EurekAlert! - Earth ScienceThe premier online source for science news since 1996. A service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Closing the gap between fish and land animals- June 25, 2008 (Uppsala University) New exquisitely preserved fossils from Latvia cast light on a key event in our own evolutionary history, when our ancestors left the water and ventured onto land. Swedish researchers Per Ahlberg and Henning Blom from Uppsala University have reconstructed parts of the animal and explain the transformation in the new issue of Nature.http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uu-ctg062508.php Fire under the ice- June 25, 2008 (Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres) An international team of researchers was able to provide evidence of explosive volcanism in the deeps of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean for the first time. Researchers from an expedition to the Gakkel Ridge, led by the American Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, report in the current issue of the journal Nature that they discovered, with a specially developed camera, extensive layers of volcanic ash on the seafloor, which indicates a gigantic..http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/haog-fut062508.php Estimation of isolation times in the Drosophila simulans complex- June 25, 2008 (Public Library of Science) In a study published on June 17, 2008, in PLoS ONE, Dr. Richard Kliman and colleague Shannon McDermott provide evidence that both island species were isolated at about the same time, estimated at 250,000 years ago. They also show that the difference in divergence patterns of genes in regions of low and higher recombination can be reconciled by allowing a modestly larger effective population size for the ancestral population than for extant D. simulans.http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/plos-eoi062508.php |