Visiting village dogs

I am horribly envious. I am speaking of the Village Dog Project, some current research going on that looks very cool.

Understanding the evolution and domestication in dogs requires genetic analysis of a global and diverse panel of non-breed-affiliated village dogs. With a network of worldwide and Cornell-affiliated collaborators, we plan to gather dog samples from remote villages, establish a genetic archive containing DNA and phenotypic information from these dogs, carry out genetic analyses on these samples, and develop computational methods for analyzing this dataset. In particular, we are interested in understanding the location, timing, and demographic conditions underlying domestication; the genetic changes involved in the transition of wolf to dog; the relationship between these village dogs and the breed dogs; and the effect that historical forces have shaped village dog diversity.

That looks informative and useful, and I’ll be looking forward to the publication of the research. That’s not what’s got me envious, though: for that, you have to look at their field work. The researchers are spending the summer traveling to exotic, remote locations (admittedly, to the kinds of places rife with scavenging village dogs, but still…) to collect blood samples. They have a travel blog that will be recounting their adventures, and also explains the science a little more.

After initial domestication, dogs probably lived “breed-less” lives as human commensals (hanging around humans, not really helping or harming them but living off their trash) for many thousands of years. During this time, dog populations quickly expanded and spread across the globe. In the last few hundreds of years, several hundred dog breeds were formed from local dogs in many parts of the world; these breed dogs have entirely replaced the non-breed “indigenous” dogs in some parts of the world, notably in Western Europe and the USA. However, most dogs throughout the world still live their lives as non-breed, indigenous, commensal dogs. We refer to these dogs as “pariah” or “village” dogs. They tend to be smallish (25-40 pounds), often tan, short-haired dogs, though the type varies a bit according to the region you’re in. The important point is that these dogs have not undergone the intense genetic bottleneck associated with breed formation. Thus, while breed dogs have only a small subset of the total genetic diversity of all dogs, it is likely that village dogs have a much greater range of the total diversity. Thus, they are very useful for looking at the original domestication event. They are informative of the original genetic bottleneck that led to the formation of domestic dogs many thousands of years ago.

Hmmm. We don’t seem to have many dogs running loose around exotic, remote Morris, Minnesota, but there are a few feral cats living off the dumpsters near the grocery store.

I probably wouldn’t try to read about visiting small midwestern towns to collect cats, though.

Limusaurus inextricabilis

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My previous repost was made to give the background on a recent discovery of Jurassic ceratosaur, Limusaurus inextricabilis, and what it tells us about digit evolution. Here’s Limusaurus—beautiful little beastie, isn’t it?

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Photograph (a) and line drawing (b) of IVPP V 15923. Arrows in a point to a nearly complete and fully articulated basal crocodyliform skeleton preserved next to IVPP V 15923 (scale bar, 5 cm). c, Histological section from the fibular shaft of Limusaurus inextricabilis (IVPP V 15924) under polarized light. Arrows denote growth lines used to age the specimen; HC refers to round haversian canals and EB to layers of endosteal bone. The specimen is inferred to represent a five-year-old individual and to be at a young adult ontogenetic stage, based on a combination of histological features including narrower outermost zones, dense haversian bone, extensive and multiple endosteal bone depositional events and absence of an external fundamental system. d, Close up of the gastroliths (scale bar, 2 cm). Abbreviations: cav, caudal vertebrae; cv, cervical vertebrae; dr, dorsal ribs; ga, gastroliths; lf, left femur; lfl, left forelimb; li, left ilium; lis, left ischium; lp, left pes; lpu, left pubis; lsc, left scapulocoracoid; lt, left tibiotarsus; md, mandible; rfl, right forelimb; ri, right ilium; rp, right pes; sk, skull.

What’s especially interesting about it is that it catches an evolutionary hypothesis in the act, and is another genuine transitional fossil. The hypothesis is about how fingers were modified over time to produce the patterns we see in dinosaurs and birds.

