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.”
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 rise and fall of evolution's popularity 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.
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.”
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.
Bioluminescence
