Tag: anatomy
Episode 23: Meet the Echinoderms! Adventures with Ancient Sea Stars!
This episode was a blast to produce for a vertebrate scientist. I learned a ton about the echinoderms, the group of invertebrate animals to which sea stars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and crinoids belong. Be prepared for more adventures with invertebrate animals in the future. Engineering Echinoderms with Elizabeth Clark! Yale University Ph.D. student Elizabeth Clark, holding examp …
Filed under: Biology, Locomotion, Palaeozoic, Paleontology, anatomy, brittle star, crinoid, echinoderm, echinoderms, invertebrates, sea cucumber, sea star
News Bite: Dodos and the evolution of bird brains
If you wander into the basement of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, and wander into the fossil collections, you will find a vast array of different dinosaurs dating back over 200 million years. However, just a few feet away from the oldest dinosaurs you will find several drawers filled with the bones of Raphus cucullatus: the dodo. These are not fossilized; the dodo has on …
Filed under: anatomy, bird, brain, dinosaur, dodo, extinction, fossil, island, scanning
Episode 7 Field Guide: Walking through Whale Evolution
Whales are spectacularly specialized mammals that seem perfectly adapted to their marine habitat. Plenty of other mammals have gone back to the water, but whales take it to a whole new level. No back legs, weird ear bones, nose on top of the head. What could the land-based ancestor of whales have possibly looked like? Is there a fossil record of walking whales? In this episode we discover whales b …
Filed under: Cenozoic, Cetacea, Eocene, Field Guide, Hippopotamus, Locomotion, Mammals, Systematics, anatomy, evolution, hippo, whale
Episode 3 Field Guide: What’s a Reptile?
When you read the word “Reptile” what do you think of? A lizard? A snake? A crocodile? A turtle? All of these animals fit the loose definition of reptiles: covered in scales, unable to regulate their body temperature, and sprawling. But in Episode 2, we explored the close relationship between birds and dinosaurs, so are birds reptiles, too? The feathers and warm-blooded-ness of birds messes with o …
Filed under: Diapsids, Dinosaurs, Lizards, Reptiles, Snakes, Synapsids, Systematics, Turtles, anatomy, mammal, tuatara
