Sourdough yeasts from a genomic perspective
Current Biology has a fascinating paper by Frédéric Bigey and coworkers examining the genomic variation of bakery yeasts: “Evidence for Two Main Domesticatio...
All posts tagged with non-primate
Neural connections may underlie intelligence in birds
The health and science-oriented magazine STAT has an article from Sharon Begley on recent research that looks at bird intelligence: “Brainiacs, not birdbrain...
Looking for the vulture assist with Neolithic burials
The archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, is one of the most significant early Neolithic villages to have been excavated. It was occupied...
How mice became house mice
A new paper from Thomas Cucchi and coworkers in Scientific Reports probes the early history of the house mouse: “Tracking the Near Eastern origins and Europe...
Goat immunity modified by introgression during and after domestication
Goat domestication may provide another example in which introgression brought new genetic variations conferring advantages for immunity into a population. A ...
Hunting the ghost dogs with camera traps
Cara Giaimo in the New York Times covers a recent research paper that combines camera trap evidence from across a large swath of the western Amazon to examin...
The genetic ancestry of modern lions
Marc de Manuel and coworkers have a new paper in PNAS that presents some new findings about lion population history from whole-genome sequencing. The paper h...
What ancient DNA is telling us about the prehistory and history of the horse
Ludovic Orlando has a great review of recent research into the origins and evolution of domesticated horses: “Ancient Genomes Reveal Unexpected Horse Domesti...
Chicken ancient DNA and natural selection during medieval times
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
Zebra stripes and flies
A fun story by Ed Yong in The Atlantic looks at an experiment that put horses in zebra suits to test whether the stripes confound biting flies: “The Surprisi...
Richard Lee tells a story about the nuclear arms race
Richard Lee is best known to followers of anthropology as one of the co-organizers of the “Man the Hunter” conference in 1966. His fieldwork with the Dobe !K...
The fattest bear
I enjoyed the Washington Post account of the “annual fattest bear contest” in Katmai National Park: “America’s fattest bear has now been crowned”.
Link: The underrated takin
This is a fun article on an underappreciated mammal: “Meet the Takin: The Largest Mammal You’ve Never Heard Of”.
The newfound respect for hybridization and introgression in mammals
An article in Quanta magazine in August by Jordana Cepelewicz is a very readable account of scientists’ newfound respect for hybridization and introgression ...
New project to scan vertebrate diversity across thousands of samples
Science reports on a new initiative to provide 3D scan data on thousands of vertebrates: New 3D scanning campaign will reveal 20,000 animals in stunning deta...
Link: Geese hybridization
Just a note that ducks provide many great examples of hybridization dynamics, particularly invasive ducks. This recent paper on geese by Jente Ottenburghs an...
Photo: Daemonelix
This is a Daemonelix, burrow of the ancient beaver relative Palaeocastor. There is a nice exposure of Miocene deposits at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument...
Should we be surprised that Neandertals, Denisovans, and modern humans didn’t form stable hybrid zones?
We’ve come a long way toward recognizing the complexity of modern human origins and dispersal. Ten years ago, I was one of a relative few who still maintaine...
Mitochondrial evidence of introgression among North American mammoths
Hendrik Poinar and colleagues have a new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution that reports new mitochondrial genomes from 67 North American mammoth sp...
Genetic flatlining of island foxes
Carl Zimmer’s article on “Foxes That Endure Despite a Lack of Genetic Diversity” is interesting and useful:
Short-faced bear convergence and the diversity of American extinct bears
A neat new paper by Kieren Mitchell and colleagues in Biology Letters has an mtDNA phylogeny for some extinct bears of the Americas. The main conclusion is t...
Link: Prairie dogs kill ground squirrels
Ed Yong writes about a long-term study of prairie dog sociality that demonstrated a surprising behavior among females: they kill dozens of ground squirrels: ...
Notable: Penguin population turnover from ancient DNA
Notable paper: Stefanie Grosser, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Christian N. K. Anderson, Ian W. G. Smith, R. Paul Scofield, Jonathan M. Waters. 2016. Invader or resid...
Forget EQ. Forget ‘Machiavellian intelligence’.
Evan MacLean and colleagues write this week in PNAS about the evolution of self-control.
Cave bear DNA from Sima de los Huesos
Jesse Dabney and colleagues, including Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, report on the assembly of a complete mitocho...
Dino size estimation
I know I’m linking a four-year-old post about dinosaurs, but I got this SV-POW post on my feed this morning and it is very relevant to those of us who think ...
Selection is for the dogs
I was really pleased to see the new paper by Erik Axelsson and colleagues Axelsson:2013 on the pattern of recent selection on domesticated dogs. As we began ...
Creative anatomy
Mike Taylor from Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week shows how anatomists get creative with their measurement instruments: “How to measure necks using Dupl...
Hiding above the dinosaurs
The early bin at PNAS has a cool, short paper by Yongjie Wang and colleagues, which matches a ginkgo tree with its insect mimic Wang:mimicry:2012. The cool p...