Birds have greatly reduced digits, but when we examine them embryologically, we can see precisely what has happened: they’ve lost the outermost digits, the thumb (I) and pinky (V), and retain the forefinger, middle finger, and ring finger (II-IV), which have been reduced and fused together. This is called Bilateral Digit Reduction, BDR, because they’ve lost digits from the medial and lateral sides, leaving the middle set intact.

Dinosaurs, when examined anatomically, seem to have a different pattern: they have a thumb (I), forefinger (II) and middle finger (III), and have lost the lateral two digits, the ring and pinky finger (IV-V). This arrangement has been advanced as evidence that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, since they have different bones in their hands, and getting from one pattern to the other is complicated and difficult and very unlikely.

The alternative hypothesis is that there is no conflict, and that dinosaurs actually underwent BDR and their digits are II-III-IV…but that what has also happened is a frame shift in digit identities. So dinosaurs actually have three digits, which are the index, middle, and ring finger, but they’ve undergone a subtle shift in morphology so that their forefinger develops as a thumb, and so forth.

Now we could resolve all this easily if only the physicists would get to work and build that time machine so we could go back to the Mesozoic and study dinosaur embryology, but they’re too busy playing with strings and quanta and dark matter to do the important experiments, so we’ve got to settle for another plan: find intermediate forms in the fossil record. That’s where Limusaurus steps in.

Limusaurus has a thumb, a tiny vestigial nubbin, and has lost its pinky completely. This is a (I)-II-III-IV pattern, and is evidence of bilateral digit reduction in a basal ceratosaur. In addition, the forefinger has become very robust, and while still distinctly a digit II, has been caught in the early stages of a transformation into a saurian first digit. It’s evidence in support of the dinosaurian II-III-IV hypothesis and the frameshift in digit identity! It’s almost as good as having a time machine.

Want to learn more? Carl Zimmer has a summary of the digit changes, while one of the authors of the paper, David Hone, also discusses the digits (the story is a little more complicated than I’ve laid out), and also has more on the rest of the animal—it’s a herbivorous ceratosaur, which is interesting in itself.

Xu X, Clark JM, Mo J, Choiniere J, Forster CA, Erickson GM, Hone DWE, Sullivan C, Eberth DA, Nesbitt S, Zhao Q, Hernandez R, Jia C-k, Han F-l, Guo Y (2009) A Jurassic ceratosaur from China helps clarify avian digit homologies. Nature 459(18):940-944.

Digit numbering and limb development

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Answers in Genesis has evolutionary biology on the run now. In an article from 2002, Ostrich eggs break dino-to-bird theory, they explain that development shows that evolution is all wrong, since developmental pathways in different animals are completely different, and can’t possibly be the result of gradual transformations.

The first piece of evidence against evolution is the old avian digit problem. Birds couldn’t have evolved from dinosaurs, because they have the wrong finger order!

The research conclusively showed that only digits two, three and four (corresponding to our index, middle and ring fingers) develop in birds. This contrasts with dinosaur hands that developed from digits one, two and three. Feduccia pointed out:

‘This creates a new problem for those who insist that dinosaurs were ancestors of modern birds. How can a bird hand, for example, with digits two, three and four evolve from a dinosaur hand that has only digits one, two and three? That would be almost impossible.’

The second problem is that frogs and people develop hands in completely different ways, ways that are even more different than the order of the digits.

This is not the only example where superficially homologous structures actually develop in totally different ways. One of the most commonly argued proofs of evolution is the pentadactyl limb pattern, i.e. the five-digit limbs found in amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. However, they develop in a completely different manner in amphibians and the other groups. To illustrate, the human embryo develops a thickening on the limb tip called the AER (apical ectodermal ridge), then programmed cell death (apoptosis) divides the AER into five regions that then develop into digits (fingers and toes). By contrast, in frogs, the digits grow outwards from buds as cells divide (see diagram, right).

Dang. I might as well hang it up right now. There is no possible way around these intractable differences. Take me, Jesus, I have seen the ligh…oh, wait a minute. That isn’t right. It looks to me like Jonathan Sarfati is just hopelessly confused on the first problem (I can’t really blame him, though—it is a complicated issue that has been the subject of scientific arguments for two centuries), and is simply completely wrong on the second (and that one I do blame him for. Tsk, tsk.)

