You should believe in magic instead...

Pope: Humanity isn't random product of evolution.

"Their biology is obviously flexible"...

Phylogenetic Analysis of Mexican Cave Scorpions Suggests Adaptation to Caves Is Reversible

Hey, that's good news for the GEICO cavemen.

Evolution going great,...

reports trilobite.

Isn't that special...

Dinosaur Museum Presents Biblical View of Origins

"We are totally different from the Museum of the Rockies in that we present fossils and all the exhibits in the context of biblical creation," said Otis E. Kline Jr., the museum's founder and director.

Jack Horner, the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, agrees the two museums are fundamentally different.

"It's not a science museum at all," Horner said. "It's not a pseudo-science museum. It's just not science. …There's nothing scientific about it."

It's ironic that this so-called museum exists smack in the middle of an area in western Montana rich with paleontological sites that have yielded tremendous scientific information about dinosaurs. But perhaps that's exactly why it is there.

Hat tip: Geogal.

Rolling back the origin...

of complex life: Fossils Push Back Earliest Complex Animals 40 Million Years.

It's getting more and more difficult to recognize my ancestors.

Fungi thrived...

while most everything died during the Permian mass extinction. Pull quote:

"Microfossils that show up in large quantities in ancient rocks deposited during Earth’s largest mass extinction are fungal spores, not algae as some recent studies had proposed, new research suggests.

About 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, life on Earth had its closest call: In a geologically short period of time, a mass extinction claimed more than 95 percent of species in the oceans and 70 percent of those on land."

But you'll need a USB 11.0 port...

in your head: By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain. And we'll need more comprehensive copyright laws, too.

Previous related rambling post written in the early days of this blog.

Julia Child cooks primordial soup...

Hat tip: Oblate Spheroid.

Out of Africa...

A skull that rewrites the history of man.

Encyclopedia of Life...

approaches nearly 10 percent completion towards its goal of cataloging 1.7 million species known to science. This is an especially daunting task since ~20,000 new species are identified each year.

Link to the on-line Encyclopedia of Life.

RELATED: Study on evolution's winners and losers concludes "new species emerge nearly as often as they die off."

RELATED UPDATE: The Bu bro observes that the tuatara is the fastest evolving creature, at least at a DNA level.

So-called "missing link"...

between humans and other primates has been recently announced. The teeny tiny 47 million year-old fossilized creature, discovered near Frankfurt, Germany, is shown in the image above (click to enlarge.) Link to more about this interesting fossil.

You know, this does resemble the Bu bro quite a bit.

UPDATE: Link to journal article.

Image credit: PLoS One, Hurum et al.

Direct and to the point...

Freaks Survive Because They Are Strange.

Hey, I'm still here.

Top 10...

useless limbs and other vestigial organs.

I'd personally like to have a prehensile tail. Think how handy that could be during field work. And cooking/cleaning/etc.

TGIF...

Best beer commercial. Ever.

Hat tip: RO'Q

Size 9 hominid footprints...

recently discovered in Kenya in strata dated to be ~ 1.5 million years old. The well preserved impressions mark the appearance of an early form of Homo erectus in the fossil record.

Now if we could just discover hominid and dinosaur prints together then the creationists may have an argument.

UPDATE: Link to more complete article.

Voting with your feet...

can be an effective strategy. The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is boycotting the city of New Orleans as a site for their annual conference in 2011. This response is due to the state having recently passed legislation allowing for so-called "intelligent design" to be taught in science classes. Here's the letter from the organization's president to Governor Jindal.

Bye bye, Louisiana. Rock on, nerdy biologists.

See my earlier related post.

And the winner...

among 18 entries to the Darwin birthday cake competition is this creative entry featuring barnacle taxonomy (a major research interest of Darwin's) and a gene pool.

This was my personal favorite, a chocolate tiktaalik, a genus of an extinct lobe-finned fish from the late Devonian Period.

There was representation of the geology program in an entry featuring the Galapagos archipelago with volcanic islands made of cake. Great job, NP and MF! Thanks, sincerely, for being there. San Cristobal Island was particularly yummy.

Additionally, dean Judd Case was a fine stand-in for the man of honor.

Everyone who entered this fun event is getting an environmental science t-shirt.

Science nerds...

party down with Darwin. What a bunch of wild and crazy animals. Whoa.

Elsewhere, here's the range of reaction in Rapid City, South Dakota to the mention of this special day in the local newspaper. Scroll through all the comments.

Hat tip: the Bu bro.

It's an uphill battle...

for acceptance of evolutionary theory in today's society. This Gallup poll shows that 39% of the general population (but only 24% of church goers) accepts the scientific explanation for the diversity of life.

I would think that a religious-minded person would find a greater appreciation for all life in the world if it were universally intertwined somehow. Funny that they prefer to believe in magic.

Arriving in the mail...

yesterday was this wonderful statue of Darwin's Ape that I had ordered last week (click to enlarge.) It's cast out of faux bronze with a resin human skull and it has nice detailing. Just in time for Charlie's birthday.

I like it so much I ordered the hear/see/speak no evil monkeys statue to go with it. Really.