nope - not a fake at all...

I hang out online sometimes with a bunch of like-minded fossil-enthusiasts (The Fossil Forum).

Tonight somebody posted this:

Just watched the new this evening and they were talking about a dig going on right now outside of Glen Rose, on the McFall ranch. The news showed the footprints of the therapod and the human prints together. It was interesting. For report go to cbs11tv.com

So I mosied over to the Dallas, TX CBS news site and found the article "Local City Known As Dinosaur Capital Of Texas, by Arezow Doost."

Sounds innocuous enough for a title, right?  Then I read the first three sentences:

"Did you ever think that there were dinosaurs in North Texas?

As it turns out, this is one of the most prolific areas for dinosaur tracks in the state. One group of scientists have even found tracks dating back millions of years."

Read that last sentence again:

"One group of scientists have even found tracks dating back millions of years."

Cause, you know, all those other groups found tracks that weren't millions of years old...
(for those of you who missed out on elementary school, dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous sixty-five million years ago.)

Absolutely hilarious...and mind-numbingly maddening.

After reading a bit more, then you learn what it is really about:

"Scientists believe that one of the most unique findings is human prints dating back to the same period as the dinosaur prints. "We are looking for the truth," said Baugh. "We don't want anything else but the truth.""

I rolled my eyes. Obviously, I had a feeling what I would find out with a little search, but I decided to check out the scientist quoted in the piece, because I thought it was a bit odd that he said "We are looking for the truth. We don't want anything else but the truth."

You see, that is a very non-scientist thing to say in a media piece, and it instantly threw up a red flag to me. I say this because when one is actually in the practice of being a good scientist, a statement like that is like a commercial fisherman saying "no really, we're just out here to catch fish." What else would a fisherman be fishing in the ocean for? If you're a scientist, a statement like that is less than unnecessary.

Yeah this guy, Carl Baugh, is a young earth creationist discredited in the scientific community and with a questionable education. He is obviously seeking to prove his own wrong beliefs - not actually do what good scientists do, which is let the data speak for themselves. Check this out for some rather hilarious reading on Baugh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Baugh

Sigh...it is Texas after all (I was born and raised in east Texas, FYI)

As an added moronic bonus, if you look at the url of the story you'll see that it's filed under "pets."
(http://cbs11tv.com/pets/Texas.Dinosaur.Capital.2.1069336.html).

What kind of of idiots are running that station?

One thing about the fossil record - it's insanely consistent across both time and continental space, if fragmentary. And it has consistently shown us that human and therapod existence is quite a few tens of millions of years apart.

Hell, mammals were barely existent back then, compared to today. But primates? LOL - no.

***

Side note: I'm going fossil hunting in Aurora, NC tomorrow and at Greens Mill Run in Greenville, NC on Saturday!!  Shark teeth here I come. Please just let me find a megalodon.

Oh...you never realized I was gone?

Ah well, that's ok, because I AM back - back from a stressful few months of wondering where I would end up, how I would feed my babies (i.e. cats) and their baby-momma (my wife - yeah that does sound rather gross), and several dozen unknowns also thrown into the mix.

And after all the trials and tribulations, I can now state with certainty that I got the one job in my new future hometown (Pittsburgh) that I wanted more than anything: a post-doc in the lab of Dr. Veronica Hinman at Carnegie Mellon University.

What will I be doing you ask?

Well, I will be doing none other than studying the evolution of gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Specifically, I'll be looking at GRNs in the context of development using the wonderful sea critters in the phylum Echinodermata. For those of you not in the know, the "spiny-skinned" echinoderms are the asteroids (starfish/sea stars), ophiuroids (brittle stars), echinoids (sea urchins), holothuroids (sea cucumbers), and crinoids (feather stars, sea lillies and such).

Click for larger! Or Click HERE for super high resolution posters.

That's right folks - I am now at least an honorary marine biologist! ... kind of.  I don't know if the real marine biologists would ever deign to allow me such a title, but I can call myself whatever I want.