So first, let’s tackle the tricky problem, digit identity in evolution. Extend your right hand out in front of you, palm down. Your thumb should be sticking out towards the left, and by convention, that’s Digit I. Counting from left to right, your index finger is Digit II, middle finger is Digit III, ring finger is digit IV, and your pinky is Digit V. We have the primitive pentadactyl (five-fingered) hand, so figuring out who is who is fairly easy. The difficulties arise in species that have reduced the number of their digits—when they extend their three-fingered hand, we have to figure out which digits are missing before we assign numbers to the remaining fingers.

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One way is by looking at the adult anatomy. Looking at your hand, you probably notice that your thumb is quantitatively different from the other fingers: it only has two joints, instead of three. This is common, that Digit I has fewer phalanges, or segments, than the others, and this is the kind of property that allows anatomists to figure out whether Digit I is present or not. To the right, for instance, is the hand of the raptor Deinonychus (the left hand, sorry to confuse you) with its digit numbering, from DI to DII to DIII, an assignment that was made on the basis of the anatomy. You can see that the ‘thumb’, DI, has fewer phalanges than the others.

You can try to do the same thing with the digits of birds, but it’s harder. Avian digits are reduced and fused into that pointy thing you find at the end of a chicken wing, and it takes an expert to sort out what bones are blended together in there. Anatomists tried, though, and initially and long ago (Meckel came to this conclusion in 1825), decided the bones were numbered DI, DII, and DIII, just like the ones we see in three-fingered dinosaurs…so no dilemma, right?

Wrong. There’s another way of looking at the identity of these bones, and that is by watching them develop. What some birds do is start to make five fingers—they form four or five little nubbins of cartilage, called condensations, and then shut down the development of some of them. What another old time anatomist noticed (Owen, in 1836) was that one of the condensations that got thrown away was the first one—which means that the bird digits are actually derived from Condensation II, Condensation III, and Condensation IV. The data is even stronger in this day of molecular markers: bird digits arise embryonically from the second, third, and fourth cartilaginous condensations.

Now this is a complication for evolution. We have three-fingered dinosaurs, and three-fingered birds, but it looks like they aren’t the same fingers. Bird ancestors would have had to resurrect their discarded Digit IV, then eliminate Digit I, all before fusing the whole assemblage into a bony gemisch anyway. It’s not parsimonious at all. (Of course, it’s even less parsimonious to throw away more than a century of data supporting evolution, as Jonathan Sarfati would like us to do.)

There is another, better explanation that Wagner and Gauthier have made that clarifies everything to me, at least.

Note that anatomists initially assigned digit numbers I, II, and III to bird limbs on the basis of their form, but later had to revise that to II, III, and IV on the basis of embryology. Dinosaur digits are assigned numbers I, II, and III on the basis of their adult form (which is admittedly much less ambiguous than adult bird digits!)…but what about their embryology? If we had access to information about expression of molecular markers and early condensations in the dinosaur limb, would we have to revise their digit numbers?

We don’t have fetal dinosaur hands to experiment on, but our growing knowledge about how limbs develop suggests that that might just be the case. This diagram illustrates the sequence of development in the hand of an alligator (a) and an ostrich (b).

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What you’re seeing is the pattern of early condensations in the limb. We tetrapods have a standard pattern: the very first digit to develop as an extension of the limb is Condensation IV, your ring finger, forming what is called the metapterygial axis. Next, the pinky (CV) forms as a little afterthought along one side of the metapterygial axis, and a new axis of condensation hooks over the palm, with the middle finger (CIII) forming next, then the index finger (CII), and lastly the thumb (CI). From a developmental standpoint, the easiest digits to lose are that odd little CV, and the thumb, CI. CI is the very last to form, so you can stop its formation by changing the timing of development in a process called heterochrony, and just halting the development of that axis hooking across the palm early. You can see that in the ostrich, which just stops making fingers after CII, so CI doesn’t form. The hardest digit to lose is CIV, because it’s kind of the lynchpin of the process—all the other digits follow after IV, so it would be difficult to suppress IV without losing all of the other digits. (Who would have thought that the ring finger was so central and important to hand development?)

