Biology & Palaeontology Qs & As

2007-01-19T05:55:00.000-08:00

WE HAVE MOVED!!!

Biology and Palaeontology Qs & As has now moved to:

Ask A Biologist

Thanks to everyone who helped run this site. All the old posts can be found at AskABiologist so you can check out everything from this sit and loads of new features!

The new site still has a few bugs, so please give us some time to get them sorted out and to answer then new questions. See you there!

2007-01-12T04:35:00.000-08:00

Bill, sent us this question....

As fossils come from many different strata and therefore comprise of different minerals to some others. In which part of the world would you find the 'best' ones with regards to ease of extraction and robustness (if those don't go together). What do you do with fragile ones?

As you rightly say, fossils are found in a great range of rock types. These rock types reflect the environments in which the fossils lived. For example, many dinosaur fossils are found in rocks that formed in coast and river plains, near where the dinosaurs lived, and where their bones could be easily buried and fossilised after the animal died.

As to where the 'best' fossils are found, it depends what you mean by 'best'. Some of the best-preserved fossils are found in rocks deposited in the deep-sea, for example the arthropods of the famous 'Burgess Shale'. Many complete, pristine fossils of insects and plants are found in ancient lake deposits, which also occasionally (and extremely rarely) preserve dinosaurs, pterosaurs, fish and frogs with 'soft tissues' preserved. These are the remains of the soft muscles and skin of the animals, which, in exceptional circumstances may be preserved along with the bones. These fossils are extremely rare and valuable. The photo is of an insect from the famous Messel group in Germany (about 40 million years old). It even preserves the original colour and irridesence of the beetle's body.

Most fossils are represented only by the bones and shells of the animal. How robust these fossils are depends largely on how well mineralised the remains are, and on how much disturbance the rock layers have been exposed to. Fragile bones can be hardened with glues and resins before being encased in plaster for extraction. There are many kinds of glues now available and fragile bones often require extensive work to support them. Sadly some still degenerate over time (especially those collected and repaired in the 1800s) and fossils are lost when they crumble away to nothing. Darren Naish reported on this situation in dinosaurs very recently in his blog here.

2007-01-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

Helen, sent us this....

I have read that in the past, the British Isles had a warm tropical climate, but I can't find more detailed information. I would like to know how the high latitude would have affected yearly cycles. Currently in the tropics seasons are more related to changes in rainfall, because day-lenght doesn't change much over a year, but in temperate zones seasons are related to day length and temperature.
How would a tropical climate be affected by changing day length? Would the winters have been colder than the summers? Would there be a massive amount of plant growth during the summer, and next to nothing in the limited daylight of winter? Could you point me towards resources which could give me more details?

There were several periods of warmer climate, the last one is about 1000 yrs ago and called the 'medieval warm period'.

Another period is in the middle Pliocene (ca. 3 Million Years Ago) when it was generally warmer than present, particularly at middle to high latitudes. It has been suggested that this period may represent an analogue for future climate change. Mechanisms that have been proposed to account for this warming are enhanced thermohaline circulation and/or greater concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. In the European and Mediterranean region the climate might have been warmer by 5 °C, wetter (by 400-1000 mm/yr), and less seasonal than present.

Some remarlable plant fossils were found along the British cliffs e.g. in the Bournemouth cliffs (which are notable for sands and clays of Eocene age). The fossil leaves seem to indicate that in Eocene times there was here an unusually warm environment even thought the palaeolatitude would normally suggest temperate rather tropical conditions .

The best link I found about the different periods is this one here.

The probelm of latitude is a completly different one, however. What is now the British Isles moved due to plate tectonics over the globe. Therefore it was once closer to the equator and the climate was therefore comparable to the tropics today.

For the determing factors of tropical climate this site here gives some good background.

2007-01-02T03:21:00.000-08:00

2006-12-27T00:42:00.000-08:00

Paul sent us this...

My dad is having trouble totally accepting evolution. He brings up complex chemical reactions such as the Kreb Cycle and how half a Kreb cycle would be useless. I've tried to explain that for things to evolve, each intermediate step must be useful. I've managed to convince him of the eye but microbiology still stymies my attempts to get him to completely accept evolution. Any suggestions?

It is always difficult to explain why evolution makes sense, and of course we can't alwasys explain everything. That does not mean that things have not evolved, but just because physicists cannot (yet) explain how black holes operate it does not mean that they do notobey the laws of physics. In the same way evolution has occured and does occur, although we may not always be able to see what has happened in the case of some things.

The trap your father has fallen into is assuming that the origin of the Krebs cycle was somehow 'aimed' at producing energy for a cell. But the basis of the cycle probably had a function beyond this. Organisms billions of years ago may have made different uses of the chemical pathways to produce useful products. Evolution added new steps to this (each of whichwould have been advantagous to the organism at the time) and this eventually resulted in the Krebs cycle as we see it now.

It is often said that the components of a structure, for example the eye, or the flagellum of a bacterium, are only worth having if they are part of an eye, or flagellum. There is no point evolving a lens, if you don't have the rest of the eye to go with it. However, the eye has been shown to have been built up from a simple light sensitive spot seen in all animals. It is throught the addition of structures like a lens which makes it into a really specialised organ that can allow the brain to differentiate the tiniest variation in colour and shape of a structure. We see (no pun intended) that the complex camera eye that we have, and also the Cephalopod molluscs, has evolved independently in both of these groups. The animals in between have a variety of simpler eyes from which our sort can be seen to have evolved.

It is interesting that all eyes whatever their morphology, be they camera eyes, or compound eyes seen in the arthropods, are all patterned by the same set of genes, the Pax6 genes.

Likewise the individual components of the flagellum have been shown to have an individual function, before they came together to form the Bacterium's propulsion system.

The is a series of links to various books and papers here and some more information on the origins of complex pathways here (scroll down a bit in both cases!).

