For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods – any land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages – in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago.
The fossils were created when fine sand from an overflowing river poured into the animals’ burrows and hardened into casts of the open spaces. The largest preserved piece is about 14 inches long, 6 inches wide and 3 inches deep. No animal remains were found inside the burrow casts, but the hardened sediment in each …

Sea Anemone
Originally uploaded by tiffywiffyuva

The basic body shape of a cnidarian consists of a sac containing a gastrovascular cavity with a single opening that functions as both mouth and anus.
There are four main classes of Cnidaria:
* Class Anthozoa (anemones, corals, etc.)
* Class Scyphozoa (jellyfish)
* Class Cubozoa (box jellies)
* Class Hydrozoa (Obelia)

Rose Anemone
Originally uploaded by beneathblueseas.com

Anthozoa is a class within the phylum Cnidaria that contains the sea anemones and corals. Unlike other cnidarians, anthozoans do not have a medusa stage in their development. Instead, they release sperm …

“Yeast” Saccharomyces cerevisiae has contributed immensely in making Drosophila melanogaster a successful model system.The over expression system of UAS GAL4,which is borrowed from Yeast turned out to be real boon for fly geneticists.Another significant contribution came in the form of FLP FRT technique.The system uses the 2um plasmid of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.This plasmid encodes a recombinase (FLP) which acts on copies of the FLP recombination target (FRT) present in the plasmid as 599 bp inverted repeats.Flp Frt system was first time introduced in fly by Kent G. Golic and …

In order to perform a successful experiment most of the time one has to begin with preparing solutions required for it.When you begin you realize all solutions are required in mM which might be confusing in the beginning but its very important to get it correct or else be prepared for some strange results.Here some simple ways for preparing mM solutions and diluting solutions from more concentrated solutions.
Solutions and Dilutions
equivalent weight = the formula weight of the solute) per L of solution.In most cases, a 1 M solution will …

Allan C. Spradling, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology, has been awarded the 2008 Genetics Prize by the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation in recognition of his contributions to fruit fly genomics and for “fundamental discoveries about the earliest stages of reproduction.” The prize, which consists of a gold medal and $500,000, will be presented to Spradling at the International Congress of Genetics in Berlin on July 13, 2008.

Nautilus

Originally uploaded by paulvo

Nautiloids are the sole surviving family of externally-shelled cephalopods that thrived in the tropical oceans 450–150 million years ago. However, in the intervening years their modern soft bodied relatives dumped the shell and developed complex central nervous systems; which makes Nautilus ideally suited to discover the ‘evolutionary pathways that led to the development of the complex coleoid [soft bodied cephalopod] brains’ say Robyn Crook and Jennifer Basil. Knowing that the simple Nautilus brain lacks the structures required for memory in more sophisticated cephalopods, Crook and Basil decided …

Underwater love
Originally uploaded by w e n d y

Although it is common for male fish to play the dominant parenting role, male pregnancy is a complex process unique to the fish family Syngnathidae, which includes pipefish, seahorses and sea dragons. Texas A&M University evolutionary biology researcher Adam Jones and colleagues in his lab are studying the effects of male pregnancy on sex roles and sexual selection of mates and are trying to understand how the novel body structures necessary for male pregnancy evolved. By doing this, the researchers hope to …