Posts Tagged ‘zoology’
“The Quaker loves an ample brim, / A hat that bows to no salaam; / And dear the beaver is to him / As if it never made a dam”*…
Leila Philip on the evolutionary puzzles and unfathomable intelligence of earth’s rodent-engineers…
I think there is an element of the sacred in the beaver, if only in its deep weirdness. One million years ago, beavers the size of bears roamed North America. They pose an evolutionary puzzle, like the platypus, or birds, which share some DNA with dinosaurs. When they dive, they seem more like marine mammals than terrestrial species, more seal than rodent. Their dexterous forepaws look startlingly human with their five nimble fingers and naked palms. They groom their lustrous fur with catlike fastidiousness. Their mammalian beauty ends abruptly in the gooselike hind feet, each as wide as the beaver’s head. The feet are followed by a reptilian tail, which, it has been observed, looks like the result of some terrible accident, run over by a tractor tire, the treads leaving a pattern of indentations that resemble scales.
Part bear, part bird, part monkey, part lizard, humanoid hands, an aquatic tail. Is it any surprise that beavers have fired the human imagination in every continent that they are found?…
“Part Bear, Part Bird, Part Monkey, Part Lizard: On the Deep Weirdness of Beavers,” from @theleilaphilip in @lithub.
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As we get busy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1928 that former concert violinist and proprietor of the One-In-Hand Tie Company of Clinton, Iowa, Joseph W. Less, introduced the modern clip-on tie.
“Every decently-made object… is not just a piece of ‘stuff’ but a physical embodiment of human energy, testimony to the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty”*…
Indeed, as the Materials Library of the Institute for Making at UCL brilliantly demonstrates, that’s often true of the materials themselves…
The Materials Library is a collection of some of the most wondrous materials on earth, gathered from sheds, labs, grottoes and repositories around the world. It is a resource, laboratory, studio, and playground for the curious and material-minded to conduct hands-on research through truly interdisciplinary inquiry and innovation. The collection is accessible to Institute of Making members day to day, and to the public at Materials Library Discovery sessions.
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As we celebrate stuff, we might spare a thought for Addison Emery Verrill; he died on this date in 1926. An invertebrate zoologist, museum curator, and university professor, he is best remembered as curator of zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, where he developed one of the largest, most valuable zoological collections in the U.S.
Verill trained under Louis Agassiz at Harvard; then, at age 25, became Yale University’s first professor of Zoology. His lifelong devotion to taxonomic research yielded the development of extensive collections at Yale in a wide variety of taxa. From 1871-87, while he was in charge of scientific explorations by the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Verrill found and described hundreds of new marine specimens. His expeditions took him to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America and to Hawaii and Central America. He published more than 350 papers and monographs, including descriptions of more than a thousand species of animals in virtually every major taxon. His breadth of interests included parasitology, mineralogy and botany.
“What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?”*…
Crab-like body plans have evolved independently at least five times. As Jason P. Dihn explains, biologists are still trying to figure out exactly why…
In 1989, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed a thought experiment: What would the world look like if we turned back time and replayed the evolutionary tape? “I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again,” he concluded. Maybe not. But crabs might.
Evolution just can’t stop creating crabs. Believe it or not, the flat-and-wide body plan has evolved at least five different times. The process is called carcinization, and it’s inspired comics, memes and entire subreddits.
Still, biologists don’t know why crabs keep evolving. Figuring it out would satisfy the online masses, sure, but it would also be a step toward solving other important scientific mysteries. For instance, why some species share evolutionary paths while others forge unique ones (looking at you, platypus)…
Convergent evolution: “Evolution Only Thinks About One Thing, and It’s Crabs,” from @JasonPDinh in @DiscoverMag.
Will crabs need to (re-)evolve a sixth time? “Alaska’s snow crabs have disappeared. Where they went is a mystery.”
(Image above: source)
* Gregory Bateson
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As we fiddle with phylogeny, we might spare a thought for Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild; he died on this date in 1937. A British banker, politician and soldier, he is best remembered for his pursuit of his passion— zoology and his collection of species. At its largest, Rothschild’s collection included 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds’ eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies and 30,000 beetles, as well as thousands of specimens of mammals, reptiles, and fishes. They formed the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a private individual (and are now part of the Natural History Museum). He named dozens of animal taxa, published Novitates Zoologicae, and authored or co-authored scores of scientific papers.
Related: “How Bird Collecting Evolved Into Bird-Watching.”
“We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed”*…
There’s a variety of “preservation” that can blind us to the lack of genetic diversity and the threat of extinction…
The small salamander known as the axolotl, whose cartoonish face resembles a smiling emoji, is among the most widespread amphibians on Earth. You can buy them as pets online, collect them in the game Minecraft, and watch them perform on Instagram and TikTok. Often pink in color with feathery external gills, axolotls are also popular in laboratories: Scientists love studying them because they can regrow limbs, spinal cords, and even portions of their brains. Roughly 1 million are under human care worldwide, according to some experts.
Yet in their home country of Mexico, where they’re celebrated as cultural icons, axolotls are critically endangered and on the verge of extinction. The only place you can find them in the wild is in a watery borough of Mexico City, the second-largest city in the Western Hemisphere. There are fewer than three dozen per square kilometer here, down from 6,000 in the 1990s.
This paradox — that axolotls seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time — raises a vexing question. If an animal is thriving in labs and aquariums, should we worry that it’s dying in its native waters? Or, asked another way: How important is the “wild” in wildlife?…
Axolotls are among the most widespread amphibians on Earth. In the wild, they’re almost extinct: “The animal that’s everywhere and nowhere,” from Benji Jones (@BenjiSJones) in @voxdotcom.
* Elizabeth Kolbert
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As we back biodiversity, we might spare a thought for Gerald “Gerry” Malcolm Durrell; he died on this date in 1995. A British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author, and television presenter, most of his work was rooted in his life as an animal collector and enthusiast… though he is probably most widely known for his autobiographical book My Family and Other Animals and its successors, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods... which have been made into television and radio mini-series many times, most recently as ITV’s/PBS’s The Durrells.
“He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive”*…
One notes that there are only three states with unique predators: two with apex predators– Alaska (the polar bear); Florida (the crocodile)– and Hawaii (the domestic cat). A ‘o ia!
The largest land predators in each state. (TotH to @simongerman600)
* Jack London, The Call of the Wild
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As we watch our backs, we might spare a thought for Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz; he died on this date in 1910. Following in his father‘s footsteps, he made important contributions to systematic zoology, serving as curator of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (1873-85), which was founded by his father.
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