Cool Archaeological Stories!

I stumbled across a couple of cool archaeological stories today.

Interesting Science News

A number of items, ranging from paleontology and developmental genetics to osteology and primatology caught my attention this week.

Interesting Science News From Around The Web

Ruminant diets and the Miocene extinction of European great apes in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. From the abstract: The successful evolutionary radiations of European hominoids and pliopithecoids came to an end during the Late Miocene. Using ruminant diets as environmental proxies, it becomes possible to detect variations in vegetation over time with the [...]

Interesting Evolution and Anthropology News

There is a bunch of interesting news relating to evolution and anthropology. Ed Yong discusses and interesting new study, published in PNAS, on coloration in lizards at White Sands, New Mexico. I have touched on the subject in a previous post. The paper can be found here for those who have access.

Interesting Science Stuff

Something that will make the creationists and ID types sad. Here is the abstract: Vestigial structures occur at both the anatomical and molecular levels, but studies documenting the co-occurrence of morphological degeneration in the fossil record and molecular decay in the genome are rare. Here, we use morphology, the fossil record, and phylogenetics to predict [...]

Interesting Anthropology and Science News

There are several interesting items on Science Daily. First, Monkeys Get A Groove On, But Only To Monkey Music: The similarities in communications between monkeys and people suggest deep evolutionary roots for the musical elements of speech, Snowdon says. “The emotional components of music and animal calls might be very similar, and from an evolutionary [...]

Interesting Anthropology and Paleontology News

There is some interesting news relating to anthropology and evolution – over and above Darwinius masillae (which I will have a couple of posts about next week).

Do Deep Sea Fish Have Good Hearing?

An interesting article over at National Geographic looks at that question: Roughly 90 percent of the ocean is completely dark, beyond the reach of the sun’s rays. The researchers wondered if the fish had evolved to have sharper hearing, which might help them catch prey, find mates, or elude predators in the darkness. The researchers [...]

Interesting Evolution News

There are a number of interesting pieces of evolutionary research in the news. Some are a little on the old side…

Interesting Evolutionary Research

There are are couple of interesting pieces of research in the news. The first concerns tail shedding in island lizards. PhysOrg has the story:

NCSE On YouTube!

The National Center for Science Education has a YouTube Channel!

Interesting Science News

Some interesting news from around the internet. Jenifer Neils reviews a couple of books on looting – including one I reviewed – and provides an interesting take on both.

Interesting Science News

There are three interesting science news items the popped up today.

The Dodo Goes Digital: Aves 3D

PhysOrg.Com has an interesting item about about the 3D scanning of the dodo: Claessens said the dodo skeleton, which was assembled of collected bones rather than those from a single individual, is one of just a handful — perhaps 10 — known around the world. That rarity makes it an important addition to the digital [...]

Interesting Science Picture

The picture below comes from an interesting article called “Adaptation from standing genetic variation. The article was written by Barrett and Schluter and was published in TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution Vol.23 No.1. I’ll get to why I find it interesting this evening.