 years no less) and the big question everyone wanted to know wasn’t what these young ladies were going to wear in the swimsuit competition.  We were all sitting on the edge of our seats interested to know their thoughts on the question “Should evolution be taught in school?” See the full video at the link for the fascinating answers.

Link

Recent advances in genetic research have allowed scientists to grow the brain of one animal inside he body of an entirely different species. Is this the dawning of a new era or a scene out of

The idea of splicing animals together isn’t a new one The ancient Greeks fashioned a chimera out of a snake, a goat, and a lion; the Japanese made a baku out of an ox, an elephant, and a tiger. Even today, people are inventing new creatures -only now, they’re using a lot more than their imaginations.

Just ask biologist Todd Streelman. Inside his lab at Georgia Tech, Streelman successfully bred a living animal with the brain of anther species. He started with a cichlid, a type of fish found in Lake Malawai, at the southern tip of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Over the past 500,000 years, hundreds of different species of the cichlid have evolved from a single ancestor, with each new species developing a distinct set of jaws, teeth, brain, and behaviors to fit their respective environments. Streelman took two species of cichlid fish -rock-dwelling cichlids and sand-dwelling cichlids- and figured out a way to grow a sand-dweller’s brain inside the skull of a rock-dweller. From a distance, that might seem like a simple trick in cross-pollination. But it’s no small feat when you consider that the brains of the two creatures are as different as those of chimpanzees and humans.

Todd Streelman

ANIMAL CROSSING

How’d he do it? The trick to Streelman’s success was figuring out how (and when) the brains of different species distinguish themselves during embryonic development. In the earliest stages of life, the brain of almost every animal starts out looking the same. It begins as a small sheet of rapidly dividing cells that are not yet designed for different functions. But this sheet of cells eventually rolls into a tube, and the cells turn into different types of neurons. The neurons then slowly forms connections uniquely tailored to the creature’s lifestyle. In humans, for example, the brain develops a large cerebral cortex capable of processing language and consciousness. In various species of cichlid fish, the forebrain changes and grows depending on its future environment. More specifically, the sand-dweller’s forebrain develops a large hind region for surviving in open water, while the rock-dweller’s forebrain develops a large front region to navigate Lake Malawi’s murky, cavernous bottom.

In both species, the size and shape of the forebrain is determined by the expression of a gene called Wnt1. In sand-dwellers, this gene sends out a strong signal, while in rock-dwellers, Wnt1′s signal is weak. As part of his study, Streelmen took rock-dweller embryos and placed them in water treated with lithium chloride -a salt that’s known to increase the strength of the Wnt1 signal. This caused the rear section of the rock-dweller’s brain to grow until its brain looked like that of a sand-dweller. In other words, by simply  changing the expression of a single gene, Streelman was able to Frankenstein a new fish.

Cichlid embryo

OF MICE AND MEN

While Streelman has proven that he can grow one species’ brain inside another’s body, there’s no telling if his patchwork creations can survive in their natural environments. To date, most attempts to manipulate neural development in animals have led to brains that look promising in the land but fail to function in the real world. In 2002, for instance, researchers manipulated a mouse’s genetic signals to increase the size of its cerebral cortex. The cortex grew dramatically, forming folds indicative of the intelligence in high-order mammals and humans. But the mutation proved fatal, and the mouse died before it was born.

Some scientists posit that the mouse’s death may have had more to do with the complex relationship between the animal and environment and less to do with ill-suited manipulation. Georg Striedner, and evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine, has found that many animals go through a phase during early development in which they’re particularly vulnerable to injury, starvation, or disease. In order for an animal to survive, something in their external world has to protect them. For instance, many species go through a prolonged period of rapid cell division before their brains become neurons. This ultimately leads to a larger brain, but it also means that the animal’s brain is not fully formed at birth. Parrots are a good example. After parrots hatch, their brains aren’t particularly developed, which forces the babies to rely on their mothers for food. That means that the mothers’ feeding behaviors must have evolved at the exact same time that parrots evolved to have larger brains. Otherwise, parrots would have never become so smart.

