Pity the poor platypus. A creature so confused that when the first specimens arrived in England at the end of the eighteenth century, scientists searched for hours in vain to locate the stitches crafty Chinese merchants must have used to assemble their hoax. With its reptilian reproductive mode (a mammal that lays eggs!), duck-bill, 10...
For years, evolutionary biologists have debated the predictability of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould famously said that if the tape of life could be rewound to the same starting point, it would replay with a very different outcome. On the other hand, many evolutionary biologists have pointed to the ubiquity of adaptive convergent evolution–when species facing...
For years, evolutionary biologists have debated the predictability of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould famously said that if the tape of life could be rewound to the same starting point, it would replay with a very different outcome. On the other hand, many evolutionary biologists have pointed to the ubiquity of adaptive convergent evolution–when species facing...
For years, evolutionary biologists have debated the predictability of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould famously said that if the tape of life could be rewound to the same starting point, it would replay with a very different outcome. On the other hand, many evolutionary biologists have pointed to the ubiquity of adaptive convergent evolution–when species facing...
Anolis is the most species rich genus of lizards, with nearly four hundred described species in the tropics of the New World (and probably many more yet to be named). Yet, of all the anoles great and small, near and far, green and brown, one stands out for its combination of elegance, charm, and mystique....
The genome of Anolis carolinensis has just been published in the journal Nature, and most attention is focusing on how this genome, the first reptile to be sequenced (not including birds), differs from other vertebrate genomes, and what these differences may tell us about genome evolution. No doubt this is interesting, but the real value of this...