2006-12-08T03:34:00.000-08:00

Anonymous said...

Where can I find more information on the role of adaptation in evolution? Many adaptations are explained away in what seem to be 'just so' stories, when in fact they could just as easily be explained by a phenotype being predominant purely by association at the genome level to some sexually selected trait - and then the organisms in the new population exploit the phenotype in such a way that afterwards it looks like adaptation drove the evolution. It just seems to me that, for example, 'Longer fingers for tree climbing' is hardly the kind of thing that would affect reproductive success - which HAS TO happen for a change in a population's genome. My 'gut feeling' is that evolution just randomly speciates, with crazy variety, and THEN niches are exploited; then in retrospect paleontologists infer reproductive success for adaptations -when in reality nothing of the sort happened.
So where can i go to validate/debunk this gut feeling? who is doing work to test the mechanisms of adaptation and selection and writing books for the layperson? is convergent evolution 'proof' of the selective power of adaptation, or just statistical certitudes given enough time, in a pretty much random process exploring all morphological spaces?

That’s quite a question, but you have picked up a few misconceptions there. I’ll try to pack it all into a reasonable reply post, but do send us another comment if you want more (and leave us your contact details).

Reproductive success is by no means the be-all and end-all of success in terms of passing on your genes. Animals must survive long enough to reproduce, and few survival traits are linked to sexual selection or to sexual characteristics. Quite the reverse in fact if you look at how sexual selection operates. Look at this recent paper (abstract here) on the changes in limbs in lizards. Limb length changed twice in less than a year in response to the introduction of a new predator. A change in limbs and behaviours allows only some lizards to survive to reproduce, so their mating success is directly tied to this, if not their ability to compete successfully for mates.

You have also used a very strict definition of 'evolution', assuming that it must be an active trend. Traits may appear that have no obvious function (like red hair in humans, or a 6th finger), but if they do not affect the survival of an animal, or its reproductive success then (all other factors being equal) there will be nothing to stop it from passing on its genes and this trait may spread through a population by genetic drift. Reproductive success does not ‘have to happen’ to change the genoype of a population. However, these traits have still evolved, as they did not exist in earlier generations. They may subsequently become 'functional' (red hair might be deemed more attractive, or a 6th finger might help climbing) but this does mean that evolution has not occured.

Novel adaptations can certainly drive evolution however, see some examples here. Obviously the success of groups like birds and bats is in response to their ability to fly and the evolution of flight has allowed them to exploit new niches and speciate and diversify as a result. With much of this work being done by the Gants on Darwin’s finches. At times of great change (after mass extinctions say, or the initial colonization of land) then niches are available to be exploited, and otherwise unsuccessful or uncompetitive adaptations may (temporarily) become established (evolution may go a little nuts) but in times of stability, the better adapted organisms will come to dominate (e.g. the rise of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic). Niches are plastic things and as environments change (over space and time) and organisms, evolve, adapt and compete, they will shape their own niches and those of other species around them.

As for convergent evolution. There are a limited number of ways of solving certain problems (e.g. feeding on termites) with certain body plans and so it is somewhat of an inevitability. In some cases (e.g. birds, bats and pterosaurs) a remarkable problem (flight) can be solved in very different ways, but in other, conservatism of shape is clearly the best solution (whales, penguins, icthyosaurs, tuna) and so evolution will eventually stumble on the ‘best’ solution and shapes will converge.

You also asked about books, take a look around. A quick search on Amazon for “evolution” and “adaptation” found a few dozen popular and more technical science books. A good start would be the Dawkins books The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable.

2006-12-04T02:09:00.000-08:00

2006-11-13T02:45:00.000-08:00

Will (11) from Lowestoft has a question about dinosaurs.....

was there ever such a creature as "giganotosaurus" (not sure about spelling?)and if so was it bigger than a T-Rex?
And my dad wants to know if Dino's were around for so long why didn't they evolve to be a bit more intelligent? Its always puzzled him.

Well Will, there certainly was such a thing as Giganotosaurs (yes, your spelling is right!) and it was indeed 'bigger' than Tyrannosaurs. Several fossils of Giganotosaurs have been found from the rocks of Late Cretaceous in Argentina, and it is one of the biggest known carnivorous dinosaurs. It was relative of Allosaurs (although it lived much later) and may have reached more than 15 meters in length! This is quite a bit more than T.rex, although T.rex was much bulkier and as a result was probably a heavier animal. Above is a reconstruction of the skull of Giganotosaurswith that of a human!

Giganotosaurs lived at the same time and place as the largest known dinosaur, the enormous Argentinosaurs that may have been up to 50 metres long, and weighted 100 tons!!! As a result, it has been suggested that Giganotosaurs was actually a pack hunter and took on these huge dinosaurs in groups. Here is a picture of a reconstruction of the two dinosaurs.

As for dinosaur intelligence it is a difficualt question to answer. Certainly some dinosaurs would have been quite smart compared to living animals. We can get an idea oof both an dinosaurs brain size, and how it was made up by the bones that surround it. From this we can see how big the brain was and what parts were devoted to eyesight, smell etc. There is also a general correlation of intelligence with the size of the brain and the size of the animal. Large animals need large brains, so a small animal with a large brain was probably quite smart. Certainly some dinosaurs (notably the advanced predators like Troodon and Deinonychus were about as smart as some modern birds like ostriches. Our own Darren Naish discussed some of these issues recently, look here for more.

As for why more dinosaurs didn't get more intelligent sooner, well thats impossible to say. Probably they had no need to, they only had to outsmart each other, so if everyone was at the same level there would be no big evolutionary pressure to get smarter. Darren's post looks at some of the consequences of super-smart dinosaurs and how they might have evolved.

2006-11-03T01:00:00.000-08:00

Taj has a comment about prions.....

You said that prions are infectious. But they have no DNA? How can they be infectious if they don't have genetic material?