Cichlid fish

The process of evolving new traits is clearly complicated. Labs can create animals with shiny new traits, but that doesn’t mean the animals can handle the complexity of the world around them. As for Streelman’s fish, no one knows how their manipulated brains will affect their behavior -or, for that matter, how they’ll fare in nature. In many ways, though, that isn’t the point. The goal of Streelman’s research isn’t to grow new and funky animals; it’s to learn how animals evolve. By discovering the relationship between the animal’s genome and its brain development, scientists ultimately hope to pinpoint the genetic basis of of human thought and behavior. It just may be that, along the way, creatures like the chimera and the baku become more than the stuff of ancient folklore.

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The article above, written by Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

In a new study, researchers have assessed the potential for photosynthetic life in multi-star systems with different combinations of sunlike stars and red dwarfs to figure out what plants might be like. The team has speculated that on an Earth-like planet with two or three suns, the vegetation may appear black or grey.

“If a planet were found in a system with two or more stars, there would potentially be multiple sources of energy available to drive photosynthesis,” said PhD student Jack O’Malley-James from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

“The temperature of a star determines its colour and, hence, the colour of light used for photosynthesis. Depending on the colours of their star-light, plants would evolve very differently.”

If a life form evolved to use two different colors of light for energy, the vegetation would appear black to our eyes. They might even develop the ability to use infrared or ultraviolet light that we can’t see at all to power photosynthesis. Link -via reddit

If Evolution Really Works – $9.95

Are you looking for the perfect Mother’s Day gift for your favorite multitasking Mom?  Well, look no further! You need the If Evolution Really Works… T-shirt from the NeatoShop.  This T-shirt is all but  guaranteed to give your hard working Mom a well deserved laugh.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Funny T-shirts and Mother’s Day Gift!

Paleontologist Josep Quintana Cardona of the Mediterranean island of Minorca and colleagues have discovered the fossils of the largest rabbit that ever lived on Earth:

The new hunk of a rabbit, now named Nuralagus rex, shows the kind of unusual turn that evolution can take on islands. “Gigantism happens,” explains Brian Kraatz of Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif. When pioneer animals start colonizing an island, rates of evolution typically speed up at first, he explains. Small creatures can supersize, and big ones can shrink. [...]

So far no plausible rabbit-eaters have turned up among fossils from the same stretch of time on Minorca, so the big bunnies could have evolved larger and larger body size without pressure to maintain speed and agility to escape predators. The relatively short, stiff spine of the fossils suggests that Nuralagus didn’t hop much, if at all, say Quintana Cardona and colleagues. They describe its pace as “low-gear walking.” [...]

What the rabbit king of Minorca did have were paws adapted for digging, a help in finding food to sustain its regal size. So far, though, there’s no sign of giant carrots.

Link

Research carried out in Richard Lenski’s lab at Michigan State University in East Lansing, and published today in Science 1, shows that rapidly evolving ‘hare’ bacteria were eventually wiped out by their more sluggish rivals.

The reason was that the ‘tortoise’ bacteria had a higher ‘evolvability’, or a greater potential to take advantage of future beneficial mutations, than their speedier competitors, despite a tendency to accumulate such mutations at a slower rate. [...]

Cooper and his colleagues looked at two Escherichia coli clone lineages, sampled after 500, 1,000 and 1,500 generations of evolution. They came from a long-term bacterial evolution experiment running in the lab.

By looking for the presence of five beneficial mutations, the researchers found that ‘hare’ bacteria had more advantageous genetic changes than ‘tortoises’ after 500 generations, suggesting they were more likely to go on to successfully survive and reproduce, and to eventually wipe out their competitors altogether.

But looking at the later generations, the team found that ‘tortoises’ had overtaken ‘hares’ and gone on to dominate the population.

Link

"One of the more troubling aspects of human nature is that we evaluate people differently depending on whether they’re a member of our ‘ingroup’ or ‘outgroup,’" Santos said. "Pretty much every conflict in human history has involved people making distinctions on the basis of who is a member of their own race, religion, social class, and so on. The question we were interested in is: Where do these types of group distinctions come from?"

The answer, she adds, is that such biases have apparently been shaped by 25 million years of evolution and not just by human culture.

