Dinosaurs found in unexpected places. In 1933, the Sinclair Oil Corporation sponsored an exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The Earth’s oil reserves, it was thought, formed during the era of the dinosaurs–the Mesozoic Era. The exhibit was so popular, a silhouette of a green dinosaur, a Brontosaurus, became Sinclair’s official logo (pictured left). Gaining popularity, a few decades later at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, Sinclair introduced their expanded exhibit, called Dinoland, featuring life-size replicas of nine different dinosaurs, including their signature 27-foot tall and 70-foot long Brontosaurus. Admission was free.
The exhibit re-enacted the once-popular dinosaur oil production theory along with erupting volcanos, flashing lightning, and bubbling streams. Now, more than a half-century later, dinosaurs found in unexpected places give new insights into the Earth’s massive flooding and plate tectonic events.
Within just months of returning from a 5-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin was quick to start working on a new theory in what he called his “notebooks.” The year was 1837. Etched in a leathery notebook with the letter “B” on the cover, now known as Notebook B, with Darwin’s tree diagram. Starting with “1” at the tree trunk, the twigs and branches represent relationships between species, like a family tree. Species were indicated with sequential letters; simple enough.
Scientists, however, have become increasingly skeptical of Darwin’s tree metaphor to explain how biology works. “Evolution is trickier, far more intricate, than we had realized,” David Quammen explains in his new book entitledThe Tangled Tree (2018). Somehow, Darwin’s tree got tangled. What happened?
The industry’s longest-running research experiment reached a milestone in October studying the evolution of more than 68,000 generations. Biologist Richard Lenski started the now legendary experiment in his laboratory early in 1988 with just 12 flasks seeded with genetically identical bacteria known as Escherichia coli (E. coli). The bacteria have since been growing in a carefully measured solution of glucose, a type of sugar – “food” for bacteria.
Each flask contained just a sparse amount of glucose to create a stressful environment along with a high concentration of citrate, a molecular close cousin of glucose, pushing the bacteria to evolve. Every day, since 1988, Lenski’s laboratory team has transferred a small sample into new 50 mL Erlenmeyer flasks. Although wanting to quit this laborious experiment many times, Lenski has continued this process non-stop for over 30 years – now recognized as the industry’s longest evolution experiment dead-end.
The armored dinosaur fossil preserved in exquisite detail unearthed in a western Canadian oil sand mine highlights the new daunting challenges facing the theory of evolution. This stunningly preserved fossil is shattering long-standing paradigms. “The more I look at it,” said Michael Greshko, science writer for National Geographic, “the more mind-boggling it becomes.”
Caleb Brown (picture-right), a paleobiologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, where the fossil was placed on exhibit in August, explained to Greshko, “We don’t just have a skeleton… We have a dinosaur as it would have been.” The museum is host to one of the largest dinosaur collections in the world. Now the fossil, known as Borealopelta markmitchelli (pictured), has the evolution industry struggling to place a new species in the mythical world of biological evolution, not what they once said it should be.
In 1835, the Galapagos Islands piqued a young British naturalist’s endless curiosity. Equipped with technologies not much beyond a clock, compass, measuring tape, scale, thermometer, clinometer, and microscope, the experience eventually propelled Charles Darwin to propose a new world-shattering theory of evolution in his 1859 book–The Origin of Species. Since then, technological advances have revolutionized scientific investigations upending Darwin’s finches with a new Galapagos icon of evolution.
For the first time, the genome of one of the most unique birds on the iconic islands, the cormorant (pictured), has been sequenced. Unique in that of the more than forty known cormorant species in the world, the Galapagos Islands cormorant is the only species incapable of flying. To explore the genetic reasons, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, have been studying the genome of the flightless Galapagos cormorants associated with the bird’s loss of flight.
Ancient fungal clues recently discovered off the coast of South Africa further stretch the boundaries of the theory of evolution. Birger Rasmussen, a geology professor at the Western Australian School of Mines, was drilling at a depth of 2,600 feet for the purpose of dating the ancient submarine lava in the Ongeluk Formation estimated to be 2.4 billion years old in Northern Cape Province of South Africa when he unexpectedly noticed what appeared to be microfilaments (pictured).
“I was startled to find a dense mesh of tangled fossilized microbes,” Rasmussen said in an interview with LiveScience writer Jerry Redfern last month. To Marlowe Hood writing for Phys.org, Rasmussen recalled that “My attention was drawn to a series of petrified gas bubbles, and when I increased the magnification of the microscope, I was startled.” The bubbles were “filled with hundreds of exquisitely preserved filaments that just screamed ‘life.’” In the words of Science Alertwriter Peter Dockrill, “It’s raising some big evolutionary questions.”
