Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology on deer antlers (with cool pics!):Because antler growth depends fundamentally on health and nutrition as well as age and size, antlers are among the most plastic of all bones. You might be able to appreciate this fact from this photo (courtesy Jon McGowan) showing diversity in English Roe deer Capreolus capreolus , yet even the diversity shown here is far from comprehensive.


• Not from a blog, but the Anchorage Daily News, this story about the Kasatochi volcano: The surprise eruption of Kasatochi Volcano in the central Aleutians this summer turned a small green island rich with seabirds and ocean mammals into a sterile gray lump, scientists say. Tens of thousands of fledgling auklets and petrels perished in their rocky nests, as Kasatochi erupted for the first time in centuries, smothering under a deep blanket of ash anything that couldn't flee.


• John at John Hawks Weblog talks on Steve Jones's claim that evolution is stopping... and says no, it's not:I'm usually pretty measured when I respond to dumb ideas about evolution reported in the press. After all, scientists are often misquoted, or misunderstood by reporters. So, I didn't really think it was worth writing about this story covering a lecture by UCL geneticist Steve Jones. After all, I'm hardly going to attend a faculty talk in London, and there's really no news here -- Jones has been arguing for more than ten years that human evolution has slowed or stopped. ... But this latest Steve Jones kerfuffle seems to have impressive reach. It hit Slashdot, for goodness' sake. The Guardian has published an exchange of opinion pieces about it. Bloggers of note have picked it up, almost universally to criticize it as a wrong idea. What I haven't yet seen, in all the commentary, is a short and simple refutation for each element of his argument. Let me lay out the components of Jones' argument, as explained in the current article and previous works
  


• Brian of Laelaps has a new gig - writing for the Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking blog. In his first post he talks about a dinosaur with sillier arms than T-Rex's and what it probably did with them: We often think of dinosaurs as massive beasts that shook their earth with their footsteps and their roars, but under the feet of those giants were smaller, stranger dinosaurs that no one ever expected to find. There are still many questions about the Alvarezsaurids to be addressed, but Albertonykus has provided several key pieces of information that help to what the lost world of Cretaceous Alberta was like.


• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life posts on endangered rimatara lories making babies (and you have to see the photos; this is one blazingly spectacular little bird): Those of you who have been following the story of the endangered Kura, or Rimatara Lory, Vini kuhlii, will be very excited to know that these rare birds are producing babies! Last year, 27 Rimatara lories, or Kura, were translocated from the island of Rimatara to the rat-free island of Atiu, which is part of their historic range. The translocated birds were recently documented to be producing chicks in their new (historic) home. Rimatara Lory fossils have been found throughout the southern regions of the Cook Islands, as well as on the small French Polynesian island of Rimatara. According to local stories, the small parrot's bright red plumage was highly prized, so the bird was to extinction throughout its range, except on the island of Rimatara, where it was protected by tapu (taboo).

Enjoy!