It is quite amazing to consider that scientists may have only discovered 10% of the Earth’s species. Of course, many of the unknown species are small (insects, microbes) or in remote or extreme environments (deserts, the deep sea), which provides some explanation for why we have not found or identified them yet. Luckily, certain research …
Awesome figure of the sexual systems used by 2,145 vertebrates species (705 fish, 173 amphibian, 593 non-avian reptilian, 195 avian, 479 mammalian).Similar figures for plants and invertebrates. Tree structure is derived from taxonomy, where each tip represents all species in a single genus. Diploid chromosome number is indicated by the height of the innermost ring. …
I’m sorry to announce the terrible news, but . . . the white-nosed syndrome has been found in Michigan bats for the first time, in both the Upper Peninsula and lower Michigan. Even if you are not someone who cares much about bats (or maybe you don’t like them, as they tend to get into …
Biology is littered with concepts that biologists cannot always agree on how to define or where there are special cases where the common definition have to be amended. Species. Complexity. Modularity. Evolvability. Evolution. Genes. Community. Robustness. Open-ended evolution. Fitness. Life. Take species. The current state of affairs is that there are many different definitions, and …
In late October 2013, a new portion of the BEACON exhibit opened at the MSU Museum. This hands-on unit, called the Mutation Station, was co-created by BEACONites Julie Fick (MSU Museum) and Emily Weigel (MSU Zoology), and is intended to specifically address what mutations are and how they impact evolution to shape species. The exhibit …
This is a fun article about many of the new species of animals that were discovered last year – and there are a lot of them! I had heard about some of these in the press, but did not know about all of them.For example, a new mountain porcupine was discovered in Brazil with a …