Piltdown Hoax (Fifth Post)

Piltdown Hoax

         In 1912 a man, working as a laborer in southeast England, discovered an unusual piece of a skull while digging in the village of Piltdown. He passed it to another man, named Charles Dawson. "Dawson later claimed he noticed that the skull was extremely thick and appeared rather primitive." He gathered a group of men from different fields to begin a further search of the same dig site the laborer found the original piece of skull. They found remains of Stone Age tools and prehistoric animals, but their biggest success was finding "an ape-like jawbone with human-like teeth that seemed to link it to the skull Dawson got from the laborer." At this time the remains of primitive humans had been discovered so far in France, Germany and Asia; none had been found in England. Scientists of England were excited by the idea of being marked as another great county with ancient human fossils. Some forty years pass and new fossils of human ancestors were discovered in Asia and Africa which appeared to look less like humans, but more like apes. These new fossils were in fact older than the Piltdown ones, and this caused a clear conflict in our ancestral timeline. Professor Kenneth Oakley proves the jaw bone to be forged using fluorine analysis. This was a bit of a wake up call for the scientific community. It taught scientists that they need to always retest theories, take a closer look, and to not always completely trust what another scientist puts out.
         Charles Dawson was purely trying to establish credibility, by "discovering" this jaw bone that could have been England's first Neanderthal. He clearly was desperate, his ego got in the way, and he saw it as an opportunity to make a name for himself. The best way of describing Dawson's actions was he wanted to achieve success without having to work for it.As Giles Oakley said in the NOVA Piltdown Man video, "Scientists are no different from other human beings. They're not all dispassionate seekers after truth in some kind of neutral way, unaffected by the pressures that affect non-scientists. Egotism, pride, ambition, rivalry, these things affect even scientific judgments." For England, patriotism played a major role in their initial reaction to Piltdown man. As a country they wanted to feel like a great and important country who is home to our potentially oldest ancestor.
         Professor Kenneth Oakley, of the British Museum, used the method of fluorine analysis in the early 1950s to reveal the truth behind the Piltdown hoax. He did this by showing that a hymn skull was actually a bit older than the jawbone that was in question. Once this was proven, other scientists along with Oakley took a closer look at the bones and found it was the jaw of an orangutan, not a hominin. "The staining on the bones was superficial." When looking at Piltdown man's teeth under the microscopic they appeared to have been filed down, still showing scratch marks. This all lead to one conclusion, "somebody had forged the Piltdown fossils."
         The question "Is it possible to remove the “human” factor from science to reduce the chance of errors like this happening again," stumped me at first. I can not think of a single way that would make removing the human factors from science even possible. Science is studying the world through human observation and experiment. The human factor is inevitable, and therefore emotions and biases will always be present in scientific work. This does not always have to be a negative influence though. You would never want the human factor to be completely removed from science, because personal opinions, can and have lead to important discoveries. Sometimes it is a good idea to trust your hunch, or intuition.
         Taking information at face value from unverified sources can be a risk and I believe should not be 100 percent trusted. One should do research and experiments of their own before just going off what another said. Without having doubts and asking questions, we would not get very far in finding new discoveries.

Comparative Primate (Fourth Post)

Comparative Primate  -  Dentition Patterns

Lemurs (Prosimians/Strepsirhini)

1. "Lemurs live in trees but some large species of them also spend time on the ground. They are only found on the Comoro Islands and Madagascar Islands. They live all over the place rather than in just one particular region. Some Lemurs live in the rain forests but others live in very hot and dry areas. Overgrown forests seem to be the location where the highest number of Lemurs are found."
2. "They have long, curved, rodent-like incisor teeth. The lemur dentition is heterodont (having multiple tooth morphologies). Lemurs are unusual among primates for their rapid dental development. The toothcomb in lemurs normally consists of six teeth (four incisors and two canines). Lemurs are also dentally precocious at birth, and have their full permanent dentition at weaning."
3. "In the toothcomb of most lemurs, the bottom incisors and canine teeth are procumbent (face forward rather than up) and finely spaced, thus providing a tool for either grooming or feeding. While fork-marked lemurs use their relatively long toothcomb to cut through tree bark to induce the flow of tree sap. Indri, the largest living lemurs, have teeth that are perfectly adapted for shearing leaves and crushing seeds. "

Spider Monkey (New World Monkey/Platyrrhini) 

1. Spider monkeys live in the tropical rain forests of Central and South America and occur as far north as Mexico. These monkeys spend most of their time aloft. These New World primates gather in groups of up to two- or three-dozen animals. At night, these groups split up into smaller sleeping parties of a half dozen or fewer. Foraging also occurs in smaller groups, and is usually most intense early in the day. Spider monkeys find food in the treetops and feast on nuts, fruits, leaves, bird eggs, and spiders.
2. Spider monkeys have large incisors and small molars with low rounded cusps.
3. The larger incisors and small molars of the spider monkey reflect the largely frugivorous, mainly fruits, diet.

