History of Ichnology: The Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Fugitive Poets

William Buckland not only was an eccentric scientist liked by virtually all his peers, but in the early 1800s he was also one of the foremost authorities on geology. Buckland's vivid sense of humor and the fact that he enjoyed working on rather strange subjects, such as coprolites, rain drop impressions, cave paleontology, and fossil footsteps, provoked a great deal of light-hearted jesting from both his friends and his students. A collection of humorous poems and caricatures were produced to pay homage to the “Geologic Wizard.” Among these fugitive poets and artists were Buckland's good friends Phillip Duncan, Philip Shuttleworth, Henry De la Beche, Richard Whately, William Conybeare, and Thomas Sopwith. Buckland was still the subject of humorous verse well into the 1950s by the contemporary South African poet William Plomer.     

The Fossil Record of the Solanaceae Revisited and Revised—The Fossil Record of Rhamnaceae Enhanced

Solanaceae is a large cosmopolitan family of angiosperms that includes some 92–100 genera and 2300–2500 species. It has been the object of a great deal of attention because of its economic importance as a food source (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers), because it includes tobacco, and is source of drugs (alkaloids). However its fossil history has been elusive with relatively few seemingly reliable reports throughout Tertiary times and no solid bases for molecular dating models to pinpoint important events in its diversification and evolution. While the great diversity found within the family makes it difficult to find morphological characters that define it, in general, the flowers have an overall distinctive morphology with some diagnostic morphological characters. Thus, as is often the case, flowers are potentially the most reliable indicators of the family in the fossil record. There have been a number of reports of flowers representing Solanaceae in the Tertiary. Yet, we report here that upon reinvestigation only one taxon remains as a plausible representative of the family while one of the most notable and frequently cited fossil Solanaceae from the Tertiary of North America is clearly a member of the family Rhamnaceae consistent with the fossil leaf record.     

A Sanctuary for Science: The Hastings Natural History Reservation and the Origins of the University of California’s Natural Reserve System

In 1937 Joseph Grinnell founded the University of California's (U.C.) first biological field station, the Hastings Natural History Reservation. Hastings became a center for field biology on the West Coast, and by 1960 it was serving as a model for the creation of additional U.C. reserves. Today, the U.C. Natural Reserve System (NRS) is the largest and most diverse network of university-based biological field stations in the world, with 36 sites covering more than 135,000 acres. This essay examines the founding of the Hastings Reservation, and asks how it managed to grow and develop, in the 1940s and 1950s, during a time of declining support for natural history research. It shows how faculty and staff courted the support of key institutional allies, presented themselves as the guardians of a venerable tradition in nature study, and emphasized the station's capacity to document ecological change and inform environmental policy and management. In the years since, Hastings and other U.C. reserves have played crucial roles in California environmental politics. Biological field stations in the post-war era deserve more attention not only from historians of biology, but also from environmental historians and other scholars interested in the role of science in society.     

The 1989 James A. F. Stevenson memorial lecture. The knee jerk: still an enigma?

This is a wide-ranging review of muscle proprioceptors, intended primarily for the nonspecialist. It emphasizes how much more they are concerned with, than just the production of the knee jerk; it concentrates on principle rather than documenting detail and cites selectively. The main topics covered are the effect of deafferentation, position sense, the proprioceptors themselves, the control of the muscle spindle by the CNS, and spinal and long-latency "stretch" reflexes. The emphasis is on human work. The knee jerk itself is seen as a "physiological artefact," resulting from a mode of stimulation that does not occur in life, with the normal function of its underlying circuitry still under debate.     

The Road from Haeckel: The Jena Tradition in Evolutionary Morphology and the Origins of “Evo-Devo”

With Carl Gegenbaur and Ernst Haeckel, inspiredby Darwin and the cell theory, comparativeanatomy and embryology became established andflourished in Jena. This tradition wascontinued and developed further with new ideasand methods devised by some of Haeckelsstudents. This first period of innovative workin evolutionary morphology was followed byperiods of crisis and even a disintegration ofthe discipline in the early twentieth century.This stagnation was caused by a lack ofinterest among morphologists in Mendeliangenetics, and uncertainty about the mechanismsof evolution. Idealistic morphology was stillinfluental in Germany, which prevented a fullappreciation of the importance of Darwinstheory of natural selection for comparativemorphology. Evolutionary morphology andembryology failed to contribute significantlyto the modern synthesis of evolutionarybiology, thereby probably delaying theintegration of developmental biology intomodern evolutionary biology. However, Haeckelsstudent Oscar Hertwig, as well as Victor Franzand Alexej N. Sewertzoff from a youngergeneration, all tried to forge their ownsynthetic approaches in which (inspired byHaeckels work) embryology played an importantrole. Important for all three researchers wereattempts to refine, and sometimes redefine, thebiogenetic law, and to find new scientificexplanations for it (and for the manyexceptions to it). Their research was latermore or less forgotten, and had littleinfluence on the architects of the modernsynthesis. As the relationship betweenevolutionary and developmental biology is nowagain rising in importance in the form ofEvo-Devo, we would like to draw attention tohow this earlier research tradition grappledwith similar questions to those now on theagenda, albeit from sometimes quite differentperspectives.     

