Random Update Of An Old Whiting Liffrig Well -- March 19, 2018

This well has now been updated and added to the list of "wells of interest."

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Notes For The Granddaughters

Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution, Jonathan B. Losos, c. 2017.

Author: director of the Losos Laboratory at Harvard University and curator of herpetology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Introduction: Convergent Evolution

From a note, page 3: Dinosaur purists may note that the name Brontosaurus was long ago discarded, replaced for quirky scientific reasons with Apatosaurus. to those killjoy know-it-alls I respond, "Ha-ha! Thanks to new scientific discoveries, the name Brontosaurus was resurrected in 2015."

From a note, page 6: Although, in reality, [the Jurassic Park velociraptor] was based on the closely related dinosar Deinonychus. One major difference between the movie and reality was that Velociraptor probably stood less than three feet tall. However, in an example of life imitating fiction, shortly after JP premiered, paleontologists described a larger cousin of Velociraptor, dubbed Utahraptor, which was about the size of the raptor in the movie.

Many references to Conway Morris.

Wow, wow, wow -- studies, thoughts by Canadian paleontologist Dale Russell

• close relative of Velociraptor: another small theropod dinosaur named Troodon
• studies suggest that dinosaurs were developing larger brain sizes at the end of their existence on earth
• what would have happened if the asteroid had not wiped them out
• how would Troodon's descendants have evolved if natural selection pushed them toward even larger brains
• Russell went through a chain of logic ... and voilà -- a creature that looks just like the creature in The Shape of Water --

Had the asteroid missed earth, and had the cooling trend continued, dinosaurs would have been forced to remain near the equator; they would not have been able to survive the cold northern and southern extreme latitudes

• the extreme northern and southern latitudes would have been "open" for development of mammals which began to appear just prior to the demise of the dinosaurs (except for the birds, or course)

Example:

• North American porcupine and the African crested porcupine, though looking very similar, do not share a common evolutionary heritage; they look similar due to a convergent evolution

Part One: Nature's Doppelgängers

Chapter One: Evolutionary Déjà VU

Wow, a great book.

The baton has been handed from Stephen Jay Gould to Jonathan B. Losos. 

I was wondering if Stephen Jay Gould had handed off the baton before he passed away.

Chapter Two: Replicated Reptiles

Chapter Three: Evolutionary Idiosyncrasy

Part Two: Experiments In The Wild

Chapter Four: The Not-So-Glacial Pace of Evolutionary Change

Chapter Five: Colorful Trinidad

Chapter Six: Lizard Castaways

Chapter Seven: From Manure to Modern Science

Chapter Eight: Evolution in Swimming Pools and Sandboxes

Part Three: Evolution Under the Microscope

Chapter Nine: Replaying the Tape

Chapter Ten: Breakthrough in a Bottle

Chapter Eleven: Jots, Tittles, and Drunken Fruit Flies

Chapter Twelve: The Human Environment

Conclusion: Fate, Chance, and the Inevitability of Humans