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Recent Posts
- Hoppers, diggers, and hopping diggers
- You can’t choose your family…the LCA of synapsids and sauropsids
- Encephalization quotients (EQ) in vertebrate animals
- Inheritance and development of primitive Dinosaurian traits in the evolution of birds (Aves)
- Why Equids walk on their toenails…the curious case of the horse
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Hoppers, diggers, and hopping diggers
All living mammals (except humans) that have become true bipeds have adopted a very specific and specialized bounding form of bipedalism. Bipedal hopping results in a distinctive pelvic structure and this structure has similarities to specialized fossorial groups, implying that these disparate groups … Continue reading
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You can’t choose your family…the LCA of synapsids and sauropsids
Mammals are the only surviving members of the synapsids, a group that split from the sauropsids, which includes all of the groups that we think of as “reptiles” as well as dinosaurs, birds, and crocodilians. This split happened sometime around 300 … Continue reading
Encephalization quotients (EQ) in vertebrate animals
Intelligence is notoriously difficult to measure even in other people, let alone other species. One method commonly used, the encephalization quotient or EQ, is an equation comparing the proportional brain size of an animal, that is brain size relative to body … Continue reading
Inheritance and development of primitive Dinosaurian traits in the evolution of birds (Aves)
Premise: If feathers and bipedality are the primitive condition in all basal dinosaurs, these traits would have been kept by saurischians – theropods and sauropods – after the saurischian/ornithischian split, while ornithischians lost these primitive traits and became scaly and quadripedal. Selective pressures, whatever selected for … Continue reading
Why Equids walk on their toenails…the curious case of the horse
Horses and other members of the genus Equus are unique in having a foot where functionally they are standing on their toenails of a single digit, the third toe. The hoofwall itself is analogous to a fingernail, the frog to … Continue reading
Shrew time
Shrews have the highest metabolism of all mammals, and must eat every hour or two. Maximum lifespan of most shrew species is around two years. Despite living on the fasttrack metabolically, shrews in common with all mammals run through roughly the … Continue reading
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Walking Whales 