Archetype

Blogging will resume in early September

Archetype is about to get even quieter.

Grant proposals have been dealt with (more or less), and next week I will be in Turin, Italy, for the congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. I just don’t want to won’t have time to blog during the congress, unfortunately.

But do not fear, for I leave you with a very tough quiz. Let see if someone knows what’s depicted below. A couple of tips:

- It is one of the few sclerites (skeletal pieces) in adult workers that is completely internal.

- It comes in pairs (left one pictured).

The answer will be revealed upon my return.

The mysterious sclerite X (Scanning Electron Micrograph, Roberto Keller/AMNH)

Nineteenth century figure found to be wrong about something, kind of

I have Google Alerts set for the term “cladistics” so I will receive a feed every time Google indexes that word. Now, in the last couple of days those feeds have catch a story circulating in the news media regarding a recently published study looking at the appendix from a comparative and phylogenetic perspective, pretty cool if you ask me.

I can only access the abstract of the original publication unfortunately, but it does seems to be a well done and thorough study. The problem is the way the report gets increasingly hyped by the news media. I first got this: Evolution of the appendix: A biological ‘remnant’ no more. OK, that’s not bad. I then got this: Appendix redux. Yeah, sure, succinct and clever. But today I got this: Darwin wrongly called the appendix a biological ‘remnant’, say researchers:

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Tags: Charles Darwin, Rudimentary organs

Patenting cladistics

Every once in a while someone comes and tries to file a patent on some of the very basic algorithms we all use to infer phylogenetic trees.
This time is a very “special” someone. The image to the left may give you a clue. Read more at Myrmecos blog.

Tags: microsoft, silly

Chris Humphries, botanist and founding fellow of the Willi Hennig Society, died on July 31st, aged 62

Photograph courtesy of Malte C. Ebach (http://urhomology.blogspot.com/)

It is our sad task to record the death of Professor Chris Humphries, merit researcher in the Botany Department until his retirement in 2007, on Friday 31st July. Chris was a leading figure in the cladistic revolution in systematics and biogeography. Without his tireless efforts, systematic botany – perhaps systematic biology – would be a very different beast.

Chris joined the Botany Department in 1972 as an assistant curator, a nearly-finished PhD student, coming directly from Vernon Heywood’s Botany Department in Reading University. With the exception of three sabbaticals – two of them at the University of Melbourne (1979-80, 1986) and a six month stay as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin) in 1994 – Chris spent his entire career in the Museum.
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New on my blogroll

I had stumble across myrmician the macrophotographer on the web before. He has a very nice collection of Australian ants, spiders and other invertebrates on Flickr.

I just learned he is also a Ph.D. student at Pert, researching the effects of salinity levels on terrestrial arthropods. He started a clever-looking blog where he mixes photography and science. After one month posts are looking good. Besides, you know that anyone with that avatar can’t be a bad blogger.

(Hat tip to himself )