Year: 2022

EMERGENCE OF BIRDS. "Maximum wing length closely tracked atmospheric pO2 before 140 Ma, but became decoupled from pO2 trends and is better explained by a model of stasis after 130 Ma. The timing of the oxygen-size decoupling coincides with the Early Cretaceous diversification of birds, between their first appearance in the latest Jurassic (Archaeopteryx, ca. 150 Ma) and the presence of diverse assemblages 25 Myr later." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

SMALL AND NIMBLE. "Maneuverability plays a key role in aerial predation and predator evasion, and scales inversely with body size in flying insects, suggesting that size-selective predation pressure by flying birds is a plausible explanation for the weakening and ultimate decoupling of the size-oxygen relationship." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

TERRESTRIAL VS AERIAL. "This trend is primarily the result of body-size changes in large flying insects, such as dragonflies (but also in grasshoppers), and ground-dwelling groups, such as many beetles or cockroaches, may not follow the same pattern because the history of terrestrial predation differs from that of aerial predation." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

BIRDS BECAME BETTER PREDATORS. "The gradual reduction in maximum insect size and extinction of large-bodied groups adapted for gliding flight also coincided with the gradual acquisition of key flight characteristics, such as an alula and fused pygostyle, important for low-speed flight performance and maneuverability, in early birds." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

FULL CIRCLE. "Atmospheric oxygen acted effectively as a physiological constraint that limited the size of the largest insects from the Carboniferous to Triassic, but its impacts were superseded by increasingly selective size limitation, likely by flying vertebrate predators following the evolution of birds in the latest Jurassic." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this glimpse into early Earth giganticism in insects, and its relationship to the Great Oxygenation event and subsequent variations in oxygen levels, followed by increasing predatory pressures. One thing it demonstrates is the incredible dynamism of adaptation, where insects can become huge, and then equally quickly scale down to avoid predation. Early life on this Planet was full of surprises. View in LinkedIn

"A PROTOCELL is a physical-chemical implementation of the simplest life form that we can either make or that can emerge spontaneously. I think there are many different ways we can make minimal living systems. Just to be clear, I'm speaking about the transition from nonliving to living materials, where you start out with components that are nonbiological." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

CHEMICAL CELLS. "They can be organic or inorganic materials or both. If you put them together in a particular way, you can create a system that can take in resources and convert those resources into building blocks for the system to grow and divide. Then if you have information, some kind of guidance for how this division process happens that is inheritable, and if the inheritable information can change from one generation to the next, then you have the possibility for selection." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

MINIMAL CELL. "Because one kind of information control of how you grow and divide may turn out to be better than another information control of how you grow and divide, the better one will be selected and reproduce. As this process continues you have evolution, and then you're done. If you can implement a system that can do this, you have created a minimal cell." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

SIMPLEST FORM. "The game, of course, is: How simplistically can that be done? A modern cell is a really complicated machine, but many of us think life can be created in much, much simpler forms." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn