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Early Man

Early Man in Trouble
October 28, 2010
New findings (or claims) are throwing long-held beliefs about human ancestors into disarray.  Early people were smarter, and traveled farther, than paleoanthropologists thought.     One report summarized by PhysOrg says, “A highly skillful and delicate method of sharpening and retouching stone artifacts by prehistoric people appears to have been developed at least 75,000 years […]
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Amazing Facts

Amazing Insects Defy Evolution
October 26, 2010
Two recent articles about insects call for the ring buoy on the H.M.S. Darwin.  The first is about fossil amber from India, reported by the BBC News.  “We have complete, three-dimensionally preserved specimens that are 52 million years old,” one of the discoverers announced with astonishment, “and you can handle them almost like living ones.”  […]
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Dinosaurs

Kinder, Gentler Dinosaurs Envisioned
October 6, 2010
See if this statement by Tim Rowe [U of Texas at Austin] meets your mental picture of dinosaurs after a lifetime of movies: “We used to think of dinosaurs as fierce creatures that outcompeted everyone else,” he said.  “Now we’re starting to see that’s not really the case.  They were humbler, more opportunistic creatures.  They […]
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Birds

Super Penguin: Seeing Is Believing, But Is It Understanding?
October 1, 2010
Another fossil of a giant penguin in Peru has been found (cf. 06/26/2007).  It apparently had reddish-brown underwings and stood as tall as a man.  It must have been a strong swimmer.  Nicknamed “water king,” the mammoth penguin was placed at the 36 million mark on the evolutionary timeline.  One remarkable feature of this fossil, […]
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Darwin and Evolution

More Neanderthal Promotion
September 22, 2010
It’s a good time to be a Neanderthal.  You’ll get more respect than ever before from paleoanthropologists.  The latest example, published in PhysOrg, is headlined, “Neanderthals more advanced than previously thought.”  Julien Riel-Salvatore [U of Colorado at Denver] says he is “rehabilitating Neanderthals” by challenging a half-century of “conventional wisdom” that portrayed them as numbskulls.  […]
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Birds

Dino-Bird Link Confused by New Fossil
September 9, 2010
A “bizarre” new dinosaur fossil found in Spain with a hump on its back that resembles a fin also has quill knobs on its arms, interpreted as attachment points for feathers.  For this reason, the BBC News announced that it “may” yield clues to the origin of birds.”  It has been named Concavenator corcovatus and […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Graveyards and Arctic Tortoises: Who’s Got the Context?
August 24, 2010
Science articles often go beyond the data.  A jumble of bones found on an island is boring; people want a story of what they were, and how they got that way.  Many scientists and reporters are only happy to fulfill that curiosity.  But are the stories they tell, usually presented as fact, the only way […]
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Cosmology

Conjuring Up Evolutionary Implications from Current Data
August 11, 2010
What does observable reality imply about unobservable reality?  Some scientists say, a lot.  But is unobservable reality really real?  Or is it an oxymoron?  A couple of recent articles in the science media show scientists observing things in the present, then saying they have “huge implications” for things no scientist ever observed.     In […]
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Cell Biology

Explosion of the Blob
August 5, 2010
Some scientists are looking into the folds of a sponge for clues about the Cambrian Explosion – the sudden emergence of all the major body plans in the geological blink of an eye.  What they are finding is more complexity than a first glance at the simple creatures would expect.     A draft genome […]
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Birds

Getting Animals from Here to There
July 30, 2010
The world is a big place, and most animals are small.  Yet many animals are found far from where their presumed ancestors lived.  Most birds, naturally, can fly long distances, and some sea creatures can cross the oceans with the help of currents.  That cannot explain all the cases, however.  Here are some attempts by […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Evolution of Segmentation Leads to Playing God
July 28, 2010
Most animals come in segments – body plans that are divided into more-or-less similar parts.  Arthropods, worms and vertebrates are examples (including humans, with their vertebral segments and rough division into head, thorax and abdomen).  Where did the idea of segmentation come from?  Some French evolutionists think it just appeared by chance and changed the […]
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Fossils

Scratching Heads With Imaginary Stars
July 21, 2010
It was lurking out there, astronomers said.  Our sun’s evil companion, invisible, dark, like a stealthy general of an enemy force, wandered silently in hiding, waiting for the next opportunity to order its agents of death into combat.  Its name was Nemesis.  Every 27 million years, using its gravity, it sent comets from the Oort […]
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Birds

Revising Dinosaurs
July 14, 2010
Reconstructing a lost world from fossils is an inexact science.  The realization that two species of dinosaur were different growth stages of the same species is just one example of the difficulty of drawing conclusions about past ecological conditions.  It raises additional questions about the mental visions we have of the world of dinosaurs.   […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Do New Fossils Soften the Cambrian Explosion?
July 5, 2010
Look at the picture of fossils in an article on PhysOrg.  The discoverers claim these fossils from Gabon are 2.1 billion years old, and provide evidence that multicellular organisms began evolving long before the Cambrian explosion.  “Until now, it has been assumed that organized multicellular life appeared around 0.6 billion years ago and that before […]
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Early Man

Lucy Gets a Date with Big Man
June 22, 2010
Another specimen of Australopithecus afarensis has been announced from Ethiopia.  This one supposedly preceded Lucy by 400,000 years, and according to its discoverers, belonged to a group of primates that shows they “were almost as proficient as we are walking on two legs, and that the elongation of our legs came earlier in our evolution […]
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