Link

Mou thinks that similar genetic tweaks have happened time and again in the evolution of birds. Many groups have lost their neck feathers independently, including vultures, the marabou stork, and large flightless birds like ostriches and emus. Naked necks allow vultures to stuff their heads into carcasses without soiling any feathers; in other cases, a naked neck probably helps its owner to keep cool in hot climates.

Whatever the benefit, it seems that it’s particularly easy for birds to evolve a naked neck, rather than another part of their body. After all, Mou found that the necks of embryonic ducks, turkeys, quails and guinea fowl all have much higher levels of retinoic acid than the rest of the body. This pattern would normally be innocuous, completely hidden from natural selection. But it allows BMP-boosting mutations to denude the neck in one fell swoop, while keeping the rest of the body covered in feathers. As Mou writes, “An underlying map within the skin provides a one-step route to a bare neck.”

The post goes into detail about how the genes initiate the production of chemical activators and inhibitors, and ends with a parable from Alan Turing that explains the concept in layman’s terms. Link

(Image credit: Demontux)

This chart makes me hungry. From Abstruse Goose. Link -Thanks, Oscar!

Fish in the Hudson River (US) have developed an immunity to polychlorinated biphenyls, a type of toxic chemicals developed in 1929. They’ve done so at an amazing speed:

“This is very, very ra­­­­­­­­­­­­pid evolutionary change,” said Isaac Wirgin, an environmental toxicologist at New York University’s School of Medicine, and the study’s lead investigator. “Normally you think of evolution occurring in thousands to millions of years. You’re talking about all this occurring in 20 to 50 generations maybe.”

The fish in question is called the tomcod, and scientists have determined the specific gene which has changed:

It turns out the fish sport a handy modification to a gene encoding a protein known to regulate the toxic effects of PCBs and related chemicals, called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor2, or AHR2.

The fish are missing six base pairs of DNA of the AHR2 gene, and the two amino acids each triplet would code for. PCBs bind poorly to the mutated receptors, apparently blunting the chemicals’ effects.

The adaptation occurs almost universally in Hudson River tomcod, but crops up only infrequently in two other tomcod populations—in Connecticut’s Niantic River and the Shinnecock Bay at Long Island’s south shore.

Link via reddit | Photo: Mark Mattson, Normandeau Associates

There were several plausible hypotheses for how the butterflies might have evolved. They might have evolved in the Amazon, with the rising Andes fragmenting their populations. If that were true, the species would be closely related to one another.

But that is not what Dr. Pierce found. Instead, she and her colleagues found that the New World species shared a common ancestor that lived about 10 million years ago. But many New World species were more closely related to Old World butterflies than to their neighbors. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated.

“By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues also investigated Nabokov’s idea that the butterflies had come over the Bering Strait. The land surrounding the strait was relatively warm 10 million years ago, and has been chilling steadily ever since. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found that the first lineage of Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the falling temperatures.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is that Vladimir Nabokov. He is better known outside scientific circles as the proclaimed author of Lolita and other novels. Link -via The Loom

(Image credit: Vlad Dinca)

Well, he may be onto something: scientists discovered that our brains are actually shrinking!

The downsizing of human brains is an evolutionary fact that took science writer Kathleen McAuliffe by surprise.

"I said, ‘What? I thought it was getting bigger!’" she tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden. That was the story up to 20,000 years ago, she learned. Then, the brains of our ancestors reversed course and started getting smaller — and they’ve been shrinking ever since.

Cro-Magnon man, who lived in Europe 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, had the biggest brains of any human species. In comparison, today’s human brain is about 10 percent smaller. It’s a chunk of brain matter "roughly equivalent to a tennis ball in size," McAuliffe says.

The experts aren’t sure about the implications of this evolutionary trend. Some think it might be a dumbing-down process. One cognitive scientist, David Geary, argues that as human society grows increasingly complex, individuals don’t need to be as intelligent in order to survive and reproduce.

I don’t know about the science, but it sure explains Jersey Shore! Link

Photo: Emergency Inflatable Brain from the NeatoShop

Having cured cancer and other serious ailments, a team of Japanese scientists from the University of Osaka turned to the next most vexing scientific problem facing the world today, the lack of singing mice, and licked that problem too. No seriously. Singing mouse.

