Archive for the ‘Paleontology’ Category
Speaking at a conference last summer in Cadiz, the great paleontologist and weighted Perhaps Poorly Said Juan Luis Arsuaga, with Some solemnity, that after 2009, the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of his seminal work The Origin of species, we entered 2010, another very important year because it would be the year in 201 years to be fulfilled in the birth of the great scientific and 151 of the publication of historical book, but not less than 2011 when the current and historical Meet 202 152 anniversary respectively.
Thus, each coming year will be an occasion to celebrate these two events, leading anniversaries in the history of human knowledge. The commentary is no less appropriate when the recognition of the evolutionary process in the planet’s biological evolution has been one of the great achievements of science, but unfortunately not going to be relegated to the overall consideration to the category of questionable validity hypothesis subject to opinion, when it is fiercely attacked by certain fundamentalist religious movements cutting and damaging impact.
Evolution, moved about the basic mechanisms of genetic modification and the subsequent scrutiny of natural selection has shaped the life forms present members of the biosphere from their common origin, but also is not a phenomenon occurred circumstantially to life on our planet after its emergence, it is one of its inherent properties, and not just known life, but of life considered in the abstract, and is within the ambit be primarily in the concept. Not surprisingly, the definition developed to serve as a reference in any missions to search for extraterrestrial life to be developed by NASA, is incorporated as a feature of the alleged biological structures are where the “ability to evolve”. Read the rest of this entry »
A fossil of a pterosaur adult with one of his perfectly preserved eggs. This unique discovery was made in China by a team of British and Chinese paleontologists. The work is published in an article in the journal Science.
The presence of eggs indicates that this winged reptile that lived about 160 million years, was female, allowing researchers to make comparisons between the sexes of the species, Darwinopterus.
The details of the egg imply that the pterosaur reproductive strategies were not as bird, belies what they believed most of the researchers, but more like those of crocodiles and other reptiles. Read the rest of this entry »
About four million years, The female of the genus Australopithecus, one of our human ancestors (hominids) and larger babies and cared for had apes as “human”. So says an article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), thus marking the onset of these unique aspects of human beings before the evolution of the genus Homo.
The current human babies weigh about 6% of maternal body mass, whereas chimpanzees newborns weigh about 3% of the mass of the mother. However, it is not clear at what point in human evolution began to give birth to large babies.
Because older children are more difficult to maintain in the womb and giving birth, some researchers have argued that the human characteristics of parenting, such as participation of parents and other family members, would emerged in parallel with technological adaptation of Homo erectus. Read the rest of this entry »
Throughout most of our biological history, the human brain has expanded, and in parallel, our intelligence was growing. However, as pointed an article published in Discover magazine, the trend would now be reversed.
According to John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin (USA) during the last 20,000 years, the average male human brain has fallen from 1,500 cubic centimeters (cc) to 1,350, a loss similar to the size of a tennis ball. For its part, the female brain has been reduced by approximately the same proportion. In addition, Hawks said that this reduction appears to still be going on an evolutionary scale.
If our brain continues to decline at that rate over the next 20,000 years, will approach the size of the brain that had Homo erectus one of our “family” who lived half a million years ago and had a brain volume of only 1,100 cc. Read the rest of this entry »
Another myth about the Neanderthals has fallen. The human species cooked and ate plants and vegetables and meat not only as expected. So says the first time an article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Responsible for the finding, a group of researchers at the National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian in Fairfax (USA) studied fossil Neanderthal teeth from northern Europe and Iraq and found evidence of plant material grains, of which part were cooked. Previously, other researchers have found grains of pollen in places where Neanderthals lived, but there was no evidence that eating vegetables. Read the rest of this entry »