A South American cactus named Espostoa frutescens is pollinated by bats. As bats are active at night, how do bats find flowers in dark? Some bat-pollinated flowers are able to reflect bats’ echolocating sounds, so scientists at Nuremberg Zoo, Germany and Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands, studied these cacti to see if they had any special […]
Swedish and Norwegian palaeontologists have studied fossilised ichthyosaur tail bones found in Spitsbergen, a remote island north of Norway. The fossils were embedded in a limestone boulder dated as 284.8 million years old, putting them in the Lower Triassic period of the evolutionary timetable. After studying the 11 articulated tail bones the researchers concluded they […]
Tiger snake jaws evolve, claim scientists who studied tiger snakes on Carnac Island – a tiny rocky island off the coast of western Australia. The snakes are the descendants of a collection of snakes believed to have been taken to the island in 1930 by a travelling showman who was in trouble with the authorities […]
As Arctic regions in North America and Russia are warming brown bears are moving north so they are crossing paths with polar bears more often. Brown bears and polar bears can mate and produce fertile offspring, referred to as “brolar” bears, and these hybrids bears are becoming more common, and the hybrids are also breeding […]
A century ago biologists suggested that butterfly wing patterns were formed from variations in a basic ground plan that was somehow manipulated to produce the distinct patterns in different butterfly species. Scientists at Cornell University and The George Washington University have now carried out a study that “explains how DNA that sits between genes – […]
Scientists at Curtin University and Flinders University claim to have found “the heart of our evolution” in the fossil of a fish found in a rock formation in Kimberley region of Western Australia claimed to be 380 million years old. This age puts it in the Devonian period of the evolutionary timetable, and the Editor’s […]
Alan Pan, an engineer based in Los Angeles, USA, has designed and built a device that enables snakes to walk on four legs. The device consists of a long tube open at both ends that a snake can crawl into. Attached to this are four robotic legs, each fitted with servomotors. The walking pattern is […]
The giant panda is well known for eating bamboo and having an extra “thumb” to help it hold onto and manipulate the bamboo stems as it eats them. The “thumb” is not an extra digit, but a protrusion resulting from an enlarged wrist bone called a radial sesamoid. A group of scientists from various USA […]
For around one hundred and fifty years students have been dogmatically told giraffes have evolved long necks by stretching them to browse from tall trees. Chinese scientists studying a fossil skull and vertebrae of an extinct “giraffoid”, have now come up with the new theory. “Giraffoids” are a group of mammals that includes living giraffes […]
Palaeontologists in Brazil have studied the head of a pterosaur named Tupandactylus imperator, andclaim to have found “simple and branched feathers” on the back of its crest. They examined these with an electron microscope and found they contained various shaped melanosomes – tiny vesicles containing the pigment melanin. Variation in the shape of melanosomes is […]