New artwork at Olduvai George’s place: it’s the start of a series on cetacean evolution.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
New artwork at Olduvai George’s place: it’s the start of a series on cetacean evolution.
I just received word from Per Ahlberg that the status of the Australian lungfish conservation efforts have reached a critical phase: letters are needed NOW. Here’s the situation:
The Traveston Dam proposal has moved into a new and critically important phase: it has been referred to the Federal Environment Minister (Mr Ian Campbell) for consideration under the Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Ian Campbell has the power to stop the dam, but if he doesn’t it is unlikely that any other organisation or individual will be able to do so.
The first hurdle that must be crossed in order to stop the dam is to ensure that the Minister does not allow the Queensland Government to conduct the EPBC assessment of it’s own proposal – something that he is entitled to do. This would be a recipy for disaster as they would be certain to conclude that their own proposal is environmentally sound! The assessment must be carried out by the Federal Environment Ministry to ensure a proper process.
The Save the Mary River Campaign is asking supporters to write to Mr Campbell and a number of relevant senators to demand a proper assessment, and provides some very helpful information and instructions. This is URGENT: letters have to be received before 27 November.
You can get details here—start writing!
I’ve been writing a fair amount about early pattern formation in animals lately, so to do penance for my zoocentric bias, I thought I’d say a little bit about homeotic genes in plants. Homeotic genes are genes that, when mutated, can transform one body part into another—probably the best known example is antennapedia in Drosophila, which turns the fly’s antenna into a leg.
Plants also have homeotic genes, and here is a little review of flower anatomy to remind everyone of what ‘body parts’ we’re going to be talking about. The problem I’ll be pursuing is how four different, broadly defined regions of the flower develop, and what that tells us about their evolution.
There don’t seem to be a lot of carnival notices in my mailbox today, so I’ll just note that the Friday Ark #113 is up, and remind everyone that the next Tangled Bank is coming up on Wednesday, at Newton’s Binomium (by the way, I thought his post on the difficulty of explaining the importance of evo-devo was good—there are biologists who look utterly blank at the enthusiasm the subject generates in some of us). Send stuff to [email protected] or me by Tuesday.
People send me pretty pictures all the time…they’re almost always of molluscs, of course. I’ve put the latest below the fold.
Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week’s issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I’m late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn’t just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin research (but strangely, very little on echinoderm development). It was a good soaking in echinodermiana.
Cool…Olduvai George does fish, too.
Synergy! Ooblog leads me to a spectacular painting of carnotaurs mating (did they always get a flight of pterosaurs at the climax?), and then by way of The Two Percent Company, I found this enlightening poster of mammals mating (hey, how many of the first 20 have you done?)…with the unfortunate consequence of death by STD. Put two and two together, and what conclusion do we arrive at?
Dinosaurs didn’t use condoms.
