The Friends of Charles Darwin

Alexis Rockman paints like Rembrandt and thinks like Darwin. He doesn't just make art - he remakes natural history. Rockman may be the only artist to call Charles Darwin a mentor and the late Stephen Jay Gould a fan. He's referred to himself as a paleogeek and favors two styles of painting: vast, lush, prehistoric landscapes that reinterpret our ecological past; and fantastic still lifes that recast our evolutionary future.

The chances that asteroid impacts and huge bouts of volcanism coincide randomly to cause mass extinctions may be greater than previously imagined.

A tiny fossil - the most primitive forelimb bone yet recovered - has revealed important insights into how animals colonised the land. The find was unearthed by a road in Pennsylvania, US, and brings to light a previously unknown stage in the evolution of walking. The bone shows that early amphibians evolved sturdy front legs to push their heads up out of the water to look around and breathe air.

…Who knows why [President George W Bush has] taken to beating up on scientists of every description, not just on global warming but on points that have been long settled. On evolution, for instance, he believes "the jury is still out," as he said in the last presidential campaign. Charles Darwin is damn near pre-deluvian himself, at least in the Christeo-Bush Calendar, the one that believes time began six thousand years before the birth of Mel Gibson. Besides, he wasn't even a Democrat.

A comparison of the chimp and human genomes casts new light on why the two species are so different despite having very similar genetic code.

More than 300 critically endangered species have no conservation protection in any part of their ranges, experts say.

If humans behaved more like their chimp relatives they might be better at communicating, say experts.

The oldest known evidence of people keeping cats as pets may have been discovered by archaeologists. The discovery of a cat buried with what could be its owner in a Neolithic grave on Cyprus suggests domestication of cats had begun 9,500 years ago.

Hummingbirds have bendy lower beaks to help them catch insects, research reveals. The flexibility allows long-beaked birds to open their mouths wide enough to hunt on the wing.

Wolves with an extra toe on their hind legs are the products of cross-mating between wolves and dogs, scientists in Italy have confirmed. The finding could help efforts to monitor the recovery of threatened wild dogs and wolves around the world. These "dewclaws" are the underdeveloped first toes common in domestic dogs but thought absent from wolves.

In a controversial new theory [Reinhard Stindl, of the Institute of Medical Biology in Vienna] suggests that all eukaryotic species (everything except bacteria and algae) have an evolutionary "clock" that ticks through generations, counting down to an eventual extinction date. This clock might help to explain some of the more puzzling aspects of evolution, but it also overturns current thinking and even questions the orthodoxy of Darwin's natural selection.

An interview with Amy Stewart, author of The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms.

…At Puerto Williams, a Chilean naval base on the island of Navarino in the Beagle Channel, scientists from a number of countries and universities are studying biodiversity changes in some of the very lands that Charles Darwin trod 180 years ago in formulating his theory of natural selection. In the Omora Ethnobotanical Park, they have established a primitive outpost both to learn more about the delicate balance of life in this sub-Antarctic region as well as to teach visitors the importance of respecting natural forces.

Bedbugs are on the increase in many developed countries, including the UK, research has found. The tiny blood-sucking insects were thought to have been virtually eradicated two decades ago. But an expert writing for the Institute of Biology believes they may have developed resistance to pesticides.

Scientists have discovered a genetic basis underlying the evolution of fewer limbs in animals by studying threespine sticklebacks, the journal Nature says. Some sticklebacks have a spine in their pelvic fin to protect against predators but others lost it through evolution. The team compared genetic maps of both types of fish to find places in their DNA code that controlled this feature. The gene Pitx1 was found to map exactly to the part of the genome associated with most variation in the feature. Scientists say the genetic mechanism could be a "smoking gun" for the way rapid changes in body plan can appear over time in the evolution of new animal species. What is more, the mechanism appears to work without the harmful side effects sometimes seen with gene mutations.

Direct evidence has now been found to show that trilobites - among the most diverse of fossil animal groups - were eaten by other ancient sea creatures. Scientists discovered cracked trilobite body parts in the gut of a 510-million-year-old fossil marine animal.

…The antebellum era saw a series of scientific discoveries that appeared to undermine revealed religion. In a decade or two geologists upped the age of the Earth from the 6,000 years of the Biblical account to millions or even hundreds of millions of years. This tension between religion and science generated a huge interest in the mid-19th century in geology and paleontology. (Under this impetus, Hudson River school landscape painting became much more geologically precise.) These discoveries were ‘reconciled’ with revealed religion by ingenious scientific theories like the Catastrophism of Louis Agassiz, the best-known American natural scientist of the antebellum era.

It would seem young female chimpanzees take their studies a little more seriously than their male classmates, a study in the journal Nature has shown. Females learn from their mothers how to gather termites much faster than males - who prefer to spend more of their time playing… Girls and boys pick up fine motor skills such as writing at different rates, and the team suggests its research could therefore indicate that sex-based learning differences may have an ancient origin.