Hallo Taj, that’s a very good question. Prior to detection of prions, all known pathogens (e.g. bacteria and viruses) contain nucleic acid to reproduce. Prions, in contrast, seem to be devoid of nucleic acid. Treatments, which would normally destroy nucleic acid, don’t inactivate them. In 1982, the infectious particle was discovered (purified) by Stanley Prusiner and termed “prion”, a combination of the terms “proteinaceous” and “infectious”. The prevalent theory proposes that prions are infectious misfolded proteins, which reproduce in the absence of nucleic acid by transmission of their abnormal folding to the normally folded proteins in the host.

2006-11-02T04:12:00.000-08:00

10 year old Ian (our question man) has another question....

I have another question. Do you know if there have been any new fossil discoveries of desmostylans and/or sea cows in the past few years? I was wondering if desmostylans are more closely related to sea cows, elephants or hyraxes.

The latest studies of desmostylians indicate that they are more closely related to elephants than they are to hyraxes or sea cows. Within the placental mammal group Paenungulata (it includes hyraxes, sea cows and elephants), the desmostylians and elephants form a subgroup termed the Behemota, with the features that indicate their relatedness mostly being details of the teeth and ear region.

Another group - the obscure and poorly known anthracobunids - also appear to be members of Behemota (interestingly, anthracobunids are like desmostylians in being aquatic or amphibious. Given that elephants are also within this group, you might like to think what this tells us about the ancestry of elephants).

New fossil desmostylians and sea cows are published fairly regularly. One of the biggest discoveries within this area has been the 2001 publication of the Jamaican fossil sea cow Pezosiren - it is significant in that it still had hindlegs and could walk on land.

2006-11-02T00:20:00.000-08:00

2006-10-31T04:52:00.000-08:00

Sam, who is 11 asked us....

I have what might be a silly question. I've always wondered why humans have a large, pointy nose and great apes like chimps, orangutans and gorillas have hardly any nose at all? When did the nose evolve?

Well Sam, that is not a silly question at all, although it is a tricky one to answer. The first problem is looking at noses in the past. As you probably know, only the top of your nose has any bone in it, further down (where it is squishy) your nose is shaped by cartilidge, not bone, and as a result this is not usually preserved.

Currently the best supported idea is that a large nose helps you to keep warm. A large nose allows the air you breathe in to warm up a little and so it will not chill your lungs too much when you breathe in. Similarly, this change in tempreature combined with a large nose (and nasal cavity) helps you keep water in your body when you breathe out. You can see it when you breathe out on a cold day - there is always much more 'steam' when you breathe out through your mouth than your nose because you are losing more water vapour. But how does the evidence match up to this?

Well, first of all modern apes (chimps, gorillas, orangs and gibbons) all live in tropical climates, and as you correctly said, they tend to have small, flat noses. As early man / apes left the rainforests they would have encountered colder, dryer air on the plains and so the nose would have begun to evolve around then. This also explains when Neanderthal man (many of whom lived in high mountains) had a large nose, as do modern eskimos (innuits) who live in cold climates. So noses evolved to keep you warm and wet, but exactly when this happened is very difficult to say.

However, the nose also probably sticks out beasue we as humans have smaller jaws than other apes. As the muzzle moved back in early human, it left the nose sticking out in front of the face, rather than incorporated into it, as with things like gorillas.

2006-10-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Anonymous has sent us this query...

I have been told that there are creatures called pseudoscorpions, that look like real scorpions without the tail. Can you please tell me when and where the earliest forms of these creatures are from?

Pseudoscorpions do indeed look a bit like scorpions without the sting, but are probably most closely related to the quite large and very quick solifugids (also called sun spiders or wind spiders [pictured]). Pseudoscorpions are a group with a poor fossil record (they are very small and would easily be overlooked), and most of the ones we have are preserved in amber. However, the earliest fossil forms are known from the Middle Devonian (ca 390 million years) of Gilboa, New York State.

2006-10-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Anonymous sent us this...

Hi, I'm a 15 year old high school student. I have a question about birds and dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs evolved into birds right? A friend of mine doesn't think that could be true, because bird lungs are so different from any other animals. So my question is, how similar are dinosaur lungs with bird lungs?

There is now overwhelming evidence that dinosaurs did indeed evolve into birds. This includes dinosaurs having light bones, fused clavicles and a special bone in the wrist called the semi-lunate carpel which allows extended movements and ultimately flapping flight (not to mention feathered dinosaurs like the one pictured!). In fact you can trace so-called bird characteristics right back through the theropod dinosaurs. There are as yet no fossilised dinosaur lungs so we have to use other evidence to reconstruct what their lungs might have been like.

The strongest evidence is that air sacs which are found in the bones of dinosaurs are very similar to those in modern birds. Dinosaurs and birds also have uncinate processes on their ribs (little backwards pointing extensions) which we believe is further evidence for a bird like respiratory system in theropod dinosaurs as they make the ribs move in a similar manner in both.

2006-10-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

Anonymous asked...

If you find and upward trend in the timberline over recent years, this means the climate is getting milder nowadays right? Does this mean global warming is really happening?

You are right, an upward trend is due to a milder climate. However, the about global warming is more difficult to answer. If we look at the big picture the climate on Earth has changed quite drastically - just think of Hannibal crossing the alps with elephants in Roman times. We have evidence that it was warmer then than it is today which goes along with higher reaching forests.

About 150 years ago it was very cold - almost a mini ice-age. Climate is therefore changing in intervals and whether we are still on an upward trend after the little ice-age or we have global warming (this expression nowadays indicates the human influence)is difficult to say. We are working hard to seperate the signals we get from the trees to be able to quantify the human and the natural warming.

2006-10-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

Stuart wanted to know...

What is the recent evidence that says long-necked dinosaurs held their tails out straight? I liked the older idea that they dragged their tails on the ground.