Baboon (Old World Monkey/Cercopithecidae) 

1. All five different species of baboons live in Africa or Arabia. Baboons generally prefer savanna and other semi-arid habitats, though a few live in tropical forests. They climb trees to sleep, eat, or look out for trouble. They spend much of their time on the ground. Baboons are opportunistic eaters. They eat fruits, grasses, seeds, bark, and roots, but also have a taste for meat. They eat birds, rodents, and even the young of larger mammals, such as antelopes and sheep.
2. They have heavy, powerful jaws with sharp canine teeth. Males can have canine teeth as long as 2 inches.
3. The long canine teeth you see on a male baboon are adaptations for male-male competition; males use these teeth to fight with other males and gain access to females. More commonly, males do not even have to use their teeth: they simply display them to other males in an open-mouthed threat or yawn, which serves as a signal to other males to stay away.

Gibbon (Lesser ape/Hylobatidae) 

1. These acrobatic mammals, endemic to the dense forests of southern Asia, ranging from northeastern India to southern China to Borneo, are perfectly adapted to life in the trees and rarely descend to the ground.
2. They have teeth that are downward in shape. Their teeth also are similar to the great apes, with molars that are bunodont and lack lophs. The upper molars usually have a cingulum, which is sometimes large. The canines are prominent but not sexually dimorphic. 
3. The molars are sharp which can help them for fighting off predators and for food. 

Chimpanzee (Great ape/Hominidae) 

1. Wild chimpanzees are only found in Africa, where they inhabit 22 African countries, from the west coast of the continent to as far east as Tanzania. Chimps live in tropical rainforests of what used to be the equatorial forest belt of Africa. Some chimps are able to move into quite arid areas, such as southwest Tanzania and Senegal, where they are found in secondary forests, open woodlands, bamboo forests, swamp forests, and even open savannah. Chimps seldom venture far away from forests, except when moving from one forest patch to another; They spend considerable time in trees, where they sleep, forage and socialize.
2. Apes (humans included) all have the same dentition pattern. They also have baby teeth, known as their “milk teeth,” that they loose when the adult teeth come in.
   One difference between our dentition is that though non-human apes have canines in the same place as humans, their canines are much larger than ours.
3. "What we know about diet probably doesn’t explain why they would have almost carnivore-sized canines. Since they eat mostly fruit, leaves, and other plant items as well as sometimes small mammal meat. Still, even that small amount of meat wouldn’t be the reason for why non-human apes have such large canines. What other purpose can teeth serve if not to chew up food? Threat. Certainly large canines are quite intimidating, and can serve as a warning to enemies to stay back, or else you could get bit and it’ll hurt!"

In conclusion, each of these primates have similar teeth structures with the large canine's being the outlining pattern. A fruit being a common meal, their teeth have developed to help with seeds and the skin of fruits. As said on the example Primate website, "All primates have essentially the same kinds of specialized mammalian teeth adapted to eating a wide variety of foods." Depending on the environment and the type of food that is available to them, certain teeth are put to better use then others.

Sources:

http://www.lemurworld.com/lemur-habitat/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemur#Dentition

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/spider-monkey/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-bellied_spider_monkey#Dentition

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/baboon/

http://www.imfene.org/misconceptions-about-baboons

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/gibbon/

http://www.monkeyworlds.com/gibbon/

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gibbon

http://www.janegoodall.ca/about-chimp-range-habitat.php

http://www.chimpsanctuarynw.org/blog/2013/07/chimpanzee-teeth/

http://primateevolution.tripod.com/id4.html

http://anthro.palomar.edu/primate/prim_4.htm

Analogy and Homology Traits (Third post)

Analogy and Homology Traits

1. Homologous traits
   a.The two different species that share the homologous trait are the common bird and the                          arctic fox who has similar bones in their legs as a bird does in its wings. 
   b. The bones look quite similar, but the fox has them in its legs, while birds have them in their wings. Therefore the fox uses them to run, and a bird uses them to fly. Both are of a similar exertion, regardless of their placement, because it is what pushes each of them forward. 

   c. The fox shares a common ancestor with all organisms, but is more closely related to vertebrates like reptiles, amphibians and birds.
   d.

2. Analogous traits

   a. The two different species that share the analogous trait are the domestic dog and the bear, who both have long snouts, or sometimes called, muzzles.

   b. Bears and dogs both have the same long muzzle that look remarkably similar. These help them chew and tear up meat when eating. The long snout gives them a better sense of smell, which is crucial for hunting prey. In addition, for example, in polar bears the long snout helps warm the inhaled air.

   c. Dogs and bears are both part of the Caniformia (Canoidea) suborder, which includes the "dog-like" carnivores (order Carnivora), like bears, dogs, etc. Caniforms first appeared as tree-climbing, superficially marten-like carnivores in the Eocene around 42 million years ago.
        Bears and dogs are different enough to be granted their own separate families though, but do share a common ancestor along way back.  There once was even an animal called a Bear Dog. 
   d.

Protein Synthesis Decoding (Second Post)

Protein  Synthesis  Decoding

AATGTACACATGCACCTTAGACGTGAGCCCCATCGGTA