The oldest pieces of jewellery made by modern humans have emerged in Africa. Shell beads found in Blombos Cave on the southern tip of the continent are 75,000 years old, scientists say.

US scientists believe they have made an important breakthrough in the mystery of how migrating birds manage to navigate thousands of kilometres and arrive at exactly the same spot each year… Amazingly, this study does seem to confirm that birds can "reset" their navigation systems daily by comparing the direction of the sunset with the magnetic signals they detect.

…Bibliophile was more concerned - as spectator - with lot 206, the Darwinists' black tulip, a signed presentation copy of On the Origin of Species. Darwin would regularly send his publisher, John Murray, a list of people to get presentation copies, and these would be inscribed "with the author's compliments" (or "greetings" or "kind regards") by dutiful clerks. Specialists can identify Clerk 1, Clerk 2, Clerk 3; except for various Darwins and the occasional Wedgwood, however, nobody was known to have received a copy inscribed by Charles himself. But the author got six free copies on publication, and it is not astonishing that some of these would be surplus to his own - or the family's - requirements.

Daniel Dennett took on the grandees of philosophy while still a student at Harvard and Oxford, then turned to pioneering and controversial work on artificial intelligence. With Richard Dawkins he has fought the 'Darwin Wars' and, when not sailing or farming, sculpting or playing jazz, is writing a new book opposing the rise of supernaturalism.

With its carefully tended gardens, neat cottages and two pubs offering "full Sunday lunch", the commuter village of Downe would seem to have little in common with the grandeur of the Taj Mahal or the pyramids of Giza. But thanks to its 162-year association with Charles Darwin, the well-heeled village and a substantial chunk of affluent greenbelt in the south-east London borough of Bromley could soon be rubbing shoulders with breathtaking monuments under the shared status of a World Heritage Site. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport confirmed yesterday that it has selected Downe, where Darwin lived for more than 40 years, and the surrounding land where he conducted many of his studies, to be put forward for the Unesco award in 2007 - ahead of other shortlisted locations including the Lake District and Stratford-Upon-Avon. The proposed heritage site will be centred on Down House, a Georgian pile once described by Darwin himself as an "oldish and ugly building", where he wrote his revolutionary work on natural selection, The Origin of Species.

Professor John Maynard Smith, the internationally renowned evolutionary biologist, 84, died peacefully at home on April 19. Maynard Smith was remarkable for the breadth of his contributions to biology, including his radical application of game theory to understanding evolutionary strategies, and his clear definition of the major transitions in the history of life. Maynard Smith was always enthusiastic about new data sources and continued to be a driving force in the use of molecular data to answer biological questions.

Too many males may have been the reason the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, say Leeds University researchers. They believe that dinosaurs may have been like modern-day reptiles such as crocodiles whose sex depends upon the temperature before they were born. The new idea is that the asteroid that struck changed the world's climate causing it to be cooler, which led too many dinosaurs to be born male. The male-female imbalance would have led to their extinction, they say.

Geologists have discovered microscopic burrows where some of Earth's earliest life forms bored their way into volcanic glass 3.5 billion years ago.mThe tubes, from rocks in South Africa's Barberton Greenstone Belt, retain traces of organic carbon left behind by the microorganisms.

A widespread resurrection, orgies on a biblical scale, and births and deaths numbering in the billions will all soon be on display in the eastern US as a uniquely enormous population of insects known as 17-year cicadas bubble up from the ground. As their name suggests, these insects are famous for emerging from their subterranean nurseries on a predictable, but oddly-spaced schedule. Some species have a 13-year life cycle, others appear every 17-years. Different broods of the insects emerge almost every year in some part of the US. But 2004's crop of red-eyed, winged insects, ominously referred to as Brood X, is special, says Michael Schauff of the Agricultural Research Service's Systematic Entomology Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. "Brood X is the largest single emergence of the species," he says. "When they come out they are literally everywhere. It's impossible to ignore."

Satellite pictures taken last summer of Mount Ararat in Turkey may reveal the final resting place of Noah's ark, according to Daniel McGivern, the businessman and Christian activist behind a planned summer 2004 expedition to investigate the site.

Women tend to choose husbands who look like their fathers - even if they are adopted, reveals a new study. The research shows that women use their dads as a template for picking a mate by a process called "sexual imprinting", says Tamas Bereczkei at the University of Pécs in Hungary and colleagues.

The Neanderthals reached adulthood at the tender age of 15 according to a report in the journal Nature.

Human-like species migrating out of their African homeland had mastered the use of fire up to 790,000 years ago, the journal Science reports. The evidence, from northern Israel, suggests species such as Homo erectus may have been surprisingly sophisticated in their behaviour.