You wouldn’t have time anyway.

You’re right, I forgot about them. But apparently there’s very little metamorphic rock in Iceland - nothing on the surface has been buried and reprocessed, then brought back to the surface.

Not too great if you’re a sedimentary geologist.

The sickle-cell allele is only beneficial if you’re heterozygous for it. In societies without modern medicine, I believe that the mortality rate for those homozygous for the allele is more like 100% before they reach reproductive age. But for the population as a whole, the allele is associated with reduced mortality.

Agreed. How about a loud recording of an elephant trumpeting, though?

Here is a woolly rhino drawn by someone who actually saw live ones:

Thirty lashes with a wet eyeball for that.

Microsoft seems to be adopting the adversarial capitalism model.

True. But it would be interesting to see what gene variants promote early fitness as opposed to simply being invisible to selection because their deleterious effects don’t appear until later in life.

It would be interesting to see if these actionable gene variants actually increase reproductive fitness early in life, then their deleterious effects kick in after you’re past your reproductive years.

Thanks. The gut appears to be healing, but the drug seems to induce a beetling focus on inessentials - have spent the last two nights solving a problem in digital visualization that’s been puzzling me for months, but is a distraction from the research I should be doing right now. And when trying to carry on a…

Yemen’s been locked in a famine for years now and its economy is a shambles, but one side in their civil war thinks it’s worthwhile to expend the resources to launch a missile at Israel.

Yes, I know about that. It’s regrettable, but once you start changing scientific names for any reason aside from systematic research showing that the original name isn’t valid, the Linnean system will start to break down.

Birds in North America are a special case - the American Ornithological Union votes (or at least used to) on the validity of species and their common names. I don’t know of any other group specializing on a particular taxon that does this. My old cladistics prof used to laugh at them.

What about Montezuma’s Quail? It’s named after the absolute ruler of what was an aggressively expansive imperial power.

The systematic community, and biologists more generally, are already preparing to oppose any move to purify scientific names. It’s bad enough that we have to keep lists of synonyms resulting from taxonomic revisions etc.

A good and thoughtful overview of fantasy publishing since the 70s - I wish I had the mental resources to respond adequately - lots of familiar names from the past in there - but I had surgery last Friday and the drugs that the doctor insists I take to quell what he assures me would otherwise be debilitating agony…

He prefers it that way.

I don’t think that this counts as a Lazarus taxon. If it was descended from North America’s Eocene plesiadapines and its lineage survived in NA for millions of years without leaving a trace, only for this species to reappear in the fossil record, that would make it a Lazarus taxon. But there’s an Asian line of descent…

You ought to work on that headline. I was wondering where these guys obtained the skin and eyes to burn, and how the original owners felt about this.