Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist
Combining Science and Joyful Creativity
What’s it about?
Smectite is a specific kind of clay mineral, common in volcanic ash. This kind of clay incorporates water during its formation, which, as the authors show, can provide a record of what surface water was like when the clay formed. Continue reading “Clay Keeps Records of Ancient Water – #365papers – 2018 – 56”
What’s it about?
Brewing beer is serious organic chemistry, and beer can have some not-really-healthy chemicals in them from various sources. The authors of this paper discuss the occurrence of amines (a type of biologically produced chemical) in beers produced in Chile that can, at high concentrations, have negative effects on the health of the beer drinker.
There are two general sources of these amines, either from microbial contamination (like small quantities of bacteria in the beer) or could have been present in the raw materials used to make the beer (barley, yeast, and hops). Continue reading “Is Your Beer Making You Sick? – #365papers – 2018 – 55”
What’s it about?
The Paleocene-Eocene boundary is marked by a period of rapid global warming and co-occuring changes in mammals in response to the warming, including the appearance of seemingly dwarfed species and the rise of important mammal groups like the hoofed mammals and primates. The authors here use fossilized pollen from rocks known to bracket the Paleocene-Eocene boundary and discuss the changes in plants during this important episode of climate change.Continue reading “Plants and Animals Don’t Respond to Climate Change the Same Way – #365papers – 2018 – 54”
What’s it about?
Much of this paper is a description of a new species of early primate, along with a description of the primate fauna from South Pass, Wyoming, which is on the edge of the Green River Basin. This particular fauna is important because it is on the edge of a geographical basin, so it includes a mixture of animals that prefer flat plains and those that prefer upland areas.Continue reading “The Value of Fossils from the Margins of Basins – #365papers – 2018 – 53”
What’s it about?
Using tomographic data, the authors tease the different growth stages of the lower jaws of placoderms apart and show that the development of teeth are separate from the development of the jaw bone itself.Continue reading “How Do Teeth and Jaws in Placoderms Grow? – #365papers – 2018 – 52”
What’s it about?
This paper provides a new description of a 385-million-year-old fish called Gladbachus. This fish has characteristics of what we consider sharks and other characteristics that align it with placoderms and bony fishes. With this new description, the authors do a new cladistic analysis that shows what the primitive shark condition looked like and also shows that an enigmatic group called the Acathodii are likely along the same lineage as sharks.Continue reading “How Long Have Sharks Been Shark-y? – #UREES270 – 2018”
What’s it about?
Smith presents an argument that all teeth in vertebrates share a common origin, even though they look remarkably different, using evidence from growth lines in fossils, as well as developmental studies of modern fishes to support this. Continue reading “Whence Come the Teeth of Vertebrates? – #365papers – 2018 – 51”
What’s it about?
Fate-maps show where tissues in an embryo wind up in the adult. It is truly remarkable how cells move around in embryos. I mean, seriously.
In this case, the authors are tracing sensory ganglia, in particular, to branches of the trigeminal nerve: the ophthalmic (or profundal) and the maxillomandibular, which provide sensory functions to parts of the lips and mouth.Continue reading “Where, Oh Where Do the Ganglia Go (in Lampreys) – #365papers – 2018 – 50”
What’s it about?
Using DNA sequences, the authors sort out the evolutionary relationships among squids, octopuses, nautiluses, and cuttlefish.Continue reading “Squids, and Octopodes, and Nautiluses, Oh My! – #365papers – 2018 – 49”
What’s it about?
Historically, it has been thought that the upper part of the first branchial (gill) arch becomes the upper jaw (maxillary) and the lower part of the first arch becomes the lower jaw (mandibular). By tracing neural crest cells in the embryos of axolotls and chickens, the authors show that both the upper and lower jaws develop from the lower part of the first arch, and that the upper part becomes the trabecular cartilage, which is part of the skull.Continue reading “Wait? What Part of the Pharynx Becomes the Jaw? – #UREES270 – 2018”
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist