The Show Place

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- One in five mammals living on Earth is a bat, yet their evolutionary history is largely unknown because of a limited fossil record and conflicting or incomplete theories about their origins and divergence.

It's hard to believe it was just ten years ago that scientists reported the first complete genome sequence of an organism, the bacterial pathogen Haemophilus influenzae. The list has grown considerably since then: add over 160 bacterial species (and counting), most major model organisms, and an ever-growing list of mammals—including, of course, humans. With 99% of our genome now fully sequenced, the Human Genome Project's next major goal is to identify all the functional elements contained in our 2.85 billion nucleotides. Such an effort is hardly trivial: producing the sequence of a mammalian-size genome can run from $10 to $50 million, the estimated price tag of the Cow Genome Project.

Over 250 million years ago (mya), all the continents of Earth formed a single land mass called Pangaea. Some 50 million years later, this supercontinent began to split in two, forming Laurasia—now North America, Asia, and Europe—and Gondwana—present-day Antarctica, Australia, South America, Africa, and India. After another 50 million years, Gondwana, too, broke up. At the end of the Cretaceous period, New Zealand split off (about 80 mya), then South America and Australia separated from Antarctica (about 35 mya).

Duke University neurobiologist Erich Jarvis and a team of 28 other neuroscientists have proposed sweeping changes to the terminology associated with the brain structures of birds--a century-old nomenclature the researchers consider outdated and irrelevant to birds' true brainpower.

A group of four-footed mammals that flourished worldwide for 40 million years and then died out in the ice ages is the missing link between the whale and its not-so-obvious nearest relative, the hippopotamus.

Genomics, the study of all the genetic sequences in living organisms, has leaned heavily on the blueprint metaphor. A large part of the blueprint, unfortunately, has been unintelligible, [...]

Like the gaudy peacock or majestic buck, the bachelor fruit fly is in a race against time to mate and pass along its genes. And just as flashy plumage or imposing antlers work to an animal's reproductive advantage, so, too, do the colored spots that decorate the wings of a particular male fruit fly.

The fossil record may not be perfect, but it passed a critical test with flying colors, [...]

While the vast majority of the world's genetic researchers focus on the five to ten percent of the human genome that is actually a blueprint for a useful molecule, Wojciech Makalowski is studying the "junk."

[...] portray birds as more comparable to mammals in their cognitive ability.

An amazing variety of arboreal animals have learned to glide through the forest, from flying squirrels to flying lizards and frogs, and even — frightening as it sounds — snakes.

A team of scientists led by Peer Bork, Ph.D., Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, report today in the journal Genome Research that they have identified a new primate-specific gene family that spans about 10% of human chromosome 2. Comprised of eight family members, the RGP gene cluster may help to explain what sets apart humans and other primates from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Biologists at Lehigh University and the University of Maryland have identified a cricket living in Hawaii's forests as the world's fastest-evolving invertebrate.

How smart is your parakeet or that crow in the back yard?

The biggest spider ever to have walked the earth has been exposed as a 'fraud' by a University of Manchester scientist, who claims the creature is more crab than creepy crawly.

To Avoid Damage From Too Much Oxygen, Say Researchers, Challenging Previous Theories

A 115-million-year-old fossil of a tiny egg-laying mammal thought to be related to the platypus provides compelling evidence of multiple origins of acute hearing in humans and other mammals.