Recently in Biological Category

Adjunct Professor Pat Shipman's paper on a new hypothesis for human evolution based on the tendency of our species to nurture members of other species is receiving a lot of news coverage. Another article "Working with animals for our mutual survival" was written for WHHY News and Information. The article can be found online at: http://whyy.org/cms/news/health-science/2010/08/06/working-with-animals-for-our-mutual-survival/43206

Please see previous posts on July 21 and August 2 concerning Dr. Shipman's paper.

Postdoc scholar Colin Shaw recently had his paper "Putting flesh back onto the bone?" Can we predict soft tissue properties from skeletal and fossil remains? published in the August issue of the Journal of Human Evolution. The article can be accessed online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.06.002

Neus Martínez-Abadías' paper will be published in the next online issue of Developmental Dynamics and has been selected to illustrate the cover for the January 2011 issue. The paper titled "Beyond the closed suture in Apert syndrome mouse models: evidence of primary effects of FGFR2 signaling on facial shape at birth" has been carried out in the Department of Anthropology of PSU in collaboration with researchers from the University of Missouri-School of Medicine and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. This paper shows that in Apert syndrome mouse models, the facial skeleton is the most affected of all regions of the skull at P0, even when the coronal suture is not yet fused. Coronal suture patency shows a great deal of variation at P0 and is not associated with skull dysmorphology. Craniofacial dysmorphology in the two Apert syndrome models is very similar, differing only in shape changes of the posterior palate. These results demonstrate that coronal suture closure is neither the primary not the sole locus of skull dysmorphology in Apert syndrome, but that the face is also primarily affected.