The numbering of the dinosaur limb is a problem then…it suggests that they don’t have a Digit IV, which looks like a complicated and unlikely thing to do. But they do have a ‘thumb’, or Digit I. How do we resolve this seeming contradiction?

The answer is that there are two developmental processes going on. The first is the formation of the condensations, CI through CV. This process partitions the terminal region into an appropriate number of chunks, but doesn’t actually specify the identity of the digits. The second process takes each of those chunks and assigns a digit identity to them, and this process is to some degree independent of the first and uses a different set of signals. Wolpert et al. have noticed this in modern embryos:

For example, digit identity is specified at a surprisingly late stage in limb development, and identity remains labile even when the digit primordia have formed. It now appears that digit identity is specified by the interdigital mesenchyme and requires BMP signaling. There is also evidence that mechanisms other than a diffusible morphogen operate to lay down the initial pattern of cartilage, which is then modified by a signal from the polarizing region…

What Wagner and Gauthier propose is that three-fingered dinosaurs accomplished that reduction by shedding the two easiest digits to lose, CI and CV, so that if we enumerated them by the same criteria we use in modern birds, they possess Condensations II, III, and IV. What also happened, though, was that there was a frame shift in the mechanism that assigns digit identity, so CII develops as DI, CIII as DII, and CIV as DIII.

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The timing of this shift can be mapped onto saurian phylogeny, and it all makes sense and is consistent. And it doesn’t involve taking seriously the silly sequence of the biblical account, which has birds appearing before all of the land animals.

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What about Sarfati’s second line of evidence against evolution, that frogs and humans use completely different mechanisms to build their limbs?

Simple answer: it’s all bullshit. It’s a blatant denial of basic information you’ll find in any developmental biology textbook.

We’ve got a pretty good handle on the outline of limb development in multiple tetrapod lineages now, and they all use the same tools. Contrary to Sarfati’s implication, they all have apical ectodermal ridges (with some rare exceptions in a few highly derived, direct-developing frogs) and zones of polarizing activity, they all use the same set of molecules, including FGF-4 and FGF-8 and the same Hox genes and retinoic acid and BMPs. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that limb development is dazzlingly well conserved.

It is true that frogs have less apoptosis between their digits than we do, but that’s because they have webbed feet. Suppress apoptosis in other vertebrates, and you get the same phenomenon, retention of membranous webs between the digits. There is a simple functional reason why they differ in this regard, and it takes advantage of a common property of limb development in all tetrapods.

I can sympathize with Sarfati having difficulty sorting out digit numbering—it’s subtle and sneaky and has puzzled smarter people than either of us. But the uninformed rejection of some of the most straightforward, clearest examples of common mechanisms in development, something that you can find described in the most introductory biology textbook…that’s hard to forgive.

Wagner GP, Gauthier JA (1999) 1,2,3=2,3,4: A solution to the problem of the homology of the digits in the avian hand. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 96:5111-5116.

Wolpert L, Beddington R, Jessel T, Lawrence P, Meyerowitz E, Smith J (2002) Principles of Development. Oxford University Press.

A $48,000 Macintosh computer

I want one, but I’ll have to wait for the price to drop just a little bit…and I’m confident that the price will plummet in the next few years. It’s really just a stock Mac, but it has something special on it: a copy of your very own genome sequence. The whole thing. Oooh.

Give it a few years, and the price of sequencing your genome will drop to a few thousand dollars, and then below a thousand…and then I’ll be going for it. Unfortunately, at those prices they probably won’t throw in a new computer with it.

Space science in Minnesota

The Minnesota Planetarium Society has ambitious plans to rebuild and expand a planetarium and space discovery center in Minneapolis, and they’re trying to spread the news and build more support. They are having an event to do this:

Summer Solstice Celebration
Monday, June 22
4:00pm – 8:00 pm
Minneapolis Central Library
300 Nicollet Mall

This event is co-sponsored by the Library Foundation of Hennepin County. Here is your chance to — travel past the Sun out into the universe through the Society’s ExploraDome sky theater, that has been wowing school kids throughout Minnesota — learn something new about astronomy and telescopes from the Minnesota Astronomical Society, and — expose your kids to the world of Astronomy through astronomically-related games. We also hope you’ll take this opportunity to see the future site of the Minnesota Planetarium and learn more about how we can make it a reality.

