Davoid - Slashdot User

Microbes 100M Years Old Found In Termite Guts 145

Posted by kdawson on Sunday May 24, 2009 @06:13PM from the mutualism-in-action dept.

viyh writes with coverage on MSNBC of the discovery of ancient microbes fossilized in the gut of a termite. "One hundred million years ago a termite was wounded and its abdomen split open. The resin of a pine tree slowly enveloped its body and the contents of its gut. In what is now the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, the resin fossilized and was buried until it was chipped out of an amber mine. The resin had seeped into the termite's wound and preserved even the microscopic organisms in its gut. These microbes are the forebears of the microbes that live in the guts of today's termites and help them digest wood. ... The amber preserved the microbes with exquisite detail, including internal features like the nuclei. ... Termites are related to cockroaches and split from them in evolutionary time at about the same time the termite in the amber was trapped."

Submission + - Biologist Barred from Creationist Film

Submitted by

Pickens

on Saturday March 22, 2008 @11:16AM

Pickens writes: "Two evolutionary biologists — P. Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota and Richard Dawkins of Oxford — tried to attend an advance screening for the creationist film "Expelled" last week. Dawkins got in while Myers did not. The movie the two scientists wanted to see asserts that people in academia who see evidence of supernatural intelligence in biological processes — an idea called "intelligent design" — have unfairly lost their jobs, been denied tenure or suffered other penalties as part of a scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nation's laboratories and classrooms. Myers asserts that he was unfairly barred from the film while Mark Mathis, a producer of the film, said he allowed Dawkins to attend because "he has handled himself fairly honorably, he is a guest in our country and I had to presume he had flown a long way to see the film." Dawkins for his part said the hoopla has been "a gift" to those who oppose creationism. "We could not ask for anything better.""

Submission + - Living Fossil is Fastest Evolving Animal

Submitted by

Pickens

on Thursday March 20, 2008 @01:23PM

Pickens writes: "Researchers have found that New Zealand's "living dinosaur" the tuatara is evolving at a DNA level faster than any other animal. "Of course we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly — they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism — would have evolved slowly," said DNA expert Professor David Lambert. "In fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly, which supports a hypothesis proposed by the evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson, who suggested that the rate of molecular evolution was uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution." In related news Henry the tuatara finally proved his manhood at age 111, when he was caught in the act by tuatara curator Lindsay Hazley mating with Mildred, a "prolific breeder" aged 70 to 80 years. The tuatara, Sphendon punctatus, is found only in New Zealand and is the only surviving member of a distinct reptilian order Sphehodontia that lived alongside early dinosaurs and separated from other reptiles 200 million years ago in the Upper Triassic period. The original paper is available for $31.50."

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