A team of researchers at the University of Osaka created the animal in their "Evolved Mouse Project", in which they use genetically modified mice that are prone to miscopying DNA and thus to mutations.

"Mutations are the driving force of evolution. We have cross-bred the genetically modified mice for generations to see what would happen," lead researcher Arikuni Uchimura told AFP.

"We checked the newly born mice one by one… One day we found a mouse that was singing like a bird," he said, noting that the "singing mouse" was born by chance but that the trait will be passed on to future generations.

"I was surprised because I had been expecting mice that are different in physical shape," he said by telephone, adding that in fact the project had also produced "a mouse with short limbs and a tail like a dachshund".

Disney, understandably, should be worried:

Uchimura dreams of further "evolution" of mice through genetic engineering.
"I know it’s a long shot and people would say it’s ‘too absurd’… but I’m doing this with hopes of making a Mickey Mouse some day," he said.

Link

Now, if you were to breed a Frankenmouse, would you really make a singing mouse? I mean, what’s the military application of that?

“It’s very exciting to come to this conclusion,” said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.

He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he says, “this changes the whole picture of evolution.”

The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.

Sir Paul Mellars, a prehistory expert at Cambridge University, said the study is reputable, and the find is “important” because remains from that critical time period are scarce, but it is premature to say the remains are human.

The archaeologists from Tel Aviv University are confident that other human fossil evidence will be found at the site. Link -Thanks, özi!

(Image credit: AP/Oded Balilty)

For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.

These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link

If Darwin were alive, he’d probably lament that thousands of years of evolution can quickly be undone (de-evolved?) by just a few hours of videogaming. In this T-shirt design, Neatoramanaut Mike Jacobsen poked fun at the "Evolution of Gamers": Link

More Mike Jacobsen T-shirts at the NeatoShop | More Gifts for Geeks

Early in his career as a geologist, Dougal Dixon developed an interest in fossils and paleontology. But he took that curiosity in a unique direction. Dixon has published several books on speculative evolution — imagining animals that may have evolved if conditions were different. Pictured above is an illustration from one of his books depicting a future version of humanity:

In Man After Man, genetically superior humans abandon a polluted Earth to colonize space. The remaining Homo sapiens tinker with their gene codes for a thousand years to achieve immortality. One such species is the Tic, who graft back-up organs and limbs onto their bodies like Mr. Potato-Head made flesh.

Link | Official Website

Scientists studying a species of Australian lizard called the yellow-bellied three-toed skink discovered that they’re seeing evolution in action: the lizard lays eggs on coasts but birth babies in mountains.

Evolutionary records shows that nearly a hundred reptile lineages have independently made the transition from egg-laying to live birth in the past, and today about 20 percent of all living snakes and lizards give birth to live young only.

But modern reptiles that have live young provide only a single snapshot on a long evolutionary time line, said study co-author James Stewart, a biologist at East Tennessee State University. The dual behavior of the yellow-bellied three-toed skink therefore offers scientists a rare opportunity.

"By studying differences among populations that are in different stages of this process, you can begin to put together what looks like the transition from one [birth style] to the other."

Link – Thanks Ethan!

Paleontologist Philip Gingerich looks for sea monsters in the Egyptian desert. He assembles fossils of ancient whales that died there when it was covered by an ocean. One such whale is the Basilosaurus, which had small hind legs.

“Complete specimens like that Basilosaurus are Rosetta stones,” Gingerich told me as we drove back to his field camp. “They tell us vastly more about how the animal lived than fragmentary remains.”

Wadi Hitan—literally “valley of whales”—has proved phenomenally rich in such Rosetta stones. Over the past 27 years Gingerich and his colleagues have located the remains of more than a thousand whales here, and countless more are left to be discovered.

Researchers hope that whale fossils can help them understand how a land mammal evolved into an aquatic form that became our modern whales. Link

(Image credit: Richard Barnes/National Geographic)

The latest theory – and it’s a surprise this hasn’t come up before, given biologists’ fixation with it – is that the long necks are the result of sexual selection: that is, they evolved in males as a way of competing for females.

