Once upon a time—in the Eocene epoch—whales were quadrupeds. They walked on land. The cetaceans, the group including whales and dolphins, originated in south Asia more than 50 million years ago from a small, four-legged, hoofed ancestor. Now, researchers reporting the discovery of an ancient four-legged whale—found in 42.6-million-year-old marine sediments along the coast of Peru—have new insight into whales’ evolution and their dispersal to other parts of the world.
“It’s quite a head scratcher,” says Waldan Kwong, a University of British Columbia postdoctoral research fellow and lead author for a team of scientists that have found an organism that can produce chlorophyll but does not engage in photosynthesis that may provide clues as to how to protect the world’s coral reefs in the future. “We don’t know why these organisms are holding on to these photosynthesis genes. There’s some novel biology going on here, something we haven’t seen before.”
Never in recorded history has a single disease burned down so much of the tree of life, reports Ed Yong in The Atlantic.
“Our animal ancestry argues that geomagnetic field sensors should also be there representing not the sixth sense but perhaps the 10th or 11th human sense to be discovered,” says Caltech geobiologist Joseph Kirschvink. Now, evidence has been found that humans are able to unconsciously detect changes in Earth-strength magnetic fields, according to scientists at Caltech and the University of Tokyo.
Occam’s Razor rules! A University of Oslo team discovered the most straight-forward and plausible explanation so far for the origin of life on Earth with the simplest assumptions.
In July 2017, a giant iceberg broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf east of the Antarctic Peninsula, unveiling a large swathe of ocean that has existed in darkness beneath the ice for more than 100,000 years, and might hold clues to the evolution and mobility of marine life and its response to climate change –an unexplored world that has existed longer than the evolution of the human neocortex, our “super-brain,” no later than 75,000 years ago that spurred our capacity for novelty and invention.
