In the Upper East River Valley of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventis) are thriving thanks to climate change. The rodents’ startling population boom — their numbers have tripled in ten years — has now been linked to the increasing size of their bellies, which is probably caused by climate-driven changes in hibernation patterns.
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The rust-coloured plateau above Mecca in Saudi Arabia may soon attract pilgrims of palaeontology. The hills, which overlook the Red Sea, have disgorged the 29–28-million-year-old partial skull fossil of an early primate that possesses features both of apes and monkeys. The skull could help palaeontologists to answer questions about the life of primates in a period that until now has provided few fossils.
When he caught sight of the skull during an expedition in search of ancient whale fossils last year, Iyad Zalmout wondered whether it belonged to a monkey or an ape. “It turns out it’s not an ape, it’s not a monkey, it’s something intermediate,” says Zalmout, a palaeontologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and an author of a paper published in Nature today. Continue reading Fossil skull fingered as ape–monkey ancestor
Acoustic physicist Luis Goméz Ullate is having a hard time finding a job. Goméz, a tenured investigator with Spain’s national research council (CSIC) in Madrid, isn’t looking for himself — he’s helping out one of his graduate students facing the country’s increasingly difficult science labour market. “The options are tighter than usual,” he says.
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This story has also gotten some attention on madrimasd.org (in Spanish): [html]
New simulations suggest that the Sun may have captured more than its fair share of comets from the primordial star-forming soup. The study, led by Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, seeks to account for the abundance of comets in the outer reaches of the Solar System.
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