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scientists say they’ve found and studied a complete fossil of a primate that is likely to be an early ancestor of the human species. this exciting finding may be an important “snapshot” from the time when humans, apes and monkeys diverged from the other primates such as lemurs.

a brand-new documentary, titled “the link” is set to air soon in the US, UK, norway and germany. a trailer and air dates are presented at revealingthelink.com.

Early Primate Provides Evolution Clues
Scientists say a 47-million-year-old fossil found in Germany may be a key link to explaining the evolution of early primates and, perhaps, telling them about developments that led to modern human beings. [more...]

here’s a comment that was recently submitted to one of my frogspawn time-lapse videos over at youtube:

“frogs are a good example of evolution seeing as it only take a month or 2 for them to grow”

ontogeny (the development of an individual organism) may be a glimpse into the evolutionary history of a species, but on the other hand, evolution has nothing to with one soft, translucent piece of frog spawn developing into a tadpole.
while evolution is a shift in genetic information during hundreds or thousands of generations, a tadpole growing legs is just part of its existing genetic programme.

i think if people actually knew what the theory of evolution is all about, there wouldn’t be half as much agitation against it.

i’ve prepared a few photos of a bat skeleton from last summer.
it’s a preparation of a greater mouse-eared bat (myotis myotis, grosses mausohr), that i received for a bat presentation. it had been used for demonstration purposes for a long time, so the ribcage is damaged.

i think it’s fascinating to actually “trace back” their evolution and see how over time, the fingers were prolonged, connected with skin (similar to the webbed toes of a duck) and made into wings.
the photos also show that these little creatures adhere to the basic “blueprint” of all mammals.
 

[view photos: bat skeleton]

everything you need to know about the theory of evolution, in 57 seconds:

(more or less) related:

atheist’s nightmare: the ultimate proof of ID
documentary on crack spiders (thanks to eric)
earlier post on evolution vs. ID

this tuesday, i got a chance to peek at what some of innsbruck’s chemists are doing:

right now, there’s an ongoing experiment based on the miller-urey-experiment [wikipedia: de, en] at the university of innsbruck.
stanley miller and harold clayton urey proved in 1953(!), that aminoacids (the base of all life-forms that we know of) could develop naturally under early atmosphere conditions of the earth.
this process is called “chemical evolution”.

nowadays, the composition of the early earth’s atmosphere is believed to be different than what miller and urey assumed, but the outcome is similar: organic molecules can (and will) form naturally, using very basic molecules (mainly water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen) and energy in the form of lightning.

here in innsbruck, scientists made a small modification to this setup: clay minerals (silicates) were added, because they have proven to influence the chemical evolution (and they were there, a few billion years ago).
after one month, they’re going to analyze what looks like green goo, and see what molecules are formed in this different setup…

when data about the atmosphere of titan was collected in january 2005, they also tried a similar experiment for titan conditions (different atmosphere, temperatures below freezing, …), to see if life (in very simple forms) could have evolved there.
after all, it’s still unknown where all the methane comes from and why it’s still there.
from what we know now, it IS possible.

[view photos: miller-urey-experiment - chemical evolution]