Several friends have forwarded this story to me the last couple of days. I know why people send me the link. I do love to hang at the pub, and not for a single pint after work. When I go there, I hang around until the pub closes.
I think my publication list is fine, but I must admit I feel a bit worried now. Could I improve it by switching to wine?
I wanted to link to this post a few days ago: Death creates life.
It looks like mass extinctions have generally been followed by an explosion in variety of species. I guess it makes sense. In equilibrium, species are “stuck” in peaks in the fitness landscape, and attempts at trying out variations — which in general will reduce fitness — will quickly be removed from the populations. If you reduce the competition, and at the same time drastically change the fitness landscape (as a mass extinction is bound to do), you get some wiggle room to try out something new…
Today is a holiday (in Denmark at least), so I will allow myself to be a bit unscientific.
In Jurassic Park they extract dinosaur DNA from insects found in amber. At least in the movie, I read the book several years ago and don’t remember if it was the same there — I seem to recall they also spliced it with DNA from other animals there, though. Anyway, I doubt this is something we would ever be able to do, but if we wanted to build a jurassic park, could we reconstruct dino DNA? Based on present day species, would we ever be able to reconstruct the DNA of dinos?
Not specific species, obviously. We would need enough present day species branching off all the inner edges in the extinct dino phylogeny, and we do not have species for that, but could we infer a kind of dino based on birds, reptiles and whatnot?