Humanizing Animals With the Most Human Eyes - Blog. People place incredible importance on their eyes. They’re arguably our default tool for perceiving the world, and one of the primary ways we remember and describe one another. Your eye color is on your birth certificate, driver’s license, and online dating profile. Those who make eye contact are considered more competent, friendlier, and more professional. Online commenters forced to make eye contact with others while writing leave nicer comments.
Audiences favor musicians who look at the crowd, and children who don’t make eye contact are flagged as troubled. Eye contact is so important to humans that when we look at our animals we often find the same kind of connection. In Nautilus’ first issue, the primatologist Frans de Waal says that eye contact can turn an ape-curious person into a professional primatologist. But what are these powerful little marbles in our heads, and why do they look the way they do? Answer key: David Attenborough on Creation. Evolution of sight traced back 700m years to jelly-fish which first developed the ability to detect light.
By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 19:00 GMT, 29 October 2012 | Updated: 19:00 GMT, 29 October 2012 Sight developed 700million years ago, a study found. The exact point in time when ancient species developed the first rudimentary ability to see light has been hotly contested. Scientific opinion was divided over which sponges or jellyfish types species first possessed opsins, a group of light-sensitive protein-coupled receptors in photoreceptor cells of the retina. Fresh faced for 700million years old: The evolution of our sense of sight has been traced back to prehistory Bristol's School of Earth Sciences and colleagues looked at a newly sequenced group of sponges named Oscarella carmela, and the jellyfish type Cnidarians, a group of animals thought to have possessed the world's earliest eyes.
Using computer modelling to provide a detailed picture of how and when opsins evolved. Dr Davide Pisani performed a computational analysis to test every hypothesis of opsin evolution proposed to date. Do the Eyes Have It? Dog domestication may have helped humans thrive while Neandertals declined Pat Shipman We all know the adage that dogs are man’s best friend. And we’ve all heard heartwarming stories about dogs who save their owners—waking them during a fire or summoning help after an accident. Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows the amazing, almost inexpressible warmth of a dog’s companionship and devotion. One of the classic conundrums in paleoanthropology is why Neandertals went extinct while modern humans survived in the same habitat at the same time. A stunning study that illuminates this decisive period was recently published in Science by Paul Mellars and Jennifer French of Cambridge University.
Mellars and French compared the number and sizes of Neandertal and modern-human archaeological sites, as well as the density of tools and the weight per square meter of prey animals, represented by fossils, in those sites. There is no shortage of hypotheses. Germonpré, M., M. How many times did eyes arise? (1997) Fish Fossil May Resolve Questions On Natural Selection.
A researcher from the University of Chicago said newly identified fish fossils discovered in several European museums might resolve a long-standing question about evolutionary theory. The 50 million-year-old fossils fill in a “missing link” in the evolution of flatfishes and explain one of nature’s most extraordinary phenomena, namely how flatfish such as sole, flounder halibut developed the bizarre but useful trait of having both eyes on one side of their head. Even more extraordinary is the fact that every flatfish is born symmetrical, with one eye on each side of its skull.
But as the flatfish develops from a larva to a juvenile, one eye gradually “migrates” up and over the top of the head, coming to rest in its adult position on the opposite side of the skull. For flatfish, which lie on their sides at the bottom of the sea, unique specialization provides a clear survival advantage in allowing the fish to use both of their eyes to look up. Mystery Of The Flatfish Head Solved. June 25, 2012 Image Caption: This is a skull of the primitive flatfish Heteronectes, with views of the left- and right-hand sides.
The left-hand side shows an eye that has migrated toward the top of the skull, but not reached the other side, in this adult specimen. Credit: Image by M. Friedman. Those delicious flatfishes, like halibut and sole, are also evolutionary puzzles. A new fossil discovery described in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Oxford University researcher Dr Matt Friedman finally solves the mystery. “This fossil comes from Bolca in northern Italy, a site that has literally been mined for hundreds of years for its fossil fishes. Friedman noted that “The specimen itself was discovered–with no identification–in a museum collection in Vienna. On The Net: Source: Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Researcher Explains Mysterious Evolution of Flatfish Eyes. CHICAGO _ Some dusty fossil fish spotted by a sharp-eyed University of Chicago doctoral student as he rummaged through forgotten corners of museum collections in Europe have solved a question that has long vexed scientists.
The puzzling question was: How did flatfish, a bizarre, highly specialized group of bottom-feeding fish that are some of nature’s most delicious creatures _ sole, plaice, turbot, flounder and halibut among them _ end up with both of their eyes on one side of their faces? Scientists have until now largely assumed the asymmetrical, one-sided eye arrangement was a trait that must have arisen suddenly in flatfish because they could not see a benefit for the fish if it took millions of years for an eye to migrate from one side to the other.
Even Charles Darwin had trouble answering critics who used flatfish and their strange eyes as an argument against his evolutionary theory after he published it in 1859. “Matt’s (Nature) article is extremely significant,” said Thomas J.