Amazing four-legged fossil shows how walking whales learned to swim
New Scientist » Evolution
by Michael Le Page
5y ago
Whales used to walk on landA. Gennari By Michael Le PageA fossil of a 43-million-year-old whale that was still able to walk on land on four legs has been found in Peru. It is the first amphibious whale found in the southern hemisphere, and suggests that whales managed to swim across the South Atlantic early in their evolution. The 3-metre-long animal looked a bit like an otter or a beaver, with four legs and a large tail for swimming. “It was still capable of bearing its weight on its limbs,” says Olivier Lambert at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, a member of the team that mad ..read more
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Albino lizards are the world’s first genetically modified reptiles
New Scientist » Evolution
by Michael Le Page
5y ago
CRISPR has been used to make albino brown anole lizardsDoug Menke By Michael Le PageThe CRISPR genome-editing technique has been used to make the world’s first genetically modified reptiles: four albino lizards. The breakthrough may have a wide variety of uses, from studying human eye disorders to tackling invasive pythons. Our ability to tweak the genomes of animals like mice and zebrafish has been hugely useful for medical research. But there are some conditions that are hard to study in existing lab animals. For instance, people with albinism often have vision problems because the genetic v ..read more
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Gaia rebooted: New version of idea explains how Earth evolved for life
New Scientist » Evolution
by Legacy content author
5y ago
For millions of years, Earth has provided water, oxygen and the key elements required by lifeKacper Kowalski/Panos Pictures By Bob HolmesIN 1948, cybernetics pioneer Ross Ashby built a curious machine. The Homeostat was constructed from four interconnected bomb-control units scavenged from the UK’s Royal Air Force. It featured four pivoting magnets, the position of each being determined by that of the others and guided by feedback mechanisms generated using a table of random settings. When Ashby turned the machine on, the magnets would start to oscillate wildly. Sometimes they would return to ..read more
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Animal with an anus that comes and goes could reveal how ours evolved
New Scientist » Evolution
by Michael Le Page
5y ago
The warty comb jelly has an anus like no otherimageBROKER / Alamy Stock Photo By Michael Le PageA jellyfish-like creature has a neat trick that makes it unique among animals: its anus forms only when it needs to defecate, then disappears without a trace. “That is the really spectacular finding here,” says Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who made the discovery. “There is no documentation of a transient anus in any other animals that I know of.” Tamm thinks the discovery might represent an intermediate stage in evolution. In some simple animals, such ..read more
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How the zebra got its stripes: The problem with ‘just-so’ stories
New Scientist » Evolution
by Jacob Aron
5y ago
“How did I get my stripes? It’s a long story…”Tim Caro/UC Davis By Michael MarshallWhen it comes to explaining why zebras have stripes, it’s best to remember that some issues are not black and white. Biologists have been debating the puzzle since Darwin’s time, but a study published on Wednesday offers further evidence for one of the most promising explanations: that the stripes deter biting flies. In the parts of Africa where zebras live, there are blood-sucking horseflies that carry lethal diseases such as trypanosomiasis. Clearly, zebras would do well to avoid being bitten. The idea is that ..read more
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Controversial fossils suggest life began to move 2.1 billion years ago
New Scientist » Evolution
by Michael Le Page
5y ago
The world’s oldest burrows?Abderrazak El Albani By Michael Le PageBurrow-like structures several millimetres in diameter have been found in 2.1-billion-year-old rocks in Gabon, Africa. The structures were made by a moving lifeform of some kind, claim geologist Abderrazak El Albani at the University of Poitiers in France and his team. The team do not know what made the trace fossils, but they speculate that it could be something similar to colonial amoeba or slime moulds – organisms made of cells that normally live separately. The trace fossils were found near bacterial mats that the mysterious ..read more
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Australia has been home to hopping kangaroos for 20 million years
New Scientist » Evolution
by Sam Wong
5y ago
We may have to rethink how kangaroos came to hopPeter Shouten/Australian Geographic By Sam WongAn ancient group of kangaroo relatives called balbarids had multiple ways of getting around, including hopping, bounding and climbing. The finding may mean we have to rethink how modern day kangaroos came to hop. Kangaroo evolution has been difficult to piece together because there are very few fossils older than one or two million years. The prevailing view of kangaroo evolution is that they began hopping when the climate in Australia became drier and wiped out many forests, but new fossil evidence ..read more
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Human or hybrid? The big debate over what a species really is
New Scientist » Evolution
by Legacy content author
5y ago
By Colin Barras BIOLOGY is a messy business. Witness these sage words: “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists minds, when they speak of ‘species’… It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the undefinable.” Strong stuff. And from a surprising source. Charles Darwin wrote those lines in a letter to fellow naturalist Joseph Hooker, just three years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. Darwin clearly had a problem with the word to which his name is now so intimately linked. It turns out he is not alone. Today, almost 160 years ..read more
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Is the idea of species now more trouble than it is worth?
New Scientist » Evolution
by Legacy content author
5y ago
DIVIDE and conquer! This isn’t just a political or military strategy, it is a human imperative. Categorising is in our nature. It is how we make sense of the world, from personal identity to scientific investigation. But sometimes, something happens that illuminates the arbitrariness of our classifications – something like the discovery that our species, Homo sapiens, contains DNA from Neanderthals. Most of us think of a species as a group of individuals that can interbreed to produce fertile offspring. In which case, either humans are hybrids or we have been mistaken in seeing Neanderthals a ..read more
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Exclusive: 600-million-year old blobs are earliest animals ever found
New Scientist » Evolution
by Legacy content author
5y ago
The oldest known animal looked like modern sea gooseberriesRon Offermans, Buiten-beeld/FLPA By Graham LawtonMOVE over, Dickinsonia. This 558-million-year-old creature was named the earliest known animal last year, but New Scientist can now exclusively reveal one that existed even earlier – by more than 40 million years. This previously unknown animal comes from 600-million-year-old rocks in China and doesn’t have a name yet. While Dickinsonia was an Ediacaran – a primitive group of organisms that went extinct about 541 million years ago – the unnamed animal seems to have belonged to a group of ..read more
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