Well Stuart, for a start there are many trackways known from sauropod dinosaurs and none of them show tail-drag marks (with perhaps one or two possible exceptions).

The longest-tailed sauropods, the diplodocids (Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, etc.) had a distinctive arrangement of the hips, in which the tops of the vertebrae (back bones) that make up the hips stick up very much higher than the main bits of the vertebrae. This arrangement would provide a strong anchor point for ligaments and muscles that would have kept the tail up off the ground.

The hips of shorter-tailed sauropods such as Brachiosaurus have less raised vertebae tops, so their tails may have been less horizontal than those of their longer-tailed cousins. Still, a brachiosaur's tail base would have been a good four meters off the ground, so the tail would have had to droop a long way bit to reach that far down!

2006-10-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

Sara has asked us....

What was the largest trilobite?

The largest trilobite was Isotelus rex from the Late Ordovician (ca 450 million years ago) of Manitoba, Canada. A complete specimen is known and it is about 70 cm long and 40 cm wide. It was described by Rudkin et al. in the Journal of Paleontology in 2003.

2006-10-25T03:30:00.000-07:00

Ian who is 10, asked us.....

Do you know if there are any shark fossils that are more than 365 million years old?

Fossil fragments of fish on the lineage leading to sharks date back 455 million years ago. In 2003, scientists reported discovering an articulated skeleton of a shark relative called Doliodus problematicus that lived almost 409 million years ago. Here's the abstract of the paper.

Ian also expressed an interest in moving animals, so here is a link to a page about locomotion (how animal move) at Leeds University in England. There are some nice videos here of some very early work done (in the 1870's!) on locomotion by the English scientist Edueard Muybridge. He used a special system of cameras to make a series of photographs of animals to see how they moved and then reassebled them into an early form of film.

2006-09-11T00:49:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Biology & Palaeontology Questions and Answers!

This is a new service aimed at school children across the UK to help them get involved and interested in science. Collectively we are a group of professional biologists and biology workers (ecologists, museum curators, science writers and the like) who have got together to answer your questions about biology.

Do you want to know more about life on Earth? If there is anything from a class that has got you interest and you want to know more, then we are the people to ask! Anything from a TV documentary, or a film with some dodgy science then we can help to explain it. Everything that you read here will be provided by real, working scientists who are experts in all aspects of biology. Do you want to know why the dinosaurs went extinct? Why do birds migrate? How do zoo breeding programmes work? How many species there are in the world? How do flys stick to celings? Why are some birds more brightly coloured than others? Why do cats eyes glow in the dark? Which were the biggest dinosaurs? What do you have to do to get a PhD in biology? How can you tell species apart? What are collections in museums used for? We will answer all of these and more!

We are dedicated to bringing you real answers to real questions and we hope that we can show you what it is like to be a real biologist, how you can get involved in biology and science, and how to learn more for yourself about science. If you look below at our older posts (and back into the archives on the right) you will see some mini-biographies of many of the people who will be answering your questions.

As you can see whe cover all kinds of biological studies, from people working in practical conservation like Dave Warburton and Matt Parratt, to palaeontologists like Erik Tetlie and Adam Smith, museum researchers like Paulo Viscardi and Peter Howlett, through to 'true' biologists like Jonathan Codd and Stuart Longhorn. We even have science writers like Carl Zimmer and Isabell Schwenkert, a climatologist in Tanja Sanders and even a human anatomist (and medical doctor) Alice Roberts.

Together, we are in a great position to answer your questions about biology, evolution, palaeontology, fossils, conservation and the environment. All you have to is click on the 'comments' button that appears at the bottom of this post (or any of the more recent posts), put in your first name, your age and your question, and then submit it. One of us will get back to you as soon as possible with an answer to your question. We will post up your question and our answer as a new post (like this one) on the main board so it is easy to find!

All of us are doing this in our spare time, so it may take us a few days or even a week to answer your question so please be patient and check back frequently! Of course, there will be lots of questions being answered all the time, so hopefully there will always be something of interest for you to read. We also have some links to other interesting biology sites on the right had side (including blogs from our contributors!), so check these out for some more sicence.

There is a bit more info about us in our July archives: but for right now you can look at the profiles of our contributers and bloggers below, look through the links or submit a question. We look forward to answering your questions, so give us some to answer!

2006-09-11T00:48:00.000-07:00

Professor Steve Jones,

University College London

Without variation there could be no genetics and no evolution so why is it there? Perhaps surprisingly we have no real idea; and I have spent many years studying the ecological genetics of snails, fruitflies and humans in an attempt to understand this issue. Certain snails are very diverse in their shell characters, and I have collected hundreds of thousands of specimens from all over Europe in an attempt to find out why. I have also worked on fruit flies in variable environments, both in the wild and in the laboratory. At the moment I am particularly involved in looking at the interaction of thermal ecology and genetics in snails and in Drosophila.

I have for several years been involved with the media, largely in presenting scientific work but also in a more general context. I have appeared on BBC Radio on more than two hundred occasions. I gave the 1991 Reith Lectures on "The Language of the Genes" and have since then written and presented a long-running Radio 3 series on science, "Blue Skies", and a six-part TV series on human genetics, "In the Blood"; broadcast in 1996. I have also appeared in various other TV programmes, from Question Time to Late Review to Newsnight. In addition I have written extensively in the press on scientific issues and have a regular column in The Daily Telegraph - "View from the Lab".

I have given large numbers of named lectures, and frequently visit and speak at schools and schools conferences. I have, I estimate, spoken directly to more than 100 000 school pupils during my career and am UCL’s representative on the recently-established London Regional Science Centre, which aims to provide in-career training to science teachers.

2006-09-11T00:46:00.000-07:00

Dr Alice Roberts,

University of Bristol.

Alice is an archaeologist and anthropologist who specialises in human evolution and anatomy. She might be familiar to you having been on TV with "Time Team" & "Extreme Archaeology" on Channel 4, and more recently with "Coast" on BBC1. However, she is writing a book at the moment and is very busy so this biography is a bit short for now: more to follow soon!