Many of you may know this already, but the process by which a single fertilized cell becomes a complex organism is an insanely intricate one. DNA is often called a "blueprint" for life, however in reality it's more like a cooking recipe informing each cell which ingredient to add and when, where, and how to add it - all codified into a multi-layered genetic computer program with kernels, plug-ins, sub-circuits, and all sorts of other technobabbly organic craziness.

This is where the "Gene Regulatory Network" comes in - the GRN is that central biological software controlling and allowing life itself. Not only will I be studying the structure of these networks in echinoderm development, I'll be looking at the evolutionary context of the echinoderm networks in relation to each other to suss out how they work and which parts of the networks are conserved (or not) between these amazing creatures that diverged from each other about 500 million years ago.

I'll initially be working on the "endomesoderm" network in the sea star, Asterina miniata. Down the line I'll also be contributing to the development of the sea cucumber as a new model for studying "evodevo".

In celebration, I spent a fair bit of time getting back to my art roots creating the above cladogram in the sand of the Echinoderm phylum (which you can get a poster of here if you're into echinoderms. I rendered it out in pretty high resolution, so you will definitely be getting a high quality poster. I'm pretty proud of it as it took quite a bit of work in the Blender program).

I spent a while trying to find time-lapses or animations of starfish development online, to no avail. Thus I spent a week of much needed downtime to create this computer animation: (note - you can also watch it in High Definition on youtube)

NOTE: The details of the actual metamorphosis of the rudiment into the juvenile are not accurate - it's quite hard to animate these types of changes - and to be honest I haven't actually seen these creatures in the flesh. But it's good enough to get a good idea of how the whole developmental process occurs in this type of sea star.

Anyway, I'm sure I will have much much more to say about the evolution and development of echinoderms in the future so I'll leave it at that for now.

Hopefully, I can at least be an honorary member of the cool kids club, the marine biologists: Kevin, Eric, Andrew, David, Miriam, Christie, Rick, Mark, Jason, Chris, and all the others I'm surely missing.

Nagraj Sambrani of Hoxful Monsters

If any of you have not read Hoxful Monsters, you should leave me and go there immediately.

I swear - everytime I read a post by Nagraj Sambrani, I find myself at least a tenth of an IQ point smarter (that's a joke - no IQ debates here...). That adds up!

Nagraj's latest post (New tree of animal suggests nervous system evolved only once in animal history) is on a recent huge study that analyzed a large number of genes throughout the "early" metazoan lineages, coming to the conclusion that the nervous system only evolved once (among other conclusions).

The amazing thing about Nagraj is that he has about as in-depth a grasp of the intricate data of metazoan taxonomy and phylogeny as possible (not to mention his expertise in developmental biology - a huge plus in my eyes).  And for someone for whom English is not a first language, he is an incredibly excellent writer, and getting better all the time.

I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Nagraj and point some more readers his direction, as he is most assuredly among the best writers to cover the detailed evolutionary and developmental science being published.

Scientifically speaking, Hoxful Monsters is most definitely my absolute favorite blog!

I love it more than almost anything, but there are two weeks of Spring that are quite hellish for me.  You see, I am incredibly allergic to Oak pollen (most species but not all).

This fact has lead to a tragic event for me and my place in the Great Darwin Beard Challenge - a mishap involving pollen, drugs, sleep, and ravenous beasts.

I awoke with the tell-tale symptoms: swollen eyes, a Tommy-gun sneezing fit, and a foggy brain. Yes, the oaks were having sex and the fruits of their lust were ravaging my insides.

So I took some pretty hardcore antihistamines and sat in a chair in my front lawn to flaunt my chemical invulnerability to the trees' love weapons. Alas, the antihistamines knocked me out cold.

Now everyone who has lived in the rural deciduous forests of North Carolina knows that you should NEVER fall asleep outside in the daytime.

NEVER EVER!

But in my drug-laden mind I had thrown caution to the wind, leaving my beard as an irresistible free meal to those nasty predators of woolen faces: the native Keratinovorous Dwarf Bears (Hirsutophagous imaliari).

Much to my dismay, my wife had photographed the entire ensuing feast. Apparently she found it too funny to awaken me (in her defense, being an original city-girl she was unaware of the almost certain transmission of virus I was receiving - see below).

