Category: Uncategorized

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constraint that limited the size of the largest insects from the Carboniferous to Triassic, but its impacts were superseded by increasingly selective size limitation, likely by flying vertebrate predators following the evolution of birds in the latest Jurassic."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

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

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

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

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

LIFE AS CONTINUITY. "There is now a growing consensus among biologists concerning this continuity." https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

ALCHEMICAL GOLD. "The intellectual part for me, what has kept me up at night, is this fascination with why materials in certain forms are alive and in other forms are not. Trying to figure out the secret of how to put materials together so they dance and become alive." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

HARD TO DEFINE. "A bewildering variety of forms of life surrounds us, but we usually have no difficulty distinguishing the living from the non-living. That flower, that mushroom, that worm, that bird are alive; that rock, that mountain, that river, that cloud are not. Yet it is notoriously difficult to say what life is, exactly." https://lnkd.in/da-Njua View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION FIRST. "Once you have replication, then you can have evolution, but you don't have evolution before you have replication. At least I don't think so." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PROPERTIES. "The individual building blocks of the protocell can't explain the higher-level structure and its functionalities when we put them together. They are an emergent structure. So we have to put a set of appropriate molecular aggregates together to get the first replicator." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn