Fixing the Chicken

Since I've been on vacation, I've been watching dinosaur specials. I know, it's really nerdy, but to compound it I've been doing this while making my Greek Principal Parts list.

So by now, I've run out of most of the various dinosaur specials that are around (sad!), and because all of my paleontology lectures from the "Prehistoric Creatures" series by National Geographic lectures on iTunes have stopped (do you hear that, National Geographic? Get your act together!), I've been seeking paleontology lectures elsewhere. I came across this TED Talk that totally cracked me up.

As it is, so far as we know, impossible to extract DNA from a dinosaur, Jack Horner talks about reconstructing a dinosaur from their closest living relatives, the birds (which are in fact classified as avian dinosaurs). He talks about reactivating genes in a chicken to create a living (non-avian) dinosaur. Pretty cool, and he's also quite funny.

Mammalian Evolution

A New York Times article, yesterday, reports that an anthropoid ancestor of the primate, may have originated in Asia rather than Africa. Anthropoids, as I found out, were creatures between the about twice the weight of chinchilla but smaller than a marmot. Although they were the size of a large rodent, they looked very much like primates.

Picture from NYT article: Lybia, where the fossils were found