ExploraDome shows will be held on the half-hour. The dome holds 25 at a time, so reservations are recommended. To reserve your spot, please send your name, phone number and time (by the half-hour) to the [email protected] OR 651-999-7300. The 6:30pm show is a special presentation in Pohlad Hall featuring our planetarium colleagues live from around the world, and is open to all.

Let’s build this!

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So…soap bubbles must be designed!

You’ve probably noticed that as a soap bubble thins, it acquires a rainbow of iridescent colors across its surface. Or perhaps you’ve noticed that a film of oil on a mud puddle shows beautiful colors. These are common physical properties of thin film interference.

The way it works is that light entering a material with a higher refractive index is both reflected and transmitted. Some of the light bounces back with a partial phase shift, and some of it passes through. In a thin film, it passes through but doesn’t travel far before it hits another boundary, for instance between the film and the water underneath it, and again, some of it is reflected and some transmitted. This second reflected beam of light, though, is out of phase with the first, by an amount that depends on the thickness of the film. What that means is that certain wavelengths will be shifted in such a way as to reinforce the first reflected beam, generating constructive interference that will make that wavelength brighter. Other wavelengths will be shifted the same amount, but they will be out of phase with light in the first reflected beam — there will be destructive interference, and that wavelength will be damped out.

The net result: the light reflecting off the film will be colored, and the color will depend on the thickness of the film. It’s a simple physical process. Cephalopods use it to generate their colors — just by shifting thin reflecting membranes by a tiny distance of a fraction of a wavelength of light, they shift which wavelengths constructively and destructively interfere with each other, and thus change their color. Now engineers are exploiting the same principle to build television screens: they use a thin film that can be expanded by fractions of a wavelength of light by applying a voltage to build reflective color screens. This will be very cool. If you’ve got a Kindle or one of the other e-book readers, you know they use a reflective screen with no backlight that depends on ambient lighting to be visible…and that right now you only get shades of gray. With this technology, we’ll be able to have color electronic paper. I’ll be looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, we’ll also enable incomprehending gomers. Case in point: Casey Luskin thinks that thin-film interference patterns implies design. Well, actually, it’s stupider than that — he actually thinks that because TVs are being designed to use thin-film interference, and because cephalopod skin uses thin-film interference to generate color, that implies that cephalopod skin is also designed. I kid you not.

So we may soon have affordable, energy-efficient, cuttlefish inspired flat screen TVs and computer monitors everywhere. But of course, there’s no design overtones to see here folks. None whatsoever.

Right. And because trebuchets were designed to use gravity to generate force, and because rocks on mountains will tumble down due to gravity, avalanches are therefore designed. We make fire by design to produce the release of energy by rapid oxidation of carbon compounds; cells also oxidize carbon-containing compounds to produce energy; therefore, cells must have been set on fire on purpose. This is what the IDiots are reduced to: if something designed and something evolved make use of the same properties of our common physical universe, that means the evolved object must be designed, too. It’s ridiculous, but it’s all they’ve got.

Life Ascending

I admit, I was initially put off by the mere title of Nick Lane’s new book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I’m one of those many biologists who is adamant about the absence of direction in evolutionary history, and ascending just sounds too much like life climbing the rungs of the ladder of life, so I picked it up in a somewhat prejudicial mood.

Have no fear, though, I was won over. Right at the beginning, he admits that it is a subjective list; his criteria for including the ten chosen evolutionary innovations are that it had to revolutionize the living world, that it was important to a significant subset of life today, that it was a product of biological (not cultural) evolution, and that it had to be iconic — it had to symbolic and arrestingly interesting to human beings. That’s fair enough; one could write a book on just the evolved properties of prokaryotes, but yeah, operons and chemical sensing and secretion and motility are of vast importance, but they’re only going to be iconic to a rather restricted set of readers. And since my own personal interests run more to metazoan innovations, I’m not going to complain about a book that gives my hobby horses a more substantial run.

