The reptiles' answer to the Coelacanth - The Tuatara
The reptiles' answer to the Coelacanth
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:57 PM Wednesday, Dec 22, 2010
This handsome fellow is a Tuatara, a rare reptile, native to New Zealand. Like the Coelacanth, Tuataras are the last surviving species of an order that thrived in ancient, ancient history and was once thought to be totally extinct—in this case, Sphenodontia.
The Tuatara looks a lot more like its fossilized relatives than the living Coelacanth does, but Tuatara isn't a species frozen in time. In fact, its genome seems to be accumulating mutations faster than any other living vertebrates'. It's just that most of the mutations are happening in places that don't change what the Tuatara looks like. Fascinating stuff. And it gets better. See, the Tuatara has a the remnants of a once-functional third eye on top of its head.
Last month, the New York Times published a great story about Tuatara, written by Natalie Angier, which will catch you up on the basics of his awesome (and awesomely long-lived) animal.
But I owe a debt of gratitude to reader JonS, who brought up the Tuatara in the comments of my Coelacanth story today. Thanks for introducing me to this very delightful creature, Jon!
via boingboing.net
This is one of the most fascinating biology related posts I've read all year. Don't forget to check out the articles linked in the post body.
Abbas Haider Ali.
My First Experience with Amazon Mechanical Turk
With the recent discussions about Mechanical Turk being a tool of the devil spammers, I should first point out that I actually used it for real work. It may have been Marketing type stuff, but I still consider it work.
My company, xMatters, went through a rebranding exercise a few months ago and we got a great response to it and one of the highlights was at our customer forum when our clients were throwing up the "X" gang sign for pictures.
It came to me that there might be some really entertaining pictures of random people doing similar poses for all sorts of other reasons as well. I could have spent some time scouring the information superhighway looking for those shots - or, I could harness a distributed network of people to do it for me.
And that was the task that I got my AMT minions to do for me - go forth and find pictures with anyone throwing up the "X" sign. The results were actually pretty good. 90% had pictures that I plan on using in some capacity. The other 10% were duplicates and some spam. Not bad for my first experience. I certainly plan on using the service again.
Oh and here is one of my favorite results from the exercise of Katy Perry from an event related to the UK TV Show X Factor.
Abbas Haider Ali.