Keratinovorous Dwarf Bears making a snack of my beard as I lie unconscious from the antihistamines.

Look what they did to my beard!

Damn you Dwarf Bears!!

Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that the Keratinous Dwarf Bears carry a virus that renders humans infertile (see the 1997 Science article for more info). Thus it seems that I have left this competition in a truly Darwinian fashion: unfit to spread my genes to the population.

Thus, I am saddened to leave this greatest of beard contests disgraced and shamed.

Saddened, impotent, and infertile I leave the Great Darwin Beard Challenge behind...

I'd like to thank Kevin Zelnio (Deep Sea News, The Other 95%), Andrew "The Southern Fried Scientist" and David "whysharksmatter" (both of Southern Fried Science), and the also-shaven "David2" for the opportunity to compete with such woollenly adapted men. It has been great fun and I wish those stupid dwarf bears had not eliminated me from the running for "Most Darwinesque Beard."

May the three of you remain bearded and fertile for the remainder of the competition!

Great Darwin Beard Challenge History:

• The Origin: Deep Sea News, Southern Fried Science, Biochemical Soul
• Week 1: Biochemical Soul, Deep Sea News
• Week 2: Southern Fried Science - Hats
  
• Week 3: Biochemical Soul - Hardcore
  
• Week 4: Biochemical Soul - The Mugshots
• Week 5: Southern Fried Science - “The Colbert”
• Month 2: Southern Fried Science

Great Darwin Beard Challenge History:

• The Origin: Deep Sea News, Southern Fried Science, Biochemical Soul
• Week 1: Biochemical Soul, Deep Sea News
• Week 2: Southern Fried Science - Hats
  
• Week 3: Biochemical Soul - Hardcore
  
• Week 4: Biochemical Soul - The Mugshots
• Week 5: Southern Fried Science - "The Colbert"

However, as I have come to expect from Miriam, she completely knocked the socks off of my expectations with her shiny new edition of the Carnival of Evolution (#10), composing the entire edition as a series of hilarious diary entries.

Excerpt:

"Dear Diary,

Friendly creationists were a bust. First Gravity and Levity refuted creation “science” comprehensively and with citations. Then Adaptive Complexity introduced them to the basic evidence for evolutionary by reviewing the book Why Evolution Is True. When the no-longer-friendly creationists feebly countered with examples of evolutionary frauds, Tangled Up in Blue Guy beat them lightly about the head and neck with the real facts about Haeckel and Piltdown Man and peppered moths and Archaeopteryx.

The sauciest one muttered about half a wing being useless, but Migration demonstrated that half a wing is useful indeed. The final straw was when the Evolving Mind noted that evolution does not inevitably lead to intelligence. They ran away, leaving me alone once more in the internet wilderness."

Be sure to check it out, for it will certainly go down as one of the more creative editions - owing in no small part to the excellent evolutionary writings linked from within.  Among those included is my own recent post on the Evolution of Channichthyidae Icefish Blood and Antifreeze.

I guess this just goes to show that Miriam didn't get syndicated by Slate's XX Factor for nothing (just announced by Miriam herself in the Podcast of the Blue #1)!

Next month, Carnival of Evolution #11 will be hosted by Allie of Oh, for the Love of Science!

Use this form to submit your posts for next month's edition.

The Red Blood Cell-less Icefish © Dr Julian Gutt and Alfred Wegener Institute

Imagine that you are a fish - exothermic and thus unable to regulate your own body temperature - and the contingent foibles of natural history have all conspired to leave you and your kind in the frigid oceans of the Antarctic just as they are beginning to reach the freezing point (10-14 million years ago).

You like the cold and are well adapted for it, but these temperatures are beginning to give even you - a master of the cold - the icthy chills.

Now imagine that the hands of mother nature have given you the tools to change your own genetic code, and thus your nature, allowing you to make yourself even more suited for waters that are 2 degrees celsius below the freezing point of pure water.

What would you do? Would you inject your DNA with a molecular antifreeze? That seems like a reasonable addition - one we will get to momentarily.

