Cool courtship display

Sexual selection: elaborate courtship behaviour of male New Guinean bird of paradise. Thanks to Courtney in the evolution class, who sent me the link.

'Saber-Toothed Squirrel' fossil discovered

Dr. Guillermo Rougier and his team discovered two skulls from the first known mammal of the early Late Cretaceous period of South America. The fossils break a roughly 60 million-year gap in the currently known mammalian record of the continent and provide new clues on the early evolution of mammals.

The new critter, named Cronopio dentiacutus by the paleontologists, is a dryolestoid, an extinct group distantly related to today's marsupials and placentals. Cronopio was shrew-sized, about 4-6 inches in length, and was an insectivore with a diet of the insects, grubs and other bugs of the time. It lived when giant dinosaurs roamed Earth -- more than 100 million years ago -- and made its home in a vegetated river plain. The skulls reveal that Cronopio had extremely long canine teeth, a narrow muzzle and a short, rounded skull.

Coevolution Video

Here is "The Evolutionary Arms Race" video we saw in class this morning:

Video: Founder Effect, Bottle Necking, and Genetic Drift

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6JEA2olNts


This video covers some of the concepts from chapter 7.

Natural Selection Game

Learn more about Darwin, test your knowledge of natural selection, and play the natural selection "survival game" - see if your species can survive! Remember: the more variation you have in a population the more likely you are to survive when conditions change!

http://science.discovery.com/interactives/literacy/darwin/darwin.html

New discovery: dinosaur feathers preserved in amber

The most diverse, amber-preserved, fossilized feather collection ever found is shedding new insight into the evolution of dinosaur and bird feathers.The feathers, 11 in total, are believed to be from the Late Cretaceous period, which spanned 99 million to 66 million years ago.It’s the first discovery of three-dimensional dinosaur feathers, and they offer the most comprehensive snapshot of the structure, colour and shape of early feathers.

The Alberta amber collection represents four distinct stages of feather evolution, including primitive single-filament protofeathers – fuzz, really, which scientists believe belonged to non-flying dinosaurs such as mighty tyrannosaurids – and complex structures with side branches that resemble feathers of modern diving birds.

The fossils also reveal that feathers from Late Cretaceous were not uniform in colour: Some were light, some dark.

(article from  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/prairies/albertas-dinosaur-feathers-have-paleontologists-all-atwitter/article2167320/ )

Ring Species - Salamander video

Here is the link to watch the video on salamanders we talked about in class this morning: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/evolution-action-salamanders.html