Building bigger dolphin brains
Ed Yong reports on a new study demonstrating a history of positive selection on the gene ASPM in cetaceans. Bruce Lahn’s group previously showed that this ge...
Polar bear mtDNA replacement
Jerry Coyne uses the occasion of polar bear genetics to give a biology lesson I’ve been trying to teach for 15 years: “A new study of polar bears underlines ...
Rapid adaptation to captivity in salmon
I just want to note this study by Mark Christie and colleagues Christie:salmon:2011 because it is such a clear demonstration of powerful selection working on...
Crows hate cavemen
Stephanie Pappas reports on experiments with social learning in crows.
Old nests
Matt Walker of BBC Earth News has an article about how gyrfalcons have continuously used the same nests for thousands of years “2,500-year-old bird’s nest fo...
A problem of fuzzy mammoths
Paleogenomics is changing the way we study evolution. In a number of cases, it now allows us to study extinct organisms with the same methods as we study liv...
Wolves in coyotes' clothing
Razib’s post on the genetics of canids (“A map of charismatic canid genomic variation”) does a nice summary of a recent paper in Genome Research, by vonHoldt...
Mailbag: Diet and isotopes
Re: “Tartar control and Neandertal plant use”.
Arsenate redux
I wrote a short post about the arsenate-bacteria story last weekend; in the meantime the story has developed. Carl Zimmer ran a long story early this week, r...
Alien biology hype
Rosie Redfield begins to disassemble the NASA-sponsored “alien life forms” story:
Divergent MHC alleles in domesticated sheep
I know, what an exciting headline!
Badger affection
We’re all about the badgers here in Wisconsin. The “badger” nickname came to the state because of miners who came to Southwestern Wisconsin to dig lead – “ba...
Sloth bombers
Brian Switek notes a new study on the locomotor dynamics of sloths. I perked up when reading this passage…
Ridded of rinderpest
Donald McNeil, Jr.::
Mailbag: Zorse pigmentation
Re: Horse-zebra hybrids
Shoe ecology and invasive species
On the topic of invasive species, here’s one about algae spreading worldwide on the soles of hip waders: “Fly Fishers Serving as Transports for Noxious Littl...
Fungus colors
Science this week published a paper on aphid pigmentation, which provides a nice example of an adaptation resulting from lateral gene transfer – in this case...
What kangaroos do…
In the current issue of Heredity, Neaves and colleagues describe the results of their analysis of 12 microsatellite loci and the mtDNA of two kangaroo specie...
The other story about the mammoth DNA
I got to writing about a story a couple of years ago, and then stalled out. That happens every so often – remember, most of my research-related entries are m...
Mailbag: Pitcher potties
Re: Another side of pitcher plants:
Another side of pitcher plants
Jerry Coyne writes about a paper that demonstrates a strange adaptation of certain Bornean pitcher plants: “Good to the last dropping: pitcher plant evolves ...
Babi yaga
Tetrapod Zoology writes about the mysterious babirusa:
Lizard whitening
Ed Yong reports on a study of pigmentation evolution in the lizards of White Sands, New Mexico: “Three desert lizards evolve white skins through different mu...
Tetratracks
Matthew Cobb writes about the Devonian tetrapod trackway story, including:
Ancient penguin mtDNA and substitution rates
Here’s an example of a really incomprehensible press release:
Cichlid colors
I really can’t get over how much work went into the cichlid pigmentation paper that’s out in the current Science (Roberts et al. 2009). The paper examines th...
Horse genomics
An interesting passage from the horse genome paper:
"Filled up with other books"
The 1000 Genomes Project is for people. Now, is it time for 10,000 vertebrate genomes? Erika Check Hayden reports on the idea in Nature news:
Maotherium ears
Natalie Angier writes about the middle ear of a Mesozoic mammal: “In Mammals, a Complex Journey to the Middle Ear”.
The colors of mice
Science this week features an article by Elizabeth Pennisi about the research of evolutionary biologist Hopi Hoekstra. She studies pigment variations in wild...
Whale societies
Wired’s science blog has a piece on cetacean culture and communciation: “Whales might be as much like people as apes are”. Dalhousie University researcher Ha...
Dude, it's called "relaxed selection"
This is a doofy story running on MSNBC without an author byline: “Shrinking of Scottish sheep tied to warming”. Why do I say “doofy”? Take a look at the way ...
A little rewilding
Here’s a Reuters story about attempts to bring back aurochsen and introduce them to Britain. Aurochsen are now extinct in the wild, the last having died in 1...
Neandertals and bears
For most of their prehistory, humans were highly mobile hunter-gatherers. We can expect that Neandertals were also highly mobile, at least compared to sedent...
Live fat die young, bearwise
This story describes research on the longevity and maturation of wild bears who have invaded urban habitat in Nevada:
Lateral gene transfer in evolutionary history
Carl Zimmer describes a recent paper documenting lateral gene transfer across a broad phylogeny of organisms. It’s one of the topics covered in his book, Mic...