2006-09-11T00:44:00.001-07:00

Carl Zimmer,

Science writer (US)

I write about biology and paleontology for the New York Times and several magazines, as well as writing science books. I also write a blog about research on evolution called the Loom. You can find out more about all of my work at my web site, CarlZimmer.com.

I'm interested in just about anything that moves, from ancient whales with legs to wasps that turn cockroaches into zombies.

2006-09-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

Charlotte Miller

I'm a PhD student at the Royal Veterinary College in London, working on elephant locomotion, foot function and anatomy.

Elephants are the largest living land animals, but they are nothing when compared with some of the largest dinosaurs. Our work concentrates on understanding what limits speed and style of movement in elephants, and can help build a realistic picture of the way very large extinct animals, such as dinosaurs and mammoths, may have moved. This involves measuring live elephants moving, dissecting dead ones to see how the muscles and bones operate together, and creating computer models to verify the results. Here an elephant has markers placed at its joints and is filmed walking to see how these move.

My background is in general biology, palaeontology, and the biomechanics of locomotion in birds and large animals.

2006-09-10T06:03:00.001-07:00

Dr PZ Myers
University of Minnesota, Morris

I'm a developmental biologist and neuroscientist with a special interest in the evolution of 'simple' model systems, science education, and the raging evolution-creation wars. I write a weblog, Pharyngula, where you can find me fulminating against fools and rhapsodizing over the amazing complexity of organisms.

2006-09-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

Dr Alastair Wilson

University of Edinburgh

I work as an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Edinburgh. Evolutionary ecology tries to understand the biodiversity we can see around us in natural populations of plants and animals. It’s about taking genetics out of the lab and trying to work out how genes and the environment act, and interact, in the wild.

Most of my research is based on long term studies of wild sheep. We use a combination of traditional ecological fieldwork and modern genetic techniques to learn as much as we can about each animal, keeping track of them throughout their lives. With this information we can test theories and ideas about evolutionary processes that are happening right now.

2006-09-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

Marlies Fischer

University College Dublin

I am a biologist currently doing my PhD researching prions (infectious proteins causing diseases) at University College Dublin. I studied biology in combination with engineering at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. I am especially interested in projects with a medical approach with the aim of discovering a cure. I did my master thesis on influenza (flu) vaccines at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg, Germany.

Currently, I focus on understanding the behaviour of the Prion protein (PrP). Prions are infectious agents that cause a group of fatal diseases (also called TSEs), which destroy tissue of the nervous system and affect both humans and animals. Mad cow disease (BSE) is one example. Prions are unique - they don’t contain DNA as do all other pathogens known before the discovery of prions (bacteria, viruses, fungi). This is a fascinating topic for me to research because so many aspects are not understood and there are so many questions to answer.

2006-09-08T04:14:00.000-07:00

Paolo Viscardi

I work as a curator in the National Museum of Ireland - Natural History. My work focuses on cleaning anf repairing old specimens held in the collections, as well as making catalogues of what we have stored here. I have a background in biomechanics (how animals move - particularly how birds fly in my case) and palaeontology (particularly taphonomy - what happens from the time an animal or plant dies and the time it is found and studied). I've loved dead animals and how their bones fit together and work since I was four - pretty creepy really!

2006-09-07T02:46:00.000-07:00

Adam Stuart Smith

University College Dublin

I am a Ph.D. researcher in vertebrate palaeontology at UCD in Ireland. I moved here after studying palaeobiology in the UK. I study extinct marine reptiles – an eclectic bunch often wrongly regarded as ‘swimming-dinosaurs ‘– I prefer the term ‘sea-dragons’. In particular I study plesiosaurs, a group of reptiles with four flippers and often a very long neck. This is a little ironic because no plesiosaur fossils are known from Ireland and all of the specimens I study in the National Museum of Ireland are from outside Ireland.

My main aim is to understand how these animals are related to each other – I want to know their family tree. I run the website The Plesiosaur Directory:, all about these mysterious animals. In addition I am also a ‘palaeoartist’ who draws restorations of prehistoric animals for magazines and museums, and I also enjoy a good palaeontology excavation (I spent last Summer in Montana digging dinosaurs).

The plesiosaur in the picture is called Rhomaleosaurus and it is one of the specimens housed here in Ireland.

2006-09-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

Dr Darren Naish

University of Portsmouth

Hi, my name’s Darren Naish and you might know of me from such films as Shriek of the Mutilated and Night of the Lepus. No, just kidding, I am supposed to be a vertebrate palaeontologist working on predatory dinosaurs, and for several years now I’ve been working mostly on the early tyrannosaur Eotyrannus. I’ve also produced technical work on sauropods (the giant long-necked dinosaurs), pterosaurs (the flying reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs), fossil turtles and other animals. My problem is that I’m not only interested in dinosaurs, but in fact in pretty much all vertebrate animals that aren’t fish, and to be honest I’d like to be considered as a zoologist rather than a palaeontologist. So pigs, snakes, bats, frogs, giant killer eagles and sea monsters hold my attention as much as do dinosaurs: if you want to see what is holding my interest right now, do check out my blog site, Tetrapod Zoology. I try my best to get hands-on experience with living animals at every occasion, and I have field experience with British lizards, amphibians, birds and mammals. Hey, I even have a Wikipedia entry! (and I'd like to know who wrote it).

I’ve written some books that you might have heard of, including the Dorling Kindersley Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life (though note that I only wrote a few of the dinosaur pages: I mostly did the non-dinosaurian reptiles and the mammals), the BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence (with Dave Martill), and the Palaeontological Association book Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight (also with Dave Martill). I also regularly act as a consultant for Usborne’s dinosaur books.

