The Friends of Charles Darwin

Krill, a major component in the diets of many Antarctic species such as whales, penguins and seals, appears to be undergoing a major decline. Since the 1970s, numbers of the shrimp-like creatures have fallen by 80% in waters near the Antarctic Peninsula, UK scientists tell Nature magazine. The crustacean feeds on algae under the ice so the fall may be linked to recent warming that has reduced sea-ice cover. The change could have a big impact on the whole Southern Ocean food web.

Land vertebrates can breathe through their noses thanks to an anatomical rearrangement of fish-style nostrils. That same rearrangement may explain why cleft lips and cleft palates are common birth defects in humans.

Researchers in the laboratories of Detlev Arendt and Jochen Wittbrodt have discovered that the light-sensitive cells of our eyes, the rods and cones, are of unexpected evolutionary origin—they come from an ancient population of light-sensitive cells that were initially located in the brain.

Trumpeted as a new species of human being, the 'hobbit' folk of Indonesia are really just sick members of Homo sapiens, it has been alleged. The claim - by Teuku Jacob, professor of paleoanthropology at Indonesia's Gadjah Mada university - threatens to trigger an academic row over the discovery of an extinct race of little hominid people, Homo floresiensis, on the island of Flores. Jacob said the tiny floresiensis skull is really that of a relatively recently deceased human who suffered from microcephaly, a congenital condition in which a person is born with a very small brain…

But these claims were rejected by British paleontologist Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London. 'The paper by Brown and his team was refereed by two independent teams made up of world experts before it was published in Nature. It is very hard to believe they could have got it as wrong as is being claimed.'

Sir Paul M. Nurse, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, spoke to members of the Cornell community at the 13th Annual Ef Racker Lecture in Biology and Medicine… As part of the lecture series, Nurse gave a public talk entitled "The Great Ideas of Biology" on Thursday evening. Nurse began his lecture by reflecting that biology is a subject that "deals with details" and that the field of biology does not consist of "many great ideas and grand theories" when compared to physics or chemistry. Nevertheless, he proceeded to take the audience through a historical tour of what he felt were some of the great ideas of biology. Nurse talked about evolution by natural selection, an idea which he noted was the "best known to [the] public and also the most notorious. He called the theory of Natural Selection, proven by Charles Darwin in the 1800s, the "most beautiful idea of biology, and one that I think is the greatest."

More than 200 of Europe's bird species - including 70 in the UK - face an uncertain future, a study has warned. Northern lapwing, corn bunting and house sparrows are among the species at risk, Birdlife International said. It found 226 species - 43% of Europe's total - were threatened by intensive agriculture and changes in climate.

A suburban American school board found itself in court yesterday after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution was "a theory, not a fact". Atlanta's Cobb County school board, the second largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2,300 strong petition attacked the presentation of "Darwinism unchallenged". Some parents wanted creationism - the theory that God created humans according to the Bible version - to be taught alongside evolution. Shortly after the stickers were put on the books, six parents launched a legal challenge, with the support of the the American Civil Liberties Union. It started yesterday. "I'm a strong advocate for the separation of church and state," one of the parents, Jeffrey Selman, told the Associated Press. "I have no problem with anybody's religious beliefs. I just want an adequate educational system."

Humans may not be entirely to blame for wiping out moas—the giant flightless birds that once grazed in New Zealand. A new study by researchers in the US and New Zealand suggests that a huge moa population existed in the few thousand years before the arrival of humans. Skeletal remains and other clues had previously put the moa population in New Zealand at around 159,000 at the time humans arrived, one thousand years ago. But the latest research suggests that there were between 3 and 12 million moa. If both numbers are correct, that means something else decimated the bird population before humans finished it off some 500 years ago.

It has been called the eighth continent because of its unique wildlife which has evolved in isolation for 165 million years. But Madagascar's biodiversity - including 50 kinds of lemur - is under acute threat from slash-and-burn agriculture in what is one of the poorest countries on Earth. The island has already lost at least 80% of its original forest cover, with over half this loss in the last 100 years. Now, Madagascar has moved to protect its priceless wildlife (three-quarters of the estimated 200,000 plant and animal species are found nowhere else) and has identified the additional forests and wetlands that will more than treble the area of nature reserves from 1.7 million hectares to 6 million ha by 2008.

A change to a single gene allowed bats to grow wings and take to the air, a development that may explain why bats appeared so suddenly in the fossil record some 50 million years ago. Bats have been an evolutionary enigma. That’s because the oldest fossil bats look remarkably like modern ones, each having wings formed from membranes stretched between long fingers, and ear structures designed for echolocation. No fossils of an animal intermediate between bats and their non-flying mammal ancestors have been found.

We are born to run. According to new research, our bodies are highly evolved for running long distances, an ability that allowed our ancestors to conquer the African savannahs. Proponents of the theory say that long-distance running may be an even more significant evolutionary adaptation than bipedal walking, an ability which may have emerged with the appearance of the first hominids some 6 million years ago.

The number of threatened species on the planet is increasing at unprecedented rates across almost all major animal groups, according to the most comprehensive evaluation of the world’s biodiversity ever undertaken. A total of 15,568 species now face extinction, according to the 2004 Red List of Threatened Species published on Wednesday by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). This represents a rise of 3300 species compared to the 2003 list. One in three amphibians and almost half of all freshwater turtles are now threatened, as well as one in eight birds and a quarter of known mammals.

Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas. The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain.

[