A comparison of brain size and brain composition was made between two uncrested duck breeds and Crested Ducks (CR) and between CR individuals that do possess crests and those that do not have the crest. Domestic ducks of the breed CR have allometrically larger brains than uncrested duck breeds. The crest inserts on a cushion of fat and connective tissue that is partly nourished by brain vessels...

Receiving the Curt Stern Award makes me think of the year 1956, when Stern, an extraordinaryDrosophila geneticist with broad-ranging interests, becamepresident of the American Society of Human Genetics. It’s also the year I was born. During the first year of my life, Stern presided over the Society’s 10th annual meeting, in Ann Arbor. There, he delivered a presidential address entitled “On porc...

Site U1318 (Proposal Site PORC-2A) is located in on the eastern slope of the Porcupine Seabight on the southwest continental margin of Ireland and is upslope from the Belgica Mound Province, including Challenger Mound. The principal objective at Site U1318 was to recover the sediments from the three seismic units (P1-3) of the southern Belgica mound province. Complete data from the seismically ...

Evolutionary biologist Michael Shapiro and his team made international headlines in 2013 when they found that a prominent change in pigeon plumage, head crests, could be traced to a mutation in a single gene. Now, in the new advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution (Vickrey et al. 2015), the research team has found an almost exact repeat in the evolutionary playbook. A mutatio...