Blair Hedges

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Wormholes from centuries-old art prints reveal history

11/20/12

By examining art printed from woodblocks spanning five centuries, Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has identified the species responsible for making the ever-present wormholes in European printed art since the Renaissance. The hole-makers, two species of wood-boring beetles, are widely distributed today, but the "wormhole record," as Hedges calls it, reveals a different pattern in the past, where the two species met along a zone across central Europe like a battle line of two armies. The research, which is the first of its kind to use printed art as a "trace fossil" to precisely date species and to identify their locations, will be published in the journal Biology Letters on 21 November 2012.

Anguilla Bank skink on rock

Here and Gone

7/10/12

It sounds like a case of hello and goodbye. A team of biologists led by Penn State's Blair Hedges recently announced the discovery of 24 new species of the lizards known as skinks, all from islands in the Caribbean. At the same time, they reported that all of these new species are either extinct or on the verge of extinction, likely the victims of the wily mongoose.

Hedges awarded the Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement

3/17/11

Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the 2011 Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Life and Health Sciences. Established in 1980, the award recognizes scholarly or creative excellence represented by a single contribution or a series of contributions around a coherent theme. A committee of faculty peers reviews nominations and selects candidates.

More information online at http://www.science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2011-news/Hedges3-2011

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Rescue missions under way to save Haiti's species from mass extinction

11/16/10

Haiti is on the brink of an era of mass extinctions similar to the time when dinosaurs and many other species suddenly disappeared from the Earth, reports a biologist at Penn State, who announced on Nov. 16 the establishment of a species-rescue program for Haiti's threatened frogs and other species, including captive-breeding and gene-preservation efforts.

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Grasping the Tree of Life: there's an app for that, too

9/19/10

The scientists who put an innovative "tree of life" online last year now have made that same resource available -- for free -- for iPhone users. The new "TimeTree" application lets anyone with an Apple iPhone harness a vast Internet storehouse of data about the diversity of life, from bacteria to humans. The intuitive interface is designed to answer a simple question, quickly and authoritatively: how long ago did species A and species B share a common ancestor?

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Ancient snakes living in Madagascar

3/30/10

Blind snakes have been discovered to be one of the few species now living in Madagascar that existed there when it broke away from India about 100 million years ago, according to a study that was published in the March 31 issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. "Blindsnakes are not very pretty, are rarely noticed, and are often mistaken for earthworms, nonetheless, they tell a very interesting evolutionary story" said Blair Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State and a leader of the research team that made the discovery. Photos and more information are online at http://www.science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2010-news/Hedges3-2010.

three books and title “off the shelf”

Off the Shelf: Book reviews from the editors of Research/Penn State

2/23/10

No Leaves Unturned

Manual of Leaf Architecture (Cornell University)

Whether one is a "backyard botanist" or a tropical ecologist, this manual—illustrated with over 300 photographs of prepared stained leaves and dozens of line drawings—comprehensively describes, compares and classifies the leaves of flowering plants, including leaf traits such as organization, shape, venation, and margins.

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New initiative traces the beginning of species' life on Earth

6/10/09

Scientists and nonscientists now have easy access to information about when living species and their ancestors originated, information that previously was difficult to find or inaccessible. Free access to the information is part of the new Timetree of Life initiative developed by Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, and Sudhir Kumar, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University. The Timetree of Life project debuted this week with the simultaneous release of a major online resource called "TimeTreeWeb" (www.timetree.org), and a book titled "The Timetree of Life" (Oxford University Press), which is written by a consortium of 105 experts on specific groups of organisms and is edited by Hedges and Kumar.

Probing Question: What is a molecular clock?

11/17/08

It doesn't tick, it doesn't have hands, and it doesn't tell you what time of day it is. But a molecular clock does tell time—on an epoch scale. The molecular clock, explains Blair Hedges, is a tool used to calculate the timing of evolutionary events.

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World's smallest snake found in Barbados

8/3/08

The world's smallest species of snake, with adults averaging just under 4 inches in length, has been identified on the Caribbean island of Barbados. The species -- which is as thin as a spaghetti noodle and small enough to rest comfortably on a U.S. quarter -- was discovered by Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State. Hedges and his colleagues also are the discoverers of the world's smallest frog and lizard species, which too were found on Caribbean islands. The most recent discovery will be published on Aug. 4 in the journal Zootaxa.

Probing Question: When did the snake lose its legs?

11/7/05

It has long been known that snakes are descendants of lizards, but whether snakes lost their legs while living in the sea or on land has been a matter of great debate among evolutionary biologists. Only one group of marine lizards, the mosasaurs, lived during the Cretaceous period when snakes first appear in the fossil record. These extinct relatives of the Komodo dragon have a skeleton that is much like a snake's (albeit 30 feet long), provoking some researchers to speculate that the snake family descended from mosasaurs.

Legless on Land

5/1/04

It has long been known that snakes are descendants of lizards, but whether snakes lost their legs while living in the sea or on land has been a matter of great debate among evolutionary biologists. Only one group of marine lizards, the mosasaurs, lived during the Cretaceous period when snakes first appear in the fossil record. These extinct relatives of the Komodo dragon have a skeleton that is much like a snake's (albeit 30 feet long), provoking some researchers to speculate that the snake family descended from mosasaurs.

Astrobiology: The Search for Life in the Universe

1/1/01

Once it was asked in whispers, or with winks. The timid among us, though undeniably curious, feared raised eyebrows. Jokes about little green men. Who could take such a question seriously, yank it from the misty realms of science fiction and drop it under the searchlight of science? Well, our national space agency, for one. What's more, NASA seems pretty confident these days about the answer: Astrobiology, as defined on an official agency Web site, is "the study of the living universe."

What's a Hoatzin?

6/1/96

(Say it like "Watson.")

There's no other bird like a hoatzin. "It is the only bird that has a foregut for fermentation, like a cow's," explains Penn State biologist Blair Hedges. "It has bacteria like a cow's to help it digest cellulose and it has an enzyme like a cow's to extract nutrients from the bacteria."

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