Male giraffes fight for females by "necking". They stand side by side and swing the backs of their heads into each others’ ribs and legs. To help with this, their skulls are unusually thick and they have horn-like growths called ossicones on the tops of their heads. Their heads, in short, are battering rams, and are quite capable of breaking their opponents’ bones.

Having a long and powerful neck would be an advantage in these duels, and it’s been found that males with long necks tend to win, and also that females prefer them.

The "necks for sex" idea also helps explain why giraffes have extended their necks so much more than their legs. If giraffes evolved to reach higher branches, we might expect their legs to have lengthened as fast as their necks, but they haven’t.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits

The English title is From the Big Bang to Tuesday Morning, a 2000 film by Quebec animator Claude Cloutier. -via Everlasting Blort

We’ve previously posted the wonderful murals and stop-motion animation of the artist Blu. This video is his depiction of the Big Bang and the evolution of life. The story is told with moving murals that sprawl over an urban landscape.

Link via Albotas | Artist’s Website

“The cursor on the origin of complex multicellular life is no longer 600 million years ago, as has long been maintained, but more like 2.1 billion years,” said Abderrazak El Albani, a researcher at the University of Poitiers and lead author of the study.

The findings were published in the British journal Nature.

Up to now, conventional scientific wisdom held that the planet was populated only by single-celled microbes until the so-called Cambrian explosion, a major surge of biodiversity that began some 600 million years ago.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: CNRS

Steve Rose created an enormous timeline of the evolution of life on earth, drawn to scale. Once you click on the link, just keep scrolling to the right. Each inch represents two million years.

Link via reddit

Growing to just over 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall, A. sediba has a number of key traits that some would say mark it as an early human, like Homo habilis, which many consider the first human species.

A. sediba, for example, had long legs and certain humanlike characteristics in its pelvis, which would have made it the first human ancestor to walk—perhaps even run—in an energy-efficient manner, the study says.

However, there are also many apelike traits in the new species. Link

(image credit: Brett Eloff)

Kanazawa’s theory is that intelligence—particularly our ability for on-the-spot problem solving and reasoning—arose as an adaptation to deal with the unusual and unexpected, such as a sudden forest fire.

Since disasters like that are rare in daily life, responding to them wouldn’t likely be something our ancestors were hard-wired to "know" how to do. Surviving the fire required both the ability to think up a new behavior, and the willingness to try it out.

Passed down via genetics, those two traits are still the calling cards of an intelligent brain—expressed as a tendency toward adopting nontraditional social values and preferences, Kanazawa says in his new study, published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

As a result of their iconoclastic ancestry, he suggests, people with higher levels of intelligence are more likely to adopt social values and behaviors that are relatively new to human life—liberalism, atheism, staying up late, and (for men) monogamy, for example.

Link

The oldest dinosaur fossil ever found dates back around 230 million years. But the fossils of around a dozen specimens of a new animal called Asilisaurus kongwe, or silesaur, found in Tanzania lead researchers to believe dinosaurs diverged from another evolutionary line around 243 million years ago.

“Back then it was a very large river system, maybe something like the Mississippi today,” said lead author and University of Texas at Austin paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt. During that time, Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India were all one giant continent called Gondwana.

Though silesaurs are very closely related to dinosaurs, they lack the open hip-sockets that are universal in dinosaurs. The Asilisaurus was a small, four-legged creatures with a long tail. Their beak-like jaws and leaf-shaped teeth helped the animals eat the soft, fibrous leaves of the primordial palms, ferns and conifers that were prevalent during the Triassic period. That suggests that, while the animal may not have been exclusively vegetarian, a good portion of its diet came from plants, he said.

The silesaur changes the conventional wisdom that the dinosaur’s closest relatives were predators. Link

In chimpanzees, he points out, dominant apes will oftentimes extend an open hand to distressed subordinates as a sort of calming gesture; and in some chimp communities, individuals will clasp hands overhead as they manually groom each other. In humans, in contrast, it’s most often the subordinate who initiates the handshake, particularly toward dominant people they wish to impress.

Link | Photo: US House of Representatives

Scientists have discovered what may be the world’s oldest set of footprints. The fossil record may be evidence of a four-legged animal’s first steps on land 397 million years ago:

Scientists tell the journal Nature that the fossil trackways even retain the impressions left by the "toes" on the animals’ feet.

