Reviews
Palaeo-poetry and placental mammals
Recently Science published O’Leary et al.’s - new load of oil to fuel the burning debate on the origins of placental mammals. Just to be clear: there is an important distinction between mammals in general that includes many fossils from the Jurassic as well as the extant platypus, kangaroo and your grandma; and placental mammals […]
Apocalypse Meow
Cats eh? You either love them or you hate them it seems. Well the latest research published in Nature by Loss et al. (2013) will give those who hate them plenty more reason to do so. While those who love their cats may just sit that little bit less comfortably next to their feline companions. […]
Intelligent Design: Part One – a brief explanation and history
Trinity College Theological Society recently held a talk by Dr Alistair Noble titled ‘A Scientific Case for Intelligent Design’ which I attended as, possibly, the only biologist in the room. It was a fascinating, if deeply frustrating, experience. Before I get into the details of the talk, a brief explanation of intelligent design may be […]
Men are from Earth and women are from Earth
We love to explore and our adventures into outer space represent the acme of our derring-do. But when we leave our cozy planet we put an awful lot of stress on our minds and bodies. The billions of years of evolutionary pressures exerted on our ancestors all took place within the confines of Earth so a […]
Hey Tree of Life! How's it growing?
Following the influence of science writers such as S.J. Gould, I always try to look back at the historical perspectives of what I’m studying. These days I'm playing with 3Gb trees so I was delighted by Mindell's 2013 Systematic Biology publication about the Tree of Life. The idea of placing species into the so called […]
You're grounded!
Pterosaurs are the largest animals to have ever flown. Some species had wingspans exceeding 10 metres dwarfing the largest avian challenger. It must have been quite a sight to see one of these things blocking out the Mesozoic sun. But there have been niggling doubts about the ability of the larger representatives to fly. Will […]
No animal is an island
No man is an island; the same could be said for the millions of life forms that populate our planet. Think of all the ways in which organisms interact with each other through predation, parasitism and the countless symbioses. Sometimes a pair of interacting partners can become inextricably linked such is their mutual dependence. Each […]
Friends with benefits
With the apocalypse come and gone we can still theorise about how our downfall will come about. E. O. Wilson wrote that ‘‘sex is an antisocial force in evolution’’. Charlie Cornwallis, his colleagues at Oxford and their promiscuous birds illustrated why this is so. As is so often the case in evolutionary theory the question […]
Smoking nests
We all know that cigarettes and smoking are bad for you. However, a recent Biology Letters paper which was featured on BBC Nature suggests that the discarded remains of cigarette butts may help to maintain the health of some urban birds. Researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico found that smoked cigarette butts incorporated […]
War of the worms
Some of the most successful animals on earth live in societies characterised by a division of labour between reproducing and non-reproducing castes. One role non-reproducing members may undertake is defence. Spectacular examples include the heavily armoured termites and ants. Recently a soldier caste was discovered in an entirely new and unexpected battleground, inside the bodies […]