Recent Posts by Joseph

Complete genomes of extinct and living elephants sequenced

An international team of researchers has produced one of the most comprehensive evolutionary pictures to date by looking at one of the world's most iconic animal families -- namely elephants, and their relatives mammoths and mastodons-spanning millions of years.

The team of scientists-which included researchers from McMaster, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard Medical...

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Tracking data reveal the secret lives of marine animals

The movements of marine mammals and other large animals that spend their lives in the ocean were largely unknown prior to the development of sophisticated tracking devices researchers could deploy on animals in the wild. Insights gained from this technology have revealed unexpected behaviors and migratory patterns in marine animals ranging from sharks and seals...

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Why are there so many types of lizards?

Lizards have special superpowers. While birds can regrow feathers and mammals can regrow skin, lizards can regenerate entire structures such as their tails. Despite these differences, all have evolved from the same ancestor as lizards.

Spreading through the Americas, one lizard group, the anoles, evolved like Darwin's finches, adapting to different islands and different habitats on...

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Playing both ends: Amphibian adapted to varied evolutionary pressures

Caecilians are serpent-like creatures, but they're not snakes or giant worms. The limbless amphibians, related to frogs and salamanders, favor tropical climates of Africa, Asia and the Americas. Most live in burrows of their own making; some are aquatic.

With colleagues from Brazil, Utah State University ecologist Edmund "Butch" Brodie, Jr. reports caecilians feature greatly enlarged...

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Monkey Vocabulary Decoded

From short 'tsiks' and 'ekks' to drawn-out 'phees' -- all the sounds produced by marmoset monkeys are made up of individual syllables of fixed length: that is the result of a study by a team of researchers headed by Dr. Steffen Hage of the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuro-science (CIN) at the University of...

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