Taxonomy
drorzel | May 6, 2011In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED:
IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics, whereas QED is the quantization of classical electrodynamics, and quantum field theories in general are quantizations of classical field theories. I think saying "quantum mechanics" when one talks about something which essentially has…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2010tags: What, If Anything, Is Big Bird?, taxonomy, taxonomy, evolution, Grandicrocavis, Big Bird, flightless birds, ratites, humor, comedy, science humor, dinosaur humor, Mike Dickison, PechaKucha, Christchurch, streaming video
Years ago, when Zoologist Mike Dickison was in the early stages of his PhD, he gave a joke presentation at a graduate student conference on the taxonomy and evolution of a giant flightless bird. It was the sort of thing you'd see at any conference on avian evolution: a Latin name, reconstructed skeleton, possible place on the great evolutionary tree of birds. The tone…
awild | May 21, 2010
Asphinctopone pilosa Hawkes 2010
The discovery of new insect species continues apace. Today, the online journal Zootaxa presents this pretty little ponerine from Tanzania, described by Peter Hawkes.
Asphinctopone is a rather poorly-known genus previously collected only in the tropical forests of West Africa. Asphinctopone pilosa is larger than the other described species and the first record from East Africa, extending the range of the lineage thousands of kilometers to the east.
source: Hawkes, P.G. 2010. A new species of Asphinctopone (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Ponerinae) from Tanzania.…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, evolutionary biogeography, molecular biology, medicine, ectoparasite, orificial hirudiniasis, mucosal leech infestation, hirudinoids, leech, Tyrannobdella rex, public health, zoology, PLoS ONE, anatomy, phylogenetic analysis, taxonomy, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Figure 1. Mucosally invasive hirudinoid leeches. Known from a wide variety of anatomical sites including eyes (A) as in this case involving Dinobdella ferox (B), mucosal leech species, as in a case involving Myxobdella annandalei (C), more frequently feed from the…
grrlscientist | February 1, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, paleontology, fossils, fossilization, fossil forensics, Taphonomy, taxonomy, zoology, deep time, paleoceanography, amphioxus, Branchiostoma lanceolatum, lamprey, Lampetra fluviatilis, chordates, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
Three rotting Amphioxus heads.
A sequence of images showing how the characteristic features of the body of amphioxus, a close living relative of vertebrates, change during decay. Colours are caused by interference between the experimental equipment and the light illuminating the specimens.
Image: Mark…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, convergent evolution, paleontology, taxonomy, zoology, basal birds, theropods, dinosaurs, ornithology, birds, Alvarezsauroidea, Haplocheirus sollers, Maniraptora, Archaeopteryx, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
A Newly Discovered Basal Alvarezsauroid Theropod from the Early Late Jurassic.
Artwork: Portia Sloan [larger view]
DOI: 10.1126/science.1182143
A long-standing scientific debate focuses on the origins of birds: did they evolve from reptiles or dinosaurs? Currently, most scientists think that birds are modern dinosaurs,…
awild | January 9, 2010
Nylanderia guatemalensis
What are ant taxonomists buzzing about this week?*
Well. A hot new paper by John LaPolla, Seán Brady, and Steve Shattuck in Systematic Entomology has killed Paratrechina as we know it.Â
Nearly all those adorable, hairy little formicines we knew as Paratrechina- like the phantom sand ant and the rasberry crazy ant- have been pulled out and placed in a resurrected genus Nylanderia. All that remains of Paratrechina is but a single species, the fabled Black Crazy Ant Paratrechina longicornis. Which, incidentally, is the species in this blog's header photo.
Here's…
awild | August 10, 2009Carol Kaesuk Yoon opines:
We are, all of us, abandoning taxonomy, the ordering and naming of life. We are willfully...losing the ability to order and name and therefore losing a connection to and a place in the living world.
No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there.
jwhitfield | February 9, 2009From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups.
Isn't that a good sentence? It's the first of this chapter. There's music in the way the Biblical ring of "From the first dawn of life", falls towards the swallowed repetition of "groups under groups", which itself mirrors and explains the descending degrees of resemblance that gives the sentence its scientific filling.
The next line is just as good: "This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of the stars in…
edyong | January 20, 2009Whalefishes, bignoses and tapetails - these three groups of deep-sea fishes couldn't look more different. The whalefishes (Cetomimidae) have whale-shaped bodies with disproportionately large mouths, tiny eyes, no scales and furrowed lateral lines - narrow organs on a fish's flanks that allow it to sense water pressure.
