Reconstructing Man's Pliocene Pongid Ancestor

Hominid-Pongid Distinctiveness in the Miocene-Pliocene Fossil Record: The Lothagam Mandible

The Lothagam mandibular fragment, found in 1967 west of Lake Turkana, Kenya, has been dated to 5.5 million years ago. This date is significant because it may lie within the suggested time range during which the hominid and pongid clades diverged. Because of its fragmentary condition and great age, this specimen has run the gamut of taxonomic assignations, from ramapithecine to pongid to hominid...

Tree structured fiber optics MANs

Experimental search for minimal organisms and the last universal common ancestor: Reconstructing the Ur-Organism

T wo questions that should be closely related have historically been studied with very different approaches. One is what constitutes a minimal living system, whether minimal cell or minimal self-contained ecosystem. The other is what actual system was the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all modern cells. As the LUCA is supposed to have been a bottleneck through which all life passed be...

Reconstructing Dryopteris "semicristata" (Dryopteridaceae): Molecular profiles of tetraploids verify their undiscovered diploid ancestor.

UNLABELLED PREMISE OF THE STUDY Discovering missing ancestors is essential to understanding the evolutionary history of biodiversity on Earth. Evidence from extinct species can provide links for reconstructing intricate patterns of reticulate relationships among extant descendents. When fossils are unavailable and other evidence yields competing hypotheses to explain species ancestry, data f...

Reconstructing the ancestor of Mycobacterium leprae: the dynamics of gene loss and genome reduction.

We have reconstructed the gene content and order of the last common ancestor of the human pathogens Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. During the reductive evolution of M. leprae, 1537 of 2977 ancestral genes were lost, among which we found 177 previously unnoticed pseudogenes. We find evidence that a massive gene inactivation took place very recently in the M. leprae lineage,...