Charles Darwin Library - from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Posted by Jennifer Eidelman | 21 Dec, 2011
"Charles Darwin’s Library is a digital edition and virtual reconstruction of the surviving books owned by Charles Darwin. This BHL special collection draws on original copies and surrogates from other libraries. It also provides full transcriptions of his annotations and marks. In this first release (2011) we provide 330 of the 1480 titles in his library, concentrating on the most heavily annotated books." http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary/

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Fossil feathers of a 36-million-year-old diving bird give clues to color, evolution

Posted by Jennifer Eidelman | 1 Oct, 2010
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BIG BIRDFossils found in northern Peru reveal an extinct giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago, newly named Inkayacu paracasensis. In the top five of big extinct penguins, it may have weighed double what today’s emperor penguins average. (Illustrated diving skeleton shown with collected fossil parts in white.)Courtesy of Science/AAAS

"A fossil giant penguin with feathers reveals the first glimpse of what the well-dressed diving bird was wearing before tuxedos. The 36-million-year-old fossils of the new species include a good portion of a skeleton with a skull and flipper, researchers report online September 30 in Science." read the report by Susan Milius 

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Tibetans developed genes to help them adapt to life at high elevations

Posted by Jennifer Eidelman | 14 May, 2010

SALT LAKE CITY—Researchers have long wondered why the people of the Tibetan Highlands can live at elevations that cause some humans to become life-threateningly ill – and a new study answers that mystery, in part, by showing that through thousands of years of natural selection, those hardy inhabitants of south-central Asia evolved 10 unique oxygen-processing genes that help them live in higher climes.

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Testing common ancestry to all modern-day life

Posted by Jennifer Eidelman | 14 May, 2010

by Grant Jacobs, Code for life

That evolution occurs is well resolved. Precisely how evolution occurs, in detail, is less so. One question revolves around if present-day life arose from a single species or more than one. Douglas Theobald  from Brandeis University has tested if life arose from one or several ancestral paths.1 His results strongly support a single ancestry. The question of if life has [...]...

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Genome Biology and Evolution

Posted by Jennifer Eidelman | 1 Dec, 2009

Genome Biology and Evolution is a wholly open access journal that publishes evolutionary advances at the forefront of genomics.

Papers considered for publication report novel findings in the field of evolutionary biology that concern natural genome diversity, population genomics, the structure, function, organisation and expression of genomes, comparative genomics, proteomics, and environmental genomic interactions.

Major evolutionary insights from the fields of computational biology, structural biology, developmental biology, and cell biology are also considered, as are theoretical advances in the field of genome evolution.

The journal is owned by the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/

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Darwin Manuscripts Project

Posted by Jennifer Eidelman | 1 Dec, 2009

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” the manuscripts detailing the theory of natural selection are being placed online.

On Tuesday [November 24th], Darwin Manuscripts Project will upload about 10,000 high-quality images of Darwin’s scientific manuscripts and notes.

These pages include 34 of the 36 known and located draft leaves of “Origin,” gathered together for the first time since Darwin wrote his seminal book, which was published on Nov. 24, 1859. http://darwin.amnh.org/

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