I received my doctorate earlier this year and am currently trying desperately to get a job. Thus far I’ve tried technical editing, book writing, child care and full-time extreme gardening. I’d like to pursue a career in what I’m interested in, but thus far the opportunity hasn’t presented itself. That's why I'm so angry, bitter and bereft of finance.

2006-09-01T05:23:00.000-07:00

Dr Lucy McCobb

National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

I work as a fossil curator in a museum, which means that I help to look after lots of different types of fossils from various periods of the Earth’s history, ranging from trilobites, corals and ammonites, to plants, ichthyosaurs and dinosaurs. I also do research on fossil trilobites, looking at the evolution of this group of creepy-crawlies, which lived in the seas between 550 and 250 million years ago.

I also use fossil trilobites and brachiopods (shellfish also known as ‘lamp shells’) to help reconstruct what the world looked like when these animals lived (a branch of geology known as ‘Palaeogeography’).
The plates that make up the Earth’s crust have moved around constantly throughout its history, rearranging the continents and redrawing the map of the world. When we find the same species of shallow water animals fossilised in rocks on two modern-day continents that are now far apart, we know that the continents must have been close to each other at the time when those animals lived, because the animals were able to swim between their coastal waters. When considered along with other geological evidence, fossils allow us to draw a map of the Earth as it was millions of years ago.
For my PhD, I worked on the exceptional preservation of soft tissues in fossils, such as muscle tissue and skin.

2006-09-01T05:16:00.000-07:00

Dr Tom Reader,

University of Nottingham

I am an ecologist and I am particularly interested in the population biology and behaviour of animals. The two questions that keep me awake at night are "why are there so many species?" and "why do animals behave in the way that they do?" I try to find answers by studying creatures (often, but not always, insects) in their natural habitats, and using mathematical models and computer simulations. I have a particular interest in the ecologically crucial processes of competition and predation, and a general enthusiasm for natural history.

The picture below shows caterpillars of the attractively named "black slug cup moth" in Sydney, Australia. I've spent many happy hours studying the social behaviour that they exhibit. Group size appears to be the result of a balance between the pressures of competition for food and a desire to be protected from attacks by predators".

2006-09-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

Dr Jonathan Codd

University of Manchester

My research broadly spans all areas of respiratory biology and aims to better understand the breathing mechanics of birds and bats. These animal models are of interest as both face similar functional constraints: fluctuations in body temperature and breathing during locomotion. To this end current research interests include an examination of the biochemical and biophysical adaptations in the pulmonary surfactant system associated with torpor and the role of hypaxial musculature during locomotion.

Given the evolutionary link between some birds and dinosaurs we are also attempting to apply the knowledge we have gained from our studies of birds to allow us to reconstruct the breathing mechanics in some theropod dinosaurs.

We approach the study of respiratory biology utilising techniques applicable from the whole animal down to the molecular level, encompassing ecological, anatomical, biochemical, molecular and physiological methods to answer questions arising from our research. Ultimately we hope to gain a better understanding of the evolution of breathing mechanics in these two groups of flying vertebrates.

2006-08-22T00:18:00.000-07:00

Peter Howlett
National Museum Wales, Cardiff

Hi, I'm the Curator of Vertebrates (things with backbones). My main interest is in birds and mammals. As these are the largest vertebrate groups in the UK this tends to be the focus of my work but species from farther afield certainly don't get ignored. My interests also extend to invertebrates - particularly butterflies and moths.

My job is more involved with raising public awareness on various biodiversity and conservation issues than research. This means I tend to be more involved with creating displays in the museum. It also gets me out and about with giving talks to various local groups and taking specimens to various events and conferences.

2006-08-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

Graeme Lloyd
University of Bristol

I am currently a PhD student working on a project entitled "character acquisition through geological time".

Although scientists of any discipline are often caught up in very specialised work science itself is about making generalisations. In this way my work is about reducing the complexities of the fossil record (the history of life on Earth preserved in the remains of animals, plants and their traces) to the sequence of characters that are acquired through time. In fossils a character might be the feathers on Microraptor, the cones from a pine tree or the ribs on a sea shell.

Although we can examine the distribution of these, and other characters in modern animals and plants I am interested in when they first appeared (evolved) and this can only be done by examining fossils. I am interested in various groups, but have devoted a lot of time to lungfish (literally fish with lungs that are eel-like in appearance). Lungfish are a famous example of a group who acquired their distinctive characters very rapidly some 350 million years ago, and that have changed very little since. Because of this similarity with much older fossil forms Charles Darwin termed them "living fossils". My main focus is to see if this pattern is really an unusual one - as most people assume - or if it is in fact more general.

I have also worked on or am interested in mass extinctions (one of which saw the demise of T. rex and his chums at the end of the Cretaceous), phylogenetics (the family tree of life), and the quality of the fossil record (can palaeontology really tell us anything useful?).

2006-08-16T03:01:00.000-07:00

Dave Warburton

Although I currently work in Biological Conservation, my undergraduate work was in hominid evolution (how humans and the higher primates evolved). So I will be helping with any questions as to how and why humans are the way we are, why we walk upright, what the different races of modern human have evolved for, and so on.

My postgraduate research involved, like many on this page, the study of dinosaurs! I was looking at origin and evolutionary relationships of basal ornithischians (the small, 'bired-hipped' bipedal dinosaurs that include some of the oldest yet found).

The majority of my current work is involved with the protection and enhancement of habitats and their wildlife and helping the public understand the huge variety of life on their doorstep. Any natural history questions on anything from bats to birds, pond invertebrates to chalk grassland and everything in between, can be directed my way.

2006-08-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

Matthew Parratt

I'm a general biologist by trade. With roots in seed and crop science I've branched out in the last few years into tree seed and seedling biology/ecology and other areas of woodland ecosystems.

I currently work on a range of projects under the general heading of tree and shrub seed fate in British woodlands. In a nutshell we're looking at what happens between the time when a seed leaves it's parent plant and when it becomes an established sapling. So far this has involved looking at the effects of granivorous (seed eating) insects, molluscs and mammals and their feeding strategies.

