by Piter Kehoma Boll

Skull of Jianchangosaurus yixianensis, a new therizinosaur from China with an unusual dentition. Photo extracted from Pu et al. 2013. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063423.g003
News
- Study links insecticide use to invertebrate die-offs. Well, it was kind of expected, don’t you think?
- Brazil’s treatment of its indigneous people violates their rights. It’s really a shame what Brazil’s government do to native peoples.
- Thousands of ancient trees at risk, Woodland Trust warns. It’s an epidemy.
- IUCN Criteria for ‘Red List’ of Endangered Ecosystems Detailed. Good news for conservation!
- Now We Know What Early Earth Smelled Like. Take a look to find out!
- Plant Knowledge: They Can Smell, Sense Color, Spy a Fly. A Nice analysis about the plants’ ability to feel the world around them.
- Pre-historic tortoises lived in Amazon. Ignore the genus written without initial capital letter and no italic…
Blog
- Top Cats: How Pumas and Other Apex Predator’s Populations Affect The Big Biodiversity Picture. A view about how top predators shape ecosystems.
- Balancing nutrient diets determines how ecosystems age. Biotic and abiotic factors go together.
- Insect-Eye Digital Camera Sees What You Just Did. Low resultion, but highly sensitive to movement.
- Who-oplocephalus: Is Euoplocephalus ‘real’? Oh, fossil taxonomy is always a mess!
- Nature is Not Ambidextrous. The mystery and consequences behind the left-handed chemistry in life.
- Birds arrange eggs in their nests to better detect imposters. “Hmm… someone moved my stuff.”
- Mosses Make Two Different Plants from the Same Genome, and a Single Gene Can Make the Difference. Plants n and 2n individuals can be a matter of one single gene, cool, huh?
- Why Penguins Cannot Fly. Do you have any clue?
- Giardia sucks! An anatomy of a sucker. Since I was once infected by this little fellow, it interests me a lot!
- How Safe is Recreational Marijuana? Will it ever be a final word on it?
- Can Humans Survive Mass Extinction? A subject that always fascinated me.
Books
- What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. A nice book about plant senses in a real scientific analysis. Worth reading!
Scientific Articles
- Platyhelminthes or just Platyhelminth-like? Phylogenetic relationships of the main turbellarian groups. In Portuguese, but it’s worth reading!
- Origin of an Assemblage Massively Dominated by Carnivorans from the Miocene of Spain. Quite an uncommon situation.
- Colour Constancy Across the Life Span: Evidence for Compensatory Mechanisms. It’s more in your brain than in your eyes.
- How do foragers decide when to leave a patch? A test of alternative models under natural and experimental conditions. “That’s enough, let’s move!”
- Risk avoidance in sympatric large carnivores: reactive or predictive? A cool study about the way cheetahs avoid lions and spotted hyaenas.
- Scientific Foundations for an IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. The paper!
- Euoplocephalus tutus and the Diversity of Ankylosaurid Dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous of Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA. Are we going to bring back old, abandoned genera?
- Sweet Puppies and Cute Babies: Perceptual Adaptation to Babyfacedness Transfers across Species. Too cute puppies make babies less cute to you?
- Shake a Tail Feather: The Evolution of the Theropod Tail into a Stiff Aerodynamic Surface. A nice study about how the tail evolved from primitive theropods to extant birds.
- Two New Cave-Dwelling Species of the Short-Tailed Whipscorpion Genus Rowlandius (Arachnida: Schizomida: Hubbardiidae) from Northeastern Brazil, with Comments on Male Dimorphism. I always love descriptions of new species!
- An Unusual Basal Therizinosaur Dinosaur with an Ornithischian Dental Arrangement from Northeastern China. Jianchangosaurus yixianensis, our new Segnosaurus?
- Molecular phylogeny of Geoplaninae (Platyhelminthes) challenges current classification: proposal of taxonomic actions. When you see it…