But if you were a genius of bioengineering would you reach out a molecular scalpel and hack away the genes that allow the production of red blood cells, hemoglobin, and myoglobin, leaving only molecular fossils behind?

Icefish Larva © Uwe Kils

It doesn't seem like a particularly well thought out plan. But then again, neither you, the fish, nor mother nature are genius bioengineers. Fortunately for life, the forces of evolution still manage to get the job done, however sloppy the end results (yes, technically the job is never done - forgive my metaphor wearing thin).

In fact, natural selection performed just such a feat somewhere around 8.5 million years ago in the ancestors of a flock of related species in the Antarctic: the Channichthyidae icefishes (also known as crocodile icefishes or white-blooded fishes).

As we all know, liquids tend to become more viscous in the cold. Just compare maple syrup before and after refrigeration. Blood viscosity would have no doubt been an issue in the ancient ice fish ancestors, or at least one that could be improved upon. Normal vertebrate blood is filled with big, round, and red blood cells coursing through the blood vessels. Now imagine lowering the temperature of the blood below the normal freezing point of water - that's bound to create some significant resistance.

But aren't erythrocytes critical for carrying oxygen? How could an organism just dispense with them completely? As many scientists know, one of the great things about really cold water is that it can be packed with oxygen. Such is the case with the waters of the Southern Ocean, which are saturated with oxygen.

Thus, it seems that at some point, the icefish ancestors developed mutations in the pathways that result in red blood cell production. Furthermore, the species eventually acquired a deletion in the key genes of red blood cells: the alpha and beta hemoglobin genes. No longer could this fish produce hemoglobin.

As is often the case with evolution through loss of gene function, the deletion wasn't perfect. Almost all vertebrates have both hemoglobin genes lying next to each other within the genome. In most Channichthyidae icefishes, the beta hemoglobin gene has been completely deleted, along with all but the truncated end of the alpha hemoglobin gene (interestingly, these fish have lost their myoglobin gene as well)¹. To quote the original paper by Near et al.:

"Despite the costs associated with loss of hemoglobin and myoglobin in icefishes, the chronically cold and oxygen-saturated waters of the Southern Ocean provided an environment in which vertebrate species could flourish without oxygen-binding proteins."

The upshot of all this is that the icefish has completely clear blood lacking in any erythrocytes - and they are the only species of vertebrates to have such a trait.

Normal two hemoglobin genes vs. lost icefish hemoglobins - cropped figure from Near et al 2006

Of course, a few other supporting traits evolved as well. Their hearts are significantly larger than other fish hearts, and they pump 4 to 5 times larger volume of blood per stroke². Their capillary beds have become much more dense as well to make sure all their tissues get adequate oxygenation. Of course, like amphibians that breathe through their skin, with the loss of red blood cells, those that were better able to absorb oxygen tended to outperform their cohorts. Thus they became scaleless as well.

As if these adaptive feats weren't cool enough (pun intended), the antarctic icefishes have evolved their own antifreeze as well^3,4. What's amazing about this antifreeze (an Antifreeze Glycoprotein - or "AFGP") is that it represents one clear cut case in which a gene with a specific function has evolved into a separate gene used for a completely different function in a novel way. In the case of the icefish, the ancestral gene was a trypsinogen (a pancreatic digestive enzyme), which has been mutated and co-opted to be secreted and distributed throughout the body to act as an antifreeze. Specifically (for you biologists out there), the 5' secretory signal and 3' UTR sequences of trypsinogen were tacked onto an amplified nine nucleotide sequence from within the trypsinogen precursor to create the novel antifreeze peptide.

So here we have in the icefish's adaptation to the cold, at least one case of de novo creation of a novel gene with a new function from an old gene, as well as the loss of two other genes that have left genomic fossils behind to whither in the weathers of time.

It may not be the cleanest or best engineered solution to the problem of living in an Antarctic Hell (or perhaps Heaven from the perspective of the fish), but this messiness of evolution is precisely what makes it so incredibly beautiful.

