Taking a break for the summer. I hope everyone has a chance to get out for holidays.
Toodleloo...
Ones that got away
7 minutes ago
Phylogenetic analysis indicates that Zhongjianornis is phylogenetically basal to Confuciusornis and the dominant Mesozoic avian groups, Enantiornithes and Ornithurae, and therefore provides significant new information regarding the diversification of birds in the Early Cretaceous. It also represents the most basal bird that completely lacks teeth, suggesting that tooth loss was more common than expected in early avian evolution and that the avian beak appeared independently in several avian lineages, most probably as a response to selective pressure for weight reduction.
Paleontologists have dug up not one but three new dinosaur species in Australia, a continent that has turned up few large fossil finds. The mid-Cretaceous giants include two massive plant-eating titanosaurs—Witonotitan wattsi and Diamantinasaurus matildae—and a fearsome carnivorous theropod—Australovenator wintonesis—reported in a PLoS ONE study last week.Read the complete article at New Dino Species Discovered in the Land Down Under.
Living at a time when Australia was still partly connected to Antarctica—about 98 million years ago—the newly discovered Cretaceous-era killer is the first large prehistoric predator found in the Outback. It would have likely been light and speedy at about five meters (16 feet) and 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds)
It has been described as ‘the most significant gap year in history’. In 1831 Charles Darwin left England aboard HMS Beagle as an able but untried Cambridge graduate. He returned from the voyage in 1836 as an eagerly awaited member of the scientific establishment. Cambridge played a vital role in this transformation. Darwin’s Cambridge connections secured his place on the Beagle; his Cambridge friends and teachers sent advice, encouragement and responses to his ideas, and arranged for his discoveries to be promoted and published; and it was to Cambridge that vast numbers of specimens were shipped in caskets, barrels, jars and pill-boxes.

A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.Eugene Delacroix.

“The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity”Richard Dawkins
"The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration. "Heinz Pagels
"As the main claim of this book [Full House], I do not deny the phenomenon of increased complexity in life's history but I subject this conclusion to two restrictions that undermine its traditional hegemony as evolution's defining feature. First, the phenomenon exists only in the pitifully limited and restricted sense of a few species extending the small right tail of a bell curve with an ever-constant mode at bacterial complexity and not as a pervasive feature in the history of most lineages. Second, this restricted phenomenon arises as an incidental consequence [...] of causes that include no mechanism for progress or increasing complexity in their main actions."
Stephen Jay Gould