I'm also involved in the conservation of rare and endangered trees and shrubs, mainly conifers, mainly from the Southern hemisphere but occasionally other parts of the world. This can be a *very* long process with some species taking 4 years or more to germinate!!

Outside of work my interests spread into all aspects of Natural history of the British Isles and other parts of the world.

2006-08-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

Dr Markus Eichhorn

I'm an ecologist, specialising in the structure and dynamics of forest communities, and how trees interact with other species. Trees are the defining organisms of many ecosystems, and their distribution, structure and growth can have many surprising effects on the communities that surround them.

For example, some of my recent research has investigated how changes in vegetation and agriculture (especially orchards) in Thailand have changed the abundances of the mosquitoes that transmit malaria and dengue fever. How trees are managed in the landscape turns out to have important implications for human health.

Other research includes agroforestry, which has the potential to increase the sustainability of agriculture. Many traditional systems of farming with trees have existed for thousands of years, and provide valuable insights into how we can improve modern farming methods. For example, it seems that mixing trees with crops means less pesticides need to be applied, because they provide habitats for the natural enemies of crop pests.

The picture below is from my work in tropical rain forests in Malaysia, where I study the links between trees and their herbivores.

2006-08-07T19:54:00.000-07:00

Dr Stuart Longhorn

Hi. I'm a molecular biologist and entomologist. I study how arthropods (insects, spiders, etc) are related to one another. Arthropods, which have a tough outer skeleton and jointed legs, are very diverse creatures. They live in every habitat on earth, from the deepest ocean to mountain tops. I specialise in using laboratory techniques to compare molecules (characters in DNA and protein) across different groups of arthropods.

The picture is an american horse-shoe crab, with the scientific name Limulus. These strange creatures are actually a close relative of spiders and scorpions, and are unlike real crabs.

I have worked on insects, comparing major groups like flies, beetles and moths, to find shared features that can tell us how and when these groups appeared on earth. Nowadays, I'm working on another group of arthropods, called arachnids. These include spiders, scorpions and mites, plus many obscure types that scientists do not know much about [yet!].

In brief, I won't be answering questions about dinosaurs or fossils, but if you have questions about the evolution and features of insects and spiders, i will try my best to help.

2006-08-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

Hi, I'm Isabell Schwenkert

During my undergraduate and graduate work I studied molecular mechanisms in neurons, especially those that lead to diseases such as alcoholism (yes, it is a disease) and Alzheimer's disease. Then I went to work for a medical device company that sells equipment for the treatment of cancer patients; these days I'm trying to understand the mechanisms that lead to this actually quite frequent disease, and I'm also trying to find out how we can use this theoretical knowledge to come up with new cures for "uncureable" cancers such as malignant brain tumors or lung cancer.

2006-08-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

Michael P. Taylor

In my day-job I am a humble computer programmer; but by night I don a colourful costume and study dinosaurs. I specialise in the sauropods (the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs like Diplodocus): the biggest of the big. I'm interested in how animals that weighed as much as whales could function on land. How did they hold their necks and tails up off the ground? How did they breathe? Could they rear up on their hind legs? How big did they actually get? Because sauropods are mostly known from very sparse remains (in many cases from single bones) a lot of guesswork is needed; and because sauropods were much more diverse than most people realise, what's true of one is not necessarily true of another. So it's a tricky area to work in, but well worth it.

(I use my middle initial because there is another vertebrate palaeontologist called Michael A. Taylor. He works on marine reptiles.)

2006-08-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

Tanja Sanders

Going back in time is not only possible with fossils. As a geographer and dendroecologist I am working with tree rings to gain information about the past. The advantage is that by counting the rings is very precise. Trees (outside the tropics) build one ring each year, although depending on temperature, rainfall, soil type, and a range of other factors the width of the ring varies from year to year. We read these signals and then take a step back in time using wood samples from houses, ships, and even samples buried in moors and ice. Linking them together tree-ring records can be as long as a millennia. We get all sorts of information from these records: climate, growth conditions, insect attacks... depending on the most important factor for these trees.

But we can use the information as well to have a look in the future. Analysing the annual growth for a certain species today and running it through a growth model we get information about the growth under e.g. global warming scenarios. Are certain species going to suffer from drought? Is the timberline going to shift? Which species are the winners? We are working on the answers.

Do we have an upwards trend of the timberline? In other words, are trees growing higher up on mountains? This is another part of my research which i will investigate over the next few years.

2006-08-02T05:25:00.000-07:00

Manabu Sakamoto

I'm yet another palaeontologist at the University of Bristol and I study the interrelationships and functional morphology of carnivorous dinosaurs. I am particularly interested in the feeding mechanics of these fantastic creatures. Recently, I have also gained interest in the feeding mechanics of modern predatory animals, especially the monitor lizards. (Monitors actually have teeth that are similar in shape to predatory dinosaurs, so they may serve as pretty good analogues…).

I am an anatomist as well - my study involves a lot of dissections of modern relatives of dinosaurs, the birds and the crocodiles. After detailed studies in these animals to determine which muscles are present and where and how these muscles attach to bones, I can reconstruct the same muscles in the extinct dinosaurs to a certain degree of confidence. I can then use these muscle reconstructions to estimate the forces working on the jaws.

I am also a cell biologist – or used to be…I used to study surface molecules in T-cells as an undergraduate student. Surface molecules are crucial in recent studies like stem-cell research. When stem cells differentiate into different kinds of cells, gene expression is not the only regulatory factor; cell-to-cell interactions through surface molecules are equally important.

2006-08-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

Dr Neil Gostling

I am an evolutionary biologist, and if you want to answer ‘big’ questions you need to think ‘small’! I work with embryos of marine invertebrates, both living and fossilised. I started in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, looking at living animals, and how the nervous system is 'built' in chordate animals (that's the group animals that human beings are in).