The Sulfolobus-“Caldariella” group: Taxonomy on the basis of the structure of DNA-dependent RNA polymerases

The similarity of the morphology and of DNA composition, the homology of the component patterns of DNA-dependent RNA polymerases and their immunochemical crossreactivity support the conclusion that several extreme thermoacidophiles are related to each other. We name two new species of the genus Sulfolobus. The first, Sulfolobus solfataricus (DSM 1616 and DSM 1617) has the same GC content in its DNA and the same general properties as S. acidocaldarius, but differs significantly from the latter species in the molecular weights of the 11 components of its RNA polymerase and in the salt requirements of this enzyme. The second, Sulfolobus brierleyi, DSM 1651, differs from S. acidocaldarius in several respects. The cells show much less stability at neutral pH. The GC content is significantly lower. The RNA polymerase lacks two components present in the enzymes from the other species. The residual 9 components show larger size differences from the homologous subunits of the S. acidocaldarius enzyme.Like the enzyme from S. solfataricus, the polymerase from S. brierleyi yields an incomplete immunochemical crossreaction with an antibody against the RNA polymerase from S. acidocaldarius.The isolates DSM 1616 and DSM 1617 of Sulfolobus solfataricus are probably identical with or similar to the Caldariella strains MT 3 and MT 4, isolated by de Rosa et al. (1975).Like all other known archaebacterial RNA polymerases the enzymes from these species are insensitive to rifampicin and streptolydigin.Abbreviations G+C Guanine + Cytosine - HPLC High Performance Liquid Chromatography - S_AB Similarity coefficient between two different RNAs as defined by Fox et al. (1977) - SDS Sodium dodecylsulfate (Sodium laurylsulfate), SSC 0.15 M NaCl, 0.015 M Na Citrate pH 7.4     

The Reverend Henry Duncan (1774–1846) and the Discovery of the First Fossil Footprints

The Reverend Henry Duncan (1774–1846), clergyman, philosopher, writer, politician, archeologist, poet, educator, social reformer, and the founder of savings banks, was indeed a “Man for All Seasons.” In 1824, while Minister of the Church of Scotland at Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, he was presented with a slab of red sandstone from the Corncockle Muir quarry in Annandale, exhibiting a set of footprints. Although Duncan felt from the start that he was dealing with the tracks of an animal, he wrote to the Reverend William Buckland, Reader in Mineralogy and Geology at the University of Oxford, to solicit his opinion on the origin of these curious markings. Buckland was at first skeptical but, after receiving casts of the markings from Duncan, he became convinced that they did in fact represent footprints, urging Duncan to study and publish on what he considered to be a very important paleontological find. On January 7, 1828 Duncan described the Corncockle Muir footprints to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and quoted Buckland's findings. Duncan's paper was not published by the Society until 1831, but it aroused considerable interest and was reported in several newspapers. This represents the first scientific report of a fossil track.     

Cryptic Biodiversity and the Origins of Pest Status Revealed in the Macrogenome of Simulium colombaschense (Diptera: Simuliidae), History’s Most Destructive Black Fly

The European black fly Simulium (Simulium) colombaschense (Scopoli), once responsible for as many as 22,000 livestock deaths per year, is chromosomally mapped, permitting its evolutionary relationships and pest drivers to be inferred. The species is 12 fixed inversions removed from the standard sequence of the subgenus Simulium. Three of these fixed inversions, 38 autosomal polymorphisms, and a complex set of 12 X and 6 Y chromosomes in 29 zygotic combinations uniquely characterize S. colombaschense and reveal 5 cytoforms: ‘A’ in the Danube watershed, ‘B’ in Italy’s Adige River, ‘C’ in the Aliakmonas River of Greece, ‘D’ in the Aoös drainage in Greece, and ‘E’ in the Belá River of Slovakia. ‘C’ and ‘D’ are reproductively isolated from one another, and ‘B’ is considered a cytotype of ‘A,’ the probable name bearer of colombaschense. The species status of ‘E’ cannot be determined without additional collections. Three derived polytene sequences, based on outgroup comparisons, place S. colombaschense in a clade of species composed of the S. jenningsi, S. malyschevi, and S. reptans species groups. Only cytoforms ‘A’ and ‘B’ are pests. Within the Simuliidae, pest status is reached through one of two principal pathways, both of which promote the production of large populations of blood-seeking flies: (1) colonization of the world’s largest rivers (habitat specialization) or (2) colonization of multiple habitat types (habitat generalization). Evolutionary acquisition of the ability to colonize large rivers by an ancestor of the S. jenningsi-malyschevi-reptans clade set the scene for the pest status of S. colombaschense and other big-river members of the clade. In an ironic twist, the macrogenome of S. colombaschense reveals that the name associated with history’s worst simuliid pest represents a complex of species, two or more of which are nonpests potentially vulnerable to loss of their limited habitat.