Although not the most important among the many different animals studied by Charles Darwin during his amazing journeys on board the Beagle, the little finches from the Galápagos Islands have become one of the most popular representatives of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. They embody the process of speciation forced by environmental conditions, in the […]
The idea of a living fossil is rather intuitive. We think that a kind of organism deserves that denomination if it has been living in the planet during a very large period of time apparently without any change. A well known example of living fossil is the Ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba) because, although it is […]
Endemic species are part of the natural heritage of a region, and their preservation for future generations should receive the same kind of priority and public understanding as historical sites, because they share a common trait: if they disappear, they will be lost forever. Of course, conservation becomes especially thorny if we are not sure […]
Author: Alvaro Arrizabalaga received a BA in History (Vitoria, 1988) and a Master in CRM -Archaeology option- (Vitoria, 1992) at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). He finished his PhD in Prehistory ( La industria lítica del Paleolítico superior inicial en el oriente cantábrico ) in 1995. He has been a lecturer of Prehistory […]
A uthor: Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, Permanent Researcher, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) The effort of mapping ignorance in biology is especially frustrating –or, if the mood and attitude of the scientist afford it, especially motivating– because solid, definite answers remain minimal compared to the amount of open issues and uncertainties that new discoveries in this […]
As the Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi famously put it (although usually misattributed to Paul Erdös), mathematicians are devices for turning coffee into theorems. Other people drink coffee for a variety of reasons, and considering that coffee is very far from being the only popular beverage containing caffeine, it is not difficult to believe that caffeine […]
The word “species” is one of the most relevant and controversial in the history of Biology and has often become the main topic of many books and articles. It seems that biologists can do their job quite well and understand each other as if all of them shared a tacit agreement on the meaning of […]
The lungs of birds move air in only one direction during both inspiration and expiration through a set of tubular gas-exchanging bronchi called parabronchi. On the other hand, in the lungs of mammals and other vertebrates, air moves tidally into and out of terminal gas-exchange structures, called alveoli (Figure 1). The work carried out by […]
You’re sitting in a room with an all-southern view. Suddenly, a bear walks by the window. What color is the bear? Young Sherlock Holmes. Barry Levinson (1985) The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is one of the most unmistakable mammals of the planet. Its white fur is maybe the most straightforward reason for this distinctiveness, but […]
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1813) is especially known as one of the discoverers of evolution by natural selection. However, among his various contributions to the development of modern biology we can also consider the British naturalist as the father of biogeography: the study of the spatial distribution of organisms over the surface of the planet. Wallace’s […]