The Caveman’s Corner

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Weird mistake in D. masillae paper?

I noticed this reading through the paper for my last post. I’ll quote how the authors describe Table 3:
Table 3 lists 30 anatomical and morphological characteristics commonly used to distinguish extant strepsirrhine and haplorhine primates. They were taken from the standard primate textbook by Fleagle [74], form the classic W. C. Osman Hill monographs of [...]

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Darwinius as a “Missing Link”

I’ve finally gotten around to reading the PLoS ONE paper describing Darwnius masillae, the newly descrived adapoid from Messel, Germany, represented by a remarkably (95%)  complete skeleton of an immature (approximately 1 y/o) female. The media blitz that accompanied the announcement of the fossil on May 20th put heavy emphasis on the notion that this [...]

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Review: The Gilded Dinosaur, Mark Jaffe

American science was largely a phenomenon of the latter half of the 19th Century. Before the Civil War, Harvard and Yale held an almost complete monopoly on university science in the United States, though their own scientific output was still dwarfed by the work of scattered amateurs in local academies and traveling Europeans. Through the [...]

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Huge Little Adapoid

In storm of media hype, including a special tribute from Google, a new little adapiform fossil has surfaced from Messel, Germany, formerly of Archeopteryx fame. Her name is  Darwinius masillae,  or ‘Ida,’ apparently. And she is beautiful:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090519-missing-link-found.html