The team says the find means that land vertebrates appeared millions of years earlier than previously supposed. [...]

They represent the movements of many animals as they scurried around what would have been a tropical muddy shoreline in the Middle Devonian Period of Earth history.

Slabs of carbonate rock are dappled with prints that range in size and detail. Some indentations are obscured where successive animals have trampled over the same patch of ground; but others retain exquisite features of the pads and digits that made them.

Link

Our forebears abandoned their easier foraging habits, traveling longer distances through a tropical landscape to acquire sufficient food to survive. Adding meat to their diets meant more calories, but finding prey also took more work. Their activity level increased and with it their need to dissipate body heat to avoid tissue damage. By 1.6 mya, protohumans had long legs for sustained walking and running. Along with that trait came naked skin and a large number of eccrine sweat glands, which produce moisture that removes body heat through evaporative cooling. The hairs on our head also help to combat overheating, by shielding our big brain from direct sun.

Link | Photo: US Department of Energy

Prions are rogue version of a protein called PrP. Like all proteins, they are made up of chains of amino acids that fold into a complex three-dimensional structure. Prions are versions of PrP that have folded incorrectly and this misfolded form, called PrPSc, is social, evangelical and murderous. It converts normal prion proteins into a likeness of its abnormal self, and it rapidly gathers together in large clumps that damage and kill surrounding tissues.

Li has found that variation can creep into populations of initially identical prions. Their amino acid sequence stays the same but their already abnormal structures become increasingly twisted. These “mutant” forms have varying degrees of success in different environments. Some do well in brain tissue; others thrive in other types of cell. In each case, natural selection culls the least successful ones. The survivors pass on their structure to the “next generation”, by altering the folds of normal prion proteins.

Scientists are not ready to classify prions as living things, even though this discovery may lead to some refinements in the definition of life. Link

While sickle cell anemia is the best known of these evolutionary diseases, it is not the only one. Migraines, depression and bipolar disorder are all passed down genetically, and there’s a good reason these traits that seem to be negative haven’t been eradicated through the millenia.

Migraines

Migraines don’t just cause majorly painful headaches, they also stimulate the nervous system, making people far more sensitive to light and sound. While this doesn’t really help modern day migraine sufferers, it could help save someone’s life in prehistoric times. Scientists speculate that migraines allowed prehistoric men and women to be one step ahead of their predators and their prey, making them more fit for survival.

Source Image Via Migraine Chick [Flickr]

Depression

While between 30 to 50 percent of all people suffer from depression at some point, it doesn’t seem the condition would offer any advantages. Surprisingly, depression actually helps people focus on their problems and then think more clearly about the possible solution to the issues that are bothering them.

Studies show that people who are depressed tend to score better on complex problems in intelligence tests than those who are not. Side effects of depression, such as lack of sexual interest and lack of appetite, can even help prevent distractions from our problem solving abilities.

Source Image Via Darkwood67 [Flickr]

Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder works in a much different manner. When individuals inherit severe bipolar disorders, they can have a hard time concentrating, making sound decisions, feeling comfortable in social situations and organizing their time. But, when someone gets the right combination of the genes that cause bipolar disorder, they can see increased creativity, courage and productivity.

Source Image Via Ventolinmono [Flickr]

In order to make lunge-feeding work, you have to have a really big mouth to capture enough water in one gulp. But in order to have a big mouth, you need a big body. And in order to keep that big body running, you need to get a lot of food. And in the very act of getting that food–diving deep, lunging open-mouthed, and then pushing a school-bus-sized volume of water forwards–requires a lot of energy on its own.

This type of feeding might explain the size of whales.

If the scientists are right, they may have discovered one of the big ironies in evolution. Lunge-feeding may have allowed whales to become the biggest animals ever to roam the planet. But this was not an open-ended invitation.r. Once whales got large enough, lunge feeding itself became so costly it prevented them from getting any bigger.

Link

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.

Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.

Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range. A 2006 report in the journal Current Anthropology documents persistence hunting among modern hunter-gatherers, including the Bushmen in Africa.[...]

There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.

Link via Instapundit | Image: U.S. Secret Service