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Hivestorm1 year ago in Pleiotropy
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Catalogue of Organisms
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Variety of Life
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Does mathematics carry human biases?3 years ago in PLEKTIX
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Daily routine3 years ago in Angry by Choice
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A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China4 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM5 years ago in Field Notes
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Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV7 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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WE MOVED!7 years ago in Games with Words
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!8 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez8 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens9 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl11 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House12 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs12 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby12 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
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in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
When did life get big?
Macroscopic fossils, fossils big enough to be seen with the naked eye, appear in the late precambrian, and they come in a surprising variety, but if the Phactor remembers correctly, and with a check in the literature indicates he does, actually the oldest macroscopic fossil is a seaweed similar to red algae that dates to 2.1 billion years ago, not some 600 million years ago. Now this was not actually very spectacular at only about 2 cm tall, and since red algae are basically filamentous, it makes sense that they were among the first large organisms. Even at such a size, such a tiny seaweed would tower over a microbial mat community like a redwood towers over a moss. So actually life got bigger a lot eariler than many people suggest. This was the second of two big episodes of size increase in the history of life, the first being when eukaryotic organisms appeared allowing cells to be considerably larger than prokaryotic cells. Multicellularity allowed organisms to be even larger resulting ultimately in blue whales and redwoods.
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