Morphology and Diet
Category archives for Morphology and Diet
A Remarkable Convergence of Species: The Deadliest Sea Snake
Posted by Greg Laden on November 18, 2012 
Sea snakes are true snakes that look a little like eels because of their horizontally flattened rudder-like tails, and they spend a lot of time…for most species, their entire lives…in the ocean. Only one species seems to be able to move on land at all. They seem to all be venomous, some extremely so. They…
Two chimps walked into a bar …
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2009 … and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped…
Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2008 There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years. By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the…
Size and Scaling in Hominid Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on August 14, 2008 Stephen Jay Gould and David Pilbeam wrote a paper in 1974 that was shown ten years later to be so totally wrong in its conclusions that it has fallen into an obscurity not usually linked to either Gould or Pilbeam. However, they were actually right in ways that they could not have anticipated. And even…
Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2008 There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were “human endemic cretins.” From the abstract of this paper: … We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital…
The Potato and Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on February 19, 2008 Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can’t find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies. This assertion is based on…
What did the immediate ancestor of chimps and humans look like?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 19, 2008 Comparing living chimpanzees to living humans, in reference to the species that gave rise to these two closely related species, is one way to frame questions about the evolution of each species.
The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder
Posted by Greg Laden on December 19, 2007 Homo floresiensis more widely known as the “Hobbit,” may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans. A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the anatomy of H. floresiensis. To explore this we first have to understand the concept of “Humeral torsion.” Humeral torsion is…
Life history trade-offs and human pygmies
Posted by Greg Laden on December 16, 2007 Every few years a paper comes out “explaining” short stature in one or more Pygmy groups. Most of the time the new work ads new information and new ideas but fails to be convincing. This is the case with the recent PNAS paper by Migliano et al. From the abstract:
Human Evolutionary Rate Study
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted by the researchers who wrote this paper. These conclusions typically come from press releases, and then are regurgitated by press outlets,…