The behavioral evolution in the red fire ant species with the two different types of colonies, one with a single queen and one with multiple queens, has long puzzled biologists. An invisible border seems to exist between the two. Queen ants happening to wander between colonies are quickly destroyed by the male ants. To understand what evolutionary mechanisms might be at play, molecular scientists have recently turned to the genome.
At the Queen Mary University of London, a team of biochemists led by Rodrigo Pracana (pictured below) sequenced the whole genome in both colony types to examine the genetic difference between the two types of colonies – SB and Sb. Surprisingly, rather than finding “slight, successive changes” as predicted by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, they discovered the two genes to be “highly divergent” from each other.
Bioluminescence (pictured left) has fueled folklore legends for thousands of years. From the eight-century Japanese Hotaru firefly legend to the Apache Indian firefly origin of fire celebration, the origin of bioluminescence continues to inspire awe and wonder.
Describing myths and legends with a natural explanation is what drives scientists. “Researchers have long wondered how bioluminescence came to be,” science writer Steph Yin noted in the article “In the Deep, Clues to How Life Makes Light,” published in the Quanta Magazine.
Matthew Davis, evolution biologist at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, investigated the origin of bioluminescence across ray-finned fishes using new genetic evidence. Published in PLoS One (2016) and entitled “Repeated and Widespread Evolution of Bioluminescence in Marine Fishes,” Davis explains –
“Our objectives in this study were to determine the number of independent evolutionary origins of bioluminescence in ray-finned fishes.”
To think that shape affects function – or form follows function – is an implicit assertion used ubiquitously throughout the evolution industry. This assumption, however, is untested. As an evolutionary biologist, Fouad El Baidouri (pictured right below) of the University of Lincoln, UK, explains –
“Despite a few pioneering attempts to link bacterial form and function, functional morphology is largely unstudied in prokaryotes [microbes].”
El Baidouri led a research team in a landmark study to test this long-standing assumption. Their report entitled “Independent evolution of shape and motility allows evolutionary flexibility in Firmicutes bacteria” was published in the journal of Nature, Ecology & Evolution last month.
Elizabeth Allen, of the University of Lincoln, in the article entitled “Reshaping our ideas of bacterial evolution,” published in the journal PhysOrg, explains –
“The shape of bacteria does not influence how well they can move – this is the surprising finding… The findings refute long-held theories that there should be a strong link between the evolution of shape in bacteria and their ability to move.”
Early northeast colonial settlers, William Bradford and Edward Winslow, in 1620 sent out a business prospectus: “Cape Cod was like to be a place of good fishing, for we saw daily great whales, of the best kind for oil and bone.” The American whaling industry was just beginning. Two hundred years later, New England was the premier whaling center in the world. More than 10,000 men set sail on whaling ships in 1857 from New Bedford, Massachusetts, alone. Certainly, whale evolution or extinction was not a popular topic.
Within the next 100 years, during the lifetime of Herman Melville’s mythical Moby Dick (illustrated), the whaling industry was forced to hunt deeper into the ocean and eventually into the southern Atlantic, leaving the north Atlantic population decimated. Since fewer than 100 were known to exist by 1935, whaling was globally banned in 1937. While the population is estimated to have finally increased to 500 in 2013, a Florida research team has uncovered that a genetic mutation is now forcing the whale population into extinction – a whale evolution nightmare.
Darwin, Then and Now, the Most Amazing Story in the History of Science, is a chronicle of who Darwin was, how he developed his theory, specifically what he said, and what scientists have discovered since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.
The book traces the popular rise and fall of evolution theory and its fall as as a scientifically valid theory. With over 1,000 references from Darwin and scientists, Darwin Then and Now retraces developments in the most amazing story in the history of science.
Dinosaurs found in unexpected places. In 1933, the Sinclair Oil Corporation sponsored an exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The Earth’s oil reserves, it was thought, formed during the era of the dinosaurs–the Mesozoic Era. The exhibit was so popular, a silhouette of a green dinosaur, a Brontosaurus, became Sinclair’s official logo (pictured left). Gaining popularity, a few decades later at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, Sinclair introduced their expanded exhibit, called Dinoland, featuring life-size replicas of nine different dinosaurs, including their signature 27-foot tall and 70-foot long Brontosaurus. Admission was free.
Bioluminescence
To think that shape affects function – or form follows function – is an implicit assertion used ubiquitously throughout the evolution industry. This assumption, however, is untested. As an evolutionary biologist, 
