Origin & Development of Life Visual - Encyclopaedia Universalis
Times Atlas of the world (concise edition) 6th Ed. Hammond World Atlas Corporation.
First published in 1982, this book has become a classic of reference publishing around the globe.
The acknowledgements section gives picture credit to “Encyclopaedia Universalis”.
Seems like this is pretty dated, but the layout, coloring, etc. - gorgeous!
Look closely and you’ll see some Ediacarans on there.
i think it’s really cool that limbs have been turned into wings for flight at least three different times in evolution on our planet. Also really cool to compare and contrast them
I’m sure we’ve all seen the “Sometimes, evolution sucks” image macro going around, depicting a horribly inaccurate dromaeosaurid going through an evolutionary transition through a feathered “dinobird” (Archaeopteryx/Microraptor), an oddly tiny phorusrhacid and finally ending up with a kiwi.
Well I say no more of this nonsense and present you with the above image, depicting an archaeopterygid-type animal, a bird intended to be Limenavis and a cassowary.
So I was doing research for a World Civ paper at my college’s library just now. Once I was done taking notes for that, I decided to take a breather and check out the science section. Which would’ve been fine and dandy except for one obnoxious detail—Evolution: A Theory in Crisis was shelved there.
In the science section.
Creationism starts with a conclusion—namely, that the biblical book of Genesis presents a literal, true account of creation—and works backward from there, twisting or flat-out ignoring any contradicting evidence. What creation “scientists” are doing, then, is the very antithesis of science. It was all I could do to stop myself from reshelving that book in the religion section, but I didn’t want to create unnecessary work for the librarians.
At least there were some actually scientific books on evolution. Spotting Your Inner Fish on the shelf certainly helped bring my blood pressure back down.
I saw this rubbish in my uni library’s paleontology section. At a friggin University of California! -.-
(It’s hard to tell from the cover and description, but it’s a birds-are-not-dinosaurs book.)
WTF VIDEO IS THIS FROM??????????? SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME
Edit: Thanks sr-ricos!!! :D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAHvyURiCqY
![ilovecharts:
[controversy]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6k62wH2M11qfddqco1_500.png)
Phylogenetic tree of Archosauria showing where characteristics of modern birds evolved.
a theropod tree for my own future reference
(apparently, no one is sure whether compsognathids and tyrannosaurs should be switched or not)
“Course of the left vagus nerve and left recurrent laryngeal nerve in a human, a giraffe, and Supersaurus. The right recurrent laryngeal nerve passes caudal to the right subclavian artery rather than the aorta and ductus arteriosus, but otherwise its course is identical to that of the left.”
“The recurrent laryngeal nerve is an oft–cited example of “unintelligent design” in biology, especially in the giraffe. The nerve appears early in embryonic development, before the pharyngial and aortic arches are separated by the development of the neck. The recurrent course of the nerve from the brain, around the great vessels, to the larynx, is shared by all extant tetrapods. Therefore we may infer that the recurrent laryngeal nerve was present in extinct tetrapods, had the same developmental origin, and followed the same course. The longest–necked animals of all time were the extinct sauropod dinosaurs, some of which had necks 14 meters long. In these animals, the neurons that comprised the recurrent laryngeal nerve were at least 28 meters long. Still longer neurons may have spanned the distance from the end of the tail to the brainstem, as in all extant vertebrates. In the longest sauropods these neurons may have been 40–50 meters long, probably the longest cells in the history of life.”
“The longest cells in the bodies of sauropods were sensory neurons that connected receptors in the skin of the extremities with interneurons in the brainstem, a pattern of neural architecture that is present in all extant vertebrates. The nerve cell bodies would have been located in the dorsal root ganglia adjacent to the spinal cord”
From: A monument of inefficiency: the presumed course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in sauropod dinosaurs. Mathew J. Wedel Acta Palaeontologica Polonica in press
available online 20 May 2011 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4202/app.2011.0019