Zimmer "flounders"
Carl Zimmer puts in a nice entry on the new flounder evolution paper, covering the history of the question including the debate between Darwin and Mivart abo...
Not the parrot sketch
The New Yorker has a fascinating article about Irene Pepperberg and the way people are grieving over her deceased parrot, Alex:
Handling exponential growth in demographic models
Exponential growth is a feature of current human populations, and was may represent how the human population behaved during some episodes of its demographic ...
Rodent tool use
It's not just any rodents, but the "highly social, intelligent" degus. And they don't use tools in their natural habitats, but were taught specially by rese...
Scandinavian dogs R us?
Mitochondrial phylogeography is a useful tool for the study of wild populations. But applying phylogeography to domestic species is more complicated....
How carnivorous were cave bears?
Charles Q. Choi reports on a new paper by Michael Richards and colleagues:
Inbred mice
At Nobel Intent, Jonathan Gitlin writes about the diversity of lab mice:
The Tao of introgression
Like mathematician Terence Tao hasn't heard that one before, hyuk. But he gives a nice account of the Grants' work on introgressive hybridization of ground ...
Reciprocity and rats
Rutte and Taborsky report in PLoS Biology that their rats know how to be nice to others:
The genetics of refugia
The NY Times gave a short writeup earlier this week to a paper about ancient DNA from arctic foxes:
Skittering not included
Who knew?
Roundup® ready
Larry Moran posts on glyphosate resistance in weed plants:
How to move like a vertebrate
Neurophilosophy has really come to life in the last few weeks. A post earlier this week described the neural circuitry that controls swimming in zebrafish, ...
Scrub jays scrub breakfast
This is interesting:
Waggle information
A nice post on bee dancing and the bee sensory system at Neurophilosophy. From an information perspective, here we have a good example of adapting a nervous...
Girlie fly necroMANIA!
You have to have a pretty weird science story to get traction this week, and Reuters serves one up:
African elephant population structure
I got in a conversation today about this paper by Régis Debruyne:
But was it a tiny-brained dwarf buffalo?
It's a short piece by John Noble Wilford, and there may be little more to say:
Elephants on the attack
Charles Siebert of the Times had a story this weekend about aggression by young bull elephants. It has a name now, HEC (human-elephant conflict). And it has...
Mad alligators and, insert cliché here
On the topic of how to measure intelligence in different species, I found this passage on pp. 256-257 of Georg Streidter's textbook:
How ecology constrains grey wolf gene flow
Not new, but this 2004 paper by Eli Geffen and colleagues concerning population structure in grey wolves has a good discussion of gene flow may be limited e...
Rat races
Read Nick Wade's article about Siberian rat breeding experiments. Two strains of rat: one tame and one aggressive. Now they're screening their genomes to se...
Elephants don't climb hills
At least, not willingly, says this article, citing a short study by Jake Wall et al. in Current Biology.
Meerkat teaching
It's all meerkats all over the place today. Here's an AP article by Randolph Schmid:
Antitrendy mouse evolution
A paper in this week's Science by Hopi Hoekstra and colleagues (DOI link) ends with this provocative paragraph:
Red and black, antennae waving
I am more or less fascinated by these ants who count their steps to find their way home. It's just that we use such a massive amount of cognitive overhead f...
Derby day horse physiology
LiveScience has a story about the qualities of good racing horses. It doesn't talk about breeding too much, but it has a lot of interesting stuff about thei...
The cockroach poll
It's minor election day here in Wisconsin, and I see this story (discovery.com) about how cockroaches "make group decisions":
Cane toad invasion and evolution
The Hawaiian cane toad is a classic case of an invasive species, and its genetics have long been a subject of study for those interested in the spread of sp...
Haast's eagle DNA study
This story about DNA from the extinct New Zealand Haast's eagle is old news, but cool nonetheless. I ran across it doing some reading about the mammoth DNA....
The Mammoth Genome Project
From LiveScience:
"Males may rub them together for as-yet unknown sensations"
I'm not into whale-blogging, but with a quote like that, the narwhal has become today's subject.
Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?
According to this PLoS Biology paper by Timothy Holy and Zhongsheng Guo, mice can sing.
FoxP2 knockout mice
Yesterday's post on mice mating songs left with a final question: Do FoxP2 knockout mice sing?
Do sheep with human brains dream of origami chickens?
From the "nightmarish future" department, this AP story on MSNBC about stem cell experiments creating human tissue inside of other species.
"It's a gene, it's not Soylent Green!"
That's what my wife Gretchen had to say about this quote:
Resurrection ecology
ABC News story
Where did pigs come from?
A study of pig mtDNA sequences by Greger Larson and colleagues in Science establishes that domesticated pigs originated in multiple geographic locations fro...
"Darwin stuck snails on ducks' feet"
Who'd'a thunk it? This story from LiveScience explains all.