Coelacanth Genome Sequence!

The morphology of the Ceolacanth hasn’t really changed since much since the Cretaceous Period, in fact it hasn’t really changed at all which makes this paper particularly interesting.  Turns out they’ve been evolving at an extremely slowly. However, their transposons have been moving around their genome at a rapid pace. They also found that the African coelacanth lacks the gene to make immunoglobin-N,  is a universal-system immune protein. I wonder how challenging it would be do some developmental genetic work on the ceolocanth…  

inhumanoid:

Reconstructed Face of Extinct “Hobbit” Species Is Startlingly Humanlike

I’ve seen this a couple times floating around. There’s still isn’t a general consensus to what taxa H. floresiensis belongs to. It has the brain size of 380 cubic centimeters which places it lower to the modern chimps and thus being smaller than the australopithecines, yet has a body structure similar to that of the genus Homo just…dwarfed.  Homo floresiensis remains one of my favorite hominid fossil just for the mere fact that it raises so many questions about what it taxonomically means to be part of the genus Homo.  And now they have a face! However, that doesn’t seem to shed light on where to place it haha. Viva la science!

A picture of the relative size of Trilobozoa.

So what’s interesting about Trilobozoa is that they are extremely challenging to classify. In fact, most Edicarian species are extremely ambiguous and are hard to place within modern taxa. But then again why should it?  Perhaps, it’s all in the eye of the taxonomist. It’s all in the eye of the dreamer.