The tapetails (Mirapinnidae) are very different - they also lack scales but they have no lateral lines. They have sharply angled mouths that give them a comical overbite and long tail streamers that extend to nine times the length of their bodies.
The bignoses (…
grrlscientist | December 24, 2008tags: parrots, Psittaciformes, evolution, molecular phylogeny, ornithology, Neornithes
Red-crowned Amazon parrot, Amazona viridigenalis, at Elizabeth Street Parrotry, Brownsville, Texas.
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 7 April 2008 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/750s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
One of the most contentious issues among scientists who study the evolution of birds is identifying precisely when the modern birds (Neornithes) first appeared. This is due to conflicts between the fossil record and molecular dating methodologies. For example,…
grrlscientist | December 18, 2008tags: Austroraptor cabazai, dinosaurs, Dromaeosauridae, birds, fossils, taxonomy, evolution
The newly unveiled Austroraptor cabazai (left) attacks a juvenile sauropod dinosaur in an artist's interpretation.
The giant raptor, found in Argentina, measured between 16.5 and 21 feet (5 to 6.5 meters) long, making it one of the largest raptors to roam Earth 70 million years ago, a new study finds.
A dramatic new carnivorous dinosaur that was bigger than a car was unveiled yesterday in public at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (the Argentine, or Bernardino Rivadavia, Museum of Natural…
awild | January 26, 2008Finally, a solid taxonomy for the Australian Aphaenogaster:
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Shattuck, S. 2008. Australian ants of the genus Aphaenogaster (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 1677: 25-25.
ABSTRACT: The Australian species of the myrmicine ant genus Aphaenogaster Mayr are revised. Eight species are recognised, four of which are described as new. The species include barbara sp. n., barbigula Wheeler (for which a lectotype is designated), kimberleyensis sp. n., longiceps (Smith) (with its newly recognised synonym, flava Emery), mediterrae sp. n., poultoni Crawley, pythia Forel (for which a neotype is designated…
awild | December 12, 2007
Technomyrmex fisheri Bolton 2007
Madagascar, line drawing by Barry Bolton
Last month, British myrmecologist Barry Bolton published the first ever global synthesis of the ant genus Technomyrmex. The tome describes 37 new species, including Technomyrmex fisheri from Madagascar, named after Brian Fisher of Antweb. I'm always keen to try out new taxonomic keys, so I tested Bolton's out on several unidentified African and Australian species in my collection. As is nearly always the case with Bolton's meticulous work, the key worked flawlessly. I only wish I had more Technomyrmex to key.…
awild | December 4, 2007
Idioneurula donegani Huertas & Arias 2007
Huertas, B. and J. J. Arias. 2007. A new butterfly species from the Colombian Andes and a review of the taxonomy of the genera Idioneurula Strand, 1932 and Tamania Pyrcz, 1995 (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Satyrinae). Zootaxa 1652: 27-40.
The online journal Zootaxa has hosted the publication of 6723 new animal species since its inception in 2001, averaging over 2.8 new species per day. And that's just a single journal- there are scores of taxonomy journals out there. Taxonomy is an old science, but it remains on the frontiers of biological…
awild | December 2, 2007
Mystrium maren Bihn & Verhaagh 2007
Discoveries of new species on our little-known planet continue apace. The two known specimens of the impressively toothy Mystrium maren were collected in 2001 in Indonesia, and Jochen Bihn and Manfred Verhaagh just published a paper in Zootaxa describing this ant and another new species, M.leonie.
Source: J. H. Bihn & M. Verhaagh, 2007. A review of the genus Mystrium (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in the Indo-Australian region. Zootaxa 1642: 1-12.
*update* Lead author Jochen Bihn writes about the…
worldsfair | May 15, 2007"Species: A term which everybody thinks they understand, but which nobody agrees upon, to denote the "basic units" of groups of biological organisms. It is sometimes said, or has been said to me, that one ought not know too much about a topic if you are to define it clearly. "
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worldsfair | May 15, 2007"A clade is, simply expressed, any branch (Greek: klados) of the evolutionary tree which is separated from the rest of the tree by a single cut. Any branch, however large or small, that is cut off this way is monophyletic, or of a single origin. Monophyly is, under cladistic terminology, the property of a single species and all of its descendant species."
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