Selfless Hymenopterans

In there monumental 1953 Nature paper, Watson and Crick did not report the discover of DNA. Rather, they reported the chemical binding among the nucleic acids that render the beautiful double helix. This is the “specific pairings” they refer to in the above quote. When they said “suggests a possible copying mechanism”,  it was a premeditated and masterful understatement, which had the effect of amplifying the importance of the work. 

“Amber from Myanmar in Southeast Asia is turning out to be an incredibly rich resource for examining the natural world of 100 million years ago. In the last year, it’s turned up frogs, snails, a snake, weird feathers, and some pretty wacky bugs. What do all of those have in common? They’re land-dwellers.

But now palaeontologists have discovered something really weird in a small chunk of Cretaceous Myanmar amber: sea creatures, side-by-side with land-dwelling creatures.

That’s four sea snails, and a juvenile marine ammonite from the ocean. Four intertidal isopods (and three more possible isopods), which dwell in the zone between high and low tide, were also trapped, along with beach sand.

From the land, the amber contains 22 mites, what seems to be a goblin spider, 12 adult insects (eight flies, two beetles, a parasitic wasp and a cockroach) and a millipede. And it’s all in a chunk just 33 millimetres by 9.5 millimetres by 29 millimetres.

It’s a remarkable assemblage of creatures.”

Timeline of Hominid Evolution

A general timeline of hominid evolution based on paleoanthropological fossil evidence.

The Amazing Anglerfish - Terror of the Deep

Sea Devils are members of Chordata Class Actinopterygii (the bony fishes), Order Lophiiformes (Anglerfish).  As you might guess correctly, they are predators that mainly ply the deep sea. Phylogenetic analysis based on mitochondrial DNA portent their emergence in the bony fish as early as 130 million years ago in the Cretaceous age of dinosaurs. Anglerfish are of particular evolutionary interest because their phenotype exhibits extreme sexual dimorphism as well as sexual parasitism of male anglerfish. Females are several orders of magnitude (100 – 100 x) larger than females in some species. In some species the male lives a parasitic life attached to the female, in order to become sperm donor to her at some point.