Thylacoleo carnifex was a marsupial lion with weird teeth that was tearing up Australia from the late Pliocene to the late Pleistocene.
Here is a rendering of a cave drawing which is probably the worst cave drawing of all time:
This is so bad that initially I assumed it was a cave drawing BY a marsupial lion.
Anyway, check out this National Geographic video to learn more:
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
Remember your college days? On a typical college Saturday night, I would head to a local Champaign, IL watering hole and get to “observe” the mating rituals of college men. Chest puffing, feats of strength, and sometimes even fisticuffs were employed to gain the favor of a particular lady. Turns out this male-male aggression is a trait we share with the little fruit fly. Those little fruit flies have, in turn, shown us that male-male aggression can be a bit more complex than we might first expect. Continue reading “Fruit flies fight over chicks”
Just like a telenovela this little toad brings the drama for days. The Venezuelan pebble toad (Oreophyrnella nigra) hangs out in the tepuis of the Guiana highlands. These toads use their cryptic skin appearance among the rocks to avoid predators and if that doesn’t work they call roll up and make like a bouncy ball down the rocks. See you later predators.
Check out this video with herpetologist, Bruce Means talking about pebble toad DNA, sharing his discovery excitement (plus you can see some tepuis).
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
How is astronomy like biology? Every time we build better tools for observation (eg, space telescopes & next-generation sequencers), we learn about the incredible variety of things that we are missing and get to wildly speculate about what it all means (we also get to regularly confuse “wild speculation” for actual “knowledge”).
This week in Pacific Standard I try to answer the question, why can’t we build life from scratch?
There are two primary ways biologists are trying to build life from scratch – evolution and intelligent design. People like Harvard’s Jack Szostak are trying to understand prebiotic evolution, by evolving autonomously replicating protocells in the lab. On the other hand, synthetic biologists, like those at the Venter Institute, want to be able to go to the whiteboard and intelligently design a genome from scratch. They already know how to synthesize and transplant a genome; designing it is another matter. As I wrote for Pacific Standard, we’re “like someone who knows how to work a 3-D printer but can’t design new digital templates for it.” Continue reading “If we can build it, we understand it… clearly we don’t understand life”
The Finch and Pea 