References

1. Near T.J., Parker S.K.,  Detrich H.W. A genomic fossil reveals key steps in hemoglobin loss by the Antarctic icefishes. Molecular Biology and Evolution, v.23, 2006, p. 2008 - 2016.
2. William C. Aird. Endothelial biomedicine. Edition: illustrated. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2007
3. Chen L., DeVries A.L., Cheng C-H. C. Evolution of antifreeze glycoprotein gene from a trypsinogen gene in Antarctic notothenioid?fish. PNAS, April 15, 1997 vol. 94 no. 8 3811-3816
4. Chen L., DeVries A.L., Cheng C-H. C. Convergent evolution of antifreeze glycoproteins in Antarctic notothenioid fish and Arctic?cod. PNAS, April 15, 1997 vol. 94 no. 8 3817-3822
5. Top image © Dr Julian Gutt and Alfred Wegener Institute
6. Icefish larval image by Uwe Kils

Previous Adaptations of the Week:

1. Timber Rattlesnake Camoflage
2. The Aye-Aye’s Freaky Finger (I’ve Been Cursed by an Aye-Aye!)
3. Flatfish Eyes & Recapitulation Theory
4. Bird/Crocodile Symbiosis?
5. Insect Dorsal Ocelli

Thus I have taken on the reigns of presenting this week's Great Darwin Beard Challenge images.

For those of you new here (and I know there are several due to my Science Blogging: The Future of Science Communication & Why You Should be a Part of it), check out the links at the bottom for previous installments. The short of it: from Darwin's birthday in February to the anniversary of the Origin of Species in October, we are competing for the title of "Most Darwinesque Beard."

Each week, we generally have some theme for the images, mainly just to keep ourselves entertained and distract us from the itchiness and rejections from our significant others.

Kevin's instructions this week were to take "mugshots. Try to look as criminally insane as possible."

Great Darwin Beard Challenge - Week 4 (click for larger)

Participants: Andrew, the Southern Fried Scientist of Southern Fried Science, Kevin of Deep-Sea News and The Other 95%, Me, David "WhySharksMatter" also of Southern Fried Science, and David2 marine graduate student without a blog.

Personally, I think that I win the "criminally insane" look. David1 definitely has the "mentally challenged" look going for him. Andrew just looks guilty and perhaps drugged. Kevin and David2 both have the "yeah - I did it - whatcha gonna do about it" look.

Next week will be hosted by David at Southern Fried Science. Thereafter, we will be moving to biweekly updates of the contest. Technically, we are in Week 5 right now - these images are from last week.

Great Darwin Beard Challenge History:

• The Origin: Deep Sea News, Southern Fried Science, Biochemical Soul
• Week 1: Biochemical Soul, Deep Sea News
• Week 2: Southern Fried Science
• Week 3: Biochemical Soul

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species

Just a couple of quick notes to my fellow developmental biologists out there:

First, due to my recent post, Science Blogging: The Future of Science Communication & Why You Should be a Part of it, I was reminded through my comments at Larry Moran's reaction post at Sandwalk that I haven't met very many developmental biologist bloggers out there.

In fact, there is only one dedicated developmental bio blogger I've found: the superb Hoxful Monsters by Nagraj Sambrani. His blog is written for scientists - and if you care about the nitty gritty details of development and evo-devo, his is a blog you should not miss. (Yes I know PZ of Pharyngula is a developmental biologist and posts on the subject as well - but I think he has "evolved" well beyond being developmental-centered - feel free to disagree)

But there must be at least a few more out there, right? If there are, please let me know.

Second, I recently started listening to Scientific American's "Science Talk" podcasts again on my long drive to work. In the February 28th episode, there's an incredibly fascinating interview with one of the premier evo-devo researchers, Dr. Sean Carroll, in which he talks about his new book, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species. This is one book I will definitely be picking up with due haste.

I highly recommned the podcasts as well.

Apparently these videos have been around for quite some time, but I somehow missed them. Thus I'm guessing that some of you may have missed them as well.

The following are a couple of songs from David Haines Lifetime: a Science Oratoria. You can find a much larger list of songs here, as well as details on the project.

Beware: after listening this you will have "Kingdom...phylum...class and or-r-r-rder" stuck in your head all day long.

Taxonomy

Mr. Darwin, Mr. Wallace, Mr. Matthew