Even better, though, what enlivens the book is the biochemist’s perspective: Lane isn’t so much interested in the superficial matters of morphology, but in the emergence of new properties in the molecular machinery of the cell, and how it affects the world around us. Somehow, it always thrills me when we drill down right to the interactions of molecules to explain how biology works.

So here are the ten evolutionary inventions Lane describes.

  1. Origins of life: Where and how did life arise? A review of some of the models for abiogenesis.

  2. DNA: What conditions would allow for the synthesis of nucleotides? Where did the genetic code come from?

  3. Photosynthesis: The photosynthetic pathway is a combination of two very different functional pathways — what does this tell us about their evolution?

  4. Complex cells: How did cells become more complex? A chapter on horizontal transfer and endosymbiosis — borrowing and stealing and kidnaping by ancient cells.

  5. Sex: Why do we have sexual reproduction? A question that focuses on the cytological and genetic machinery.

  6. Movement: How do organisms get around? Cytoskeletons and motor proteins, and where they came from.

  7. Sight: How did vision evolve? A fairly wide-ranging discussion of opsins and crystallins and Hox genes and the weird glow of black smokers.

  8. Hot blood: Another chapter with a little taste of everything: respiration, metabolism, insulation, and how a key feature of our physiology affects everything.

  9. Consciousness: Where did our awareness come from? You won’t be surprised to learn that Lane is a materialist — the answer lies in the wiring of the brain.

  10. Death: Why do all organisms die, and why do we even have genes that contribute to senescence and death?

So the topics aren’t that biased: only three exclusive to multicellular animals, and six that are about eukaryotes almost exclusively — and even in those our prokaryotic heritage is discussed. And really, when you’re talking about genes and biochemistry, you can’t get away from the fact that you are dealing with genuinely universal processes.

The book is also a fun read, deep enough to give you some substance, yet clearly written with the general public in mind. If you aren’t a biologist or biochemist, don’t shy away — you will be able to read this book, and you will learn a lot from it. When I was reading it, I was thinking this would be a really enjoyable text to build a freshman seminar course around. The chapters are readable and each one addresses an interesting topic in biology, bringing up both current research and pending questions, and it’s meaty enough to spark some good discussions.

Save the submersibles!

Go sign this petition to maintain the tools for sea exploration at Florida Atlantic University. They’re trying to get a thousand signatures…we can do that in no time at all.

The Johnson-Sea-Link I & II submersibles are owned and operated by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Fort Pierce, Florida. They are launched from the HBOI research vessel R/V Seward Johnson, a 204-ft ,purpose built ,state of the art platform redesigned in 1994 which displaces 1282 tons and has a 6,000 nautical mile range. An experienced captain and crew constantly maintain the R/V Seward Johnson as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) Fleet of research vessels. A team of highly skilled sub pilots operate, maintain and upgrade the submersibles according to strict safety protocols. The Johnson-Sea-Link submersibles were built in 1971. Almost four decades, 9,000 dives and continuous upgrades and improvements later, the Johnson-Sea-Link I submersibles and II, along with their support ship the R/V Seward Johnson, remain invaluable platforms for exploring the oceans.

&hellip:

Unfortunately, the current administration of HBOI has announced its decision to sell the R/V Seward Johnson and retire the JSL submersibles in spite of a lack of technologies with similar or better capabilities at HBOI, FAU or any other institution on the East coast of the U.S. While some argue that this expensive technology is outdated and tied to its mother ship, this view is not shared by the scientific community. The Alvin submersible operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts is 10 years older, and still performs between 150 and 200 dives a year. No one considers the Alvin 40-year old technology, or criticizes its dependence on the research vessel Atlantis for its deployment. It is still considered a valuable workhorse. While NOAA has just awarded HBOI a 22.5 million dollars grant to be a Cooperative Institute, in part due to their ability to perform oceanographic study with such tools as the R/V Seward Johnson and JSL submersibles, it is unclear whether these assets will be supported by that grant money. Unless a new source of funding is found to support these technologies, the current administration will continue their plans to abandon these technologies. Maintaining and operating these technologies is expensive, and the HBOI administration lacks the funds to continue to support these assets. Thus, it is critical for the State of Florida to invest in these amazing technologies to further our ocean exploration and our scientific progress.