If you want to know how animals are related to each other, you can look at the way that animals develop from their eggs to the larvae that hatch out. If you have three different animals and two of them develop in a similar way to each other, but differently from the third, then the 'similar two' are more closely related to one another than they are to the third animal.

10 years ago palaeontologists were lucky enough to realise that fossilised embryos were preserved in rocks from 520 Million years ago (and older). These fossil embryos are really important, because they are from rocks laid down at he same time as when animals first appear in the fossil record. If you enlarge the image (simply click on it) you can see a fossil embryo perched on the end of a finger.

So we can now describe development of some of the very first animals ever to crawl and swim through the ancient oceans of our planet.

2006-08-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

Sarda Sahney

I’m a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol and I study palaeoecology. This involves looking at which animals lived together in past communities and learning about how they interacted. Right now I am studying how life diversified. We have a very rich variety of fauna in the world today, much of which is threatened by human expansion. I believe that by studying the past history of biodiversity we can apply that knowledge to our present situation.

This is a picture of plants, insects, amphibians and reptiles that lived in a Palaeozoic community over 250 million years ago.

2006-08-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

Dr. O. Erik Tetlie

I’m a palaeontologist specializing in eurypterids, also called sea scorpions. They were chelicerates, related to scorpions and spiders, but went extinct around 250 million years ago. I’m also interested in chelicerate phylogeny (how all the different groups of chelicerates: mites, spiders, scorpions, and their many chums are related to each other). But I’m also very interested in how other arthropod groups like insects, myriapods, crustaceans, trilobites and pycnogonids are related, although not specifically working on these problems myself. I also have a keen interest in solar system astronomy and the supply and demand situation of metals and energy resources, but do not expect to draw on that expertise in this forum.

P.S. The image is of a model made for the BBC. Sadly, eurypterids are extinct!

2006-08-01T04:04:00.000-07:00

Dr Al McGowan

I am an analytical palaeontologist, which means that I apply statistics and computer models to analyze the fossil record to better understand the history of life. Another area of my work is the quantitative study of changes in the form of organisms, a field called morphometrics. My morphometrics research has focussed mainly on ammonoids. The other major research area I work in is biogeography, which tries to establish whether there are 'rules' for the way in which animals and plants are distributed across the earth. My broader training is in earth sciences and evolutionary biology. I am a keen birdwatcher, and carry out field surveys for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO).

2006-07-25T04:32:00.000-07:00

Meet the team! Over the next few days, out team members will login and add their details to the thread so you can see who is responding to your questions. People will reply anonomously and although you will see peoples specialisations listed, often we know about lots of different subjects and so will happily cover for each other.

Meantime, here is your BioBlogger number 1.....

Dr David Hone,
Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology, Munich.

I am a biologist and palaeontologist working in Munich, Germany. My main areas of research are in cladistic methods - finding out how extinct animals are related to each other (building 'family trees'). I mostly work on dinosaurs and pterosaurs (and some other fossil reptiles), but I also work on African ungulates (grazing mammals. I also work on biomechanics (how animals move) especially of extinct organisms, and on various aspects of macroevolution (how big changes happen across whole groups of animals).

One important area of my work is on 'gigantism' - how and why some animals got to be so big. Some dinosaurs got REALLY big: the picture above shows me (looking a bit fat) with a Brachiosaurus humerus (upper-arm bone) that measures over 2 m long! I have also worked in several zoos and museums so I will also answer questions about them too.

2006-07-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

Biology & Palaeontology Qs & As

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Check back periodically to see when your question has been answered. We hope to reply to every question within a week, but please be patient. The scientists who are blogging for you are doing so on their own time and many of us are often busy. If you have asked a really tricky question, we might have to wait for a specific expert to be free to answer it for you, so give us some time!

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2006-07-25T04:13:00.000-07:00

Hello, and welcome to online Biology & Palaeontology Q&A. This is a special site aimed at schools and devoted to providing the best scientific information available to school kids around the UK and abroad. I’m sorry to say that we are not here to do your homework for you, but if you want more information on any aspect of biology ( the study of life) or palaeontology (the study of the history of life) then we are here to help. For now, this is just a test site, if we are successful and this looks to be working, then please let us know! For now we will start with biology (living things) and palaeontology (fossils) but we hope to expand to other branches of science soon. We want to take you beyond the classroom - if you want to know more, then come here to ask us and find out.

Collectively we are a group of over 20 professional scientists, (museum and ecology workers, PhD students, lecturers, researchers, PostDocs and even the odd professor!) who want to help you out. We think that kids don’t always get the access to real scientific information (or real scientists!) outside of the classroom so we are here to do just that. There are lots of sources online already, from Wikipedia and university sites, to people’s homepages and forums. Some are great, many are average, many are terrible – but everything here will be written by a professional scientist who is an expert in your area of interest. These people are willingly giving up their own free time to help you, so please use them to learn and enjoy science, between us we work on dinosaurs, sea scorpions, ecology, biogeography, human evolution, spiders, cell biology, evolution, birds, fish, animal behaviour, physiology, forests, insects, conservation, genetics, worms and plenty more besides.

We believe in being honest: if we (or science) as a whole do not know the answer, then we will say so. If there is a debate on the subject we will give you both sides and the reasons why we may favor one or the other. We want you to enjoy science and to be as excited about life as we are. Simply add a question and one of our experts will post the question and a reply as soon as they can.

David Hone set up the site and acts as a kind of guardian / administrator. If you wish to contact him, please e-mail at: d.hone(AT)lrz.uni-muenchen.de

One last point, this site is devoted to science. That which can be observed, recorded, measured and tested. No one on this site has an anti-religious agenda (indeed several of our contributors are religious) but this website is purely about science, not religion.

Thanks, now ask away and we shall do our best to answer you.