all Museum of Comparative Zoology stories

Jamaican lizards mark their territory with shows of strength at dusk and dawn

404132862 — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:40:48 -0400

What does ageless fitness guru Jack LaLanne have in common with a Jamaican lizard?

Like LaLanne, the lizards greet each day with vigorous push-ups. That's according to a new study showing that male Anolis lizards engage in impressive displays of reptilian strength - push-ups, head bobs, and threatening extension of a colorful neck flap called a dewlap -- to defend their territory at dawn and dusk.

The lizards are the first animals known to mark dawn and dusk through visual displays, rather than the much better known chirping, tweeting, and other sounding off by birds, frogs, geckos, and primates.

Foraging for forest frogs

404132862 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:31:20 -0500

In the dark of the Sri Lankan cloud forest, the researchers’ only guides were the headlamps they used to light up the night, illuminating the cold, gray mist that drifted through the trees.

They looked carefully as they walked among the trunks, the beams from their headlamps casting left and right, up and down. They examined rocks and branches, leaf litter and shrubs, tree trunks, and leaves high in the canopy. By and by, they found one, then another — small tree frogs that froze in the light and went suddenly silent.

Yale honors E. O. Wilson with Verrill Medal

404132862 — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:58:23 -0400

Yale honors Wilson with Verrill Medal

Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus E.O. Wilson received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal from Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History on Wednesday (Oct. 17) in New Haven, Conn. Awarded by the curators and trustees of the museum, the medal was established in 1959 to honor “some signal practitioner in the arts of natural history and natural science.” Wilson was given the award for his career-spanning efforts to educate the public about the ecological consequences of human behavior.

Biologists remember landmark theory

404132862 — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:12:41 -0400

Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.

Professor Lord Robert May of Oxford University said the word “ecology” — which describes the interaction between an organism and its environment — was coined just a little more than a century ago. By the 1960s, he said, the science of ecology was still mainly a descriptive one, lacking theories to tie together the observations by scientists in the field.

Leading scientists announce creation of Encyclopedia of Life

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:00:45 -0400

Realizing a dream articulated in 2003 by renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, Harvard and four partner institutions have launched an ambitious effort to create an Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an unprecedented project to document online every one of Earth's 1.8 million known species. For the first time in history, the EOL would grant scientists, students, and others multimedia access to all known living species, even those just discovered.

The effort, announced today (May 9), will be supported by a new $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Lizards shed light on species diversity

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:51:48 -0400

Some people are drawn to majestic racehorses, melodious songbirds, or cuddly puppies. Jonathan Losos has had a lifelong love affair with reptiles.

As a youngster in suburban St. Louis, the Harvard professor was a “little dinosaur freak,” bringing bucketfuls of the molded plastic beasts to nursery school.

Losos’ lizards give evolutionary clues in island experiments

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:41:16 -0400

Tiny islets in the Bahamas have proven useful laboratories to illustrate natural selection’s effects on island lizards, which saw their legs lengthen, then shorten as ground-dwelling predators drove them into the trees.

The experiments capped years of research into a type of lizard called an anole on the Caribbean islands. The research, conducted by Jonathan Losos, the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor of the Study of Latin America, examined the relationships between lizards that shared similar habitats and characteristics but lived on different islands.

Losos described his research Tuesday (Sept. 18) during the kickoff talk in this year’s lecture series sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH).

First orchid fossil puts showy blooms at some 80 million years old

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:27:21 -0400

Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs.

Their analysis, published this week (Aug. 29) in the journal Nature, indicates orchids arose some 76 to 84 million years ago, much longer ago than many scientists had estimated. The extinct bee they studied, preserved in amber with a mass of orchid pollen on its back, represents some of the only direct evidence of pollination in the fossil record.

A tale of two scholars: The Darwin debate at Harvard

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:41:37 -0400

Few people have left a more indelible imprint on Harvard than Louis Agassiz.

An ambitious institution-builder and fundraiser as well as one of the most renowned scientists of his generation, he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) and trained a generation of naturalists in the precise methods of observation and categorization developed in Europe. His wife Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the other half of this Harvard power couple, was co-founder and first president of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, the precursor of Radcliffe.

Eggs, nests make colorful bedfellows at HMNH

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:00:00 -0400

Large and small, plain and colored, splotched and dotted, eggs from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology’s vast collection are on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in a new exhibition of eggs and nests.

The nests, like the eggs, come in all shapes and sizes. Unlike eggs, which have the same basic plan, nests vary greatly in complexity, from the simple dirt mounds of reptiles to the elaborate creations of Africa’s weaver birds to no nests at all.

When fish first started biting

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:20:30 -0400

Before fish began to invade land, about 365 million years ago, they had some big problems to solve. They needed to come up with new ways to move, breathe, and eat.

Take the latter, for example. Fish usually pucker up and suck prey into their mouths. But air is 900 times less dense than water, so land-livers must bite into their food to get a meal. Researchers at Harvard University have just completed a study that gives a clear picture of how that change was made.

Arctic hit by global warming first

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:28:30 -0400

Scientists from the eight nations bordering the Arctic recently enlisted representatives of the region's native peoples to help assess climate change there. What they found put a human face on a debate often involving distant projections and abstract numbers.

Less snow, less sea ice, freezing rain in winter, and the appearance of mosquitoes and robins, creatures so foreign the native residents have no word for them.

The experience of the Arctic peoples is a harbinger of things to come, according to James McCarthy, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography.

"It's the canary in the mine, a glimpse of what's going to happen at lower latitudes," McCarthy said.

Big brains better for birds

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:50:32 -0400

As you might guess, big-brained birds survive better in the wild than those less cerebral for their size. Scientists guessed that too, but they had to prove it to themselves.

"The supposition that large brains are associated with reduced death rates has not been tested in any group of animals," notes Tamás Székely, a visiting fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

Big brains have their disadvantages, biologists admit. They exact a high cost from their owners in the form of development time and upkeep demands. Evolution would eliminate them if they did not provide benefits to offset that cost. The benefit is obvious when you see a large-brained red-tail hawk capture a small-brained pigeon for its lunch.

Eclipsed for decades, Harvard's glass animals step out

50443248 — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:46:42 -0400

Long overshadowed by their famed floral kin, some of the exquisite 19th century glass animals housed at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) have finally hit the road for a Minnesota exhibit - the first time in Harvard's nearly 130-year ownership that the rare sculptures are known to have left Cambridge.

The exhibit of 29 invertebrate models, dubbed "The Glass Sea Treasures of Harvard: The Age of Darwin," continues through next February at the Underwater Adventures Aquarium in Bloomington, Minn. At that time, the newly cleaned and restored creatures are expected to migrate eastward en masse for a possible exhibition on campus.

Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:30:50 -0400

Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime - within months - as a population's needs change. In a study of island lizards exposed to a new predator, the scientists found that natural selection dramatically changed direction over a very short time, within a single generation, favoring first longer and then shorter hind legs.