Since FAU is a state university, the submersibles and research vessel are property of the State of Florida and the taxpayers should have a say in choosing whether these amazing technologies which are helping us discover and protect our underwater assets should be maintained. These are expensive technologies to maintain, but their benefits far outweigh their costs. If you believe that the state of Florida should invest in science, education and technology, please sign this petition to indicate to our legislators that you believe the HBOI ship and submersibles should be saved from sale or retirement and supported by the state of Florida.

Darwinius masillae

This is an important new fossil, a 47 million year old primate nicknamed Ida. She’s a female juvenile who was probably caught in a toxic gas cloud from a volcanic lake, and her body settled into the soft sediments of the lake, where she was buried undisturbed.

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What’s so cool about it?

Age. It’s 47 million years old. That’s interestingly old…it puts us deep into the primate family tree.

Preservation. This is an awesome fossil: it’s almost perfectly complete, with all the bones in place, preserved in its death posture. There is a halo of darkly stained material around it; this is a remnant of the flesh and fur that rotted in place, and allows us to see a rough outline of the body and make estimates of muscle size. Furthermore, the guts and stomach contents are preserved. Ida’s last meal was fruit and leaves, in case you wanted to know.

Life stage. Ida is a young juvenile, estimate to be right on the transition from requiring parental care to independent living. That means she has a mix of baby teeth and adult teeth — she’s a two-fer, giving us information about both.

Phylogeny. A cladistic analysis of the fossil revealed another interesting point. There are two broad groups of primates: the strepsirrhines, which includes the lemurs and lorises, and the haplorhines, which includes monkeys and apes…and us, of course. Ida’s anatomy places her in the haplorhines with us, but at the same time she’s primitive. This is an animal caught shortly after a major branch point in primate evolutionary history.

She’s beautiful and interesting and important, but I do have to take exception to the surprisingly frantic news coverage I’m seeing. She’s being called the “missing link in human evolution”, which is annoying. The whole “missing link” category is a bit of journalistic trumpery: almost every fossil could be called a link, and it feeds the simplistic notion that there could be a single definitive bridge between ancient and modern species. There isn’t: there is the slow shift of whole populations which can branch and diverge. It’s also inappropriate to tag this discovery to human evolution. She’s 47 million years old; she’s also a missing link in chimp evolution, or rhesus monkey evolution. She’s got wider significance than just her relationship to our narrow line.

People have been using remarkable hyperbole when discussing Darwinius. She’s going to affect paleontology “like an asteroid falling down to earth”; she’s the “Mona Lisa” of fossils; she answers all of Darwin’s questions about transitional fossils; she’s “something that the world has never seen before”; “a revolutionary scientific find that will change everything”. Well, OK. I was impressed enough that I immediately made Ida my desktop wallpaper, so I’m not trying to diminish the importance of the find. But let’s not forget that there are lots of transitional forms found all the time. She’s unique as a representative of a new species, but she isn’t at all unique as a representative of the complex history of life on earth.

When Laelaps says, “I have the feeling that this fossil, while spectacular, is being oversold,” I think he’s being spectacularly understated. Wilkins also knocks down the whole “missing link” label. The hype is bad news, not because Ida is unimportant, but because it detracts from the larger body of the fossil record — I doubt that the media will be able to muster as much excitement from whatever new fossil gets published in Nature or Science next week, no matter how significant it may be.

Go ahead and be excited by this find, I know I am. Just remember to be excited tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, because this is perfectly normal science, and it will go on.

Laelaps has some serious reservations about the analysis — the authors may not have done as solid a cladistic analysis as they should, and its position in the family tree may not be as clear as it has been made out to be.

Franzen JL, Gingerich PD, Habersetzer J, Hurum JH, von Koenigswald W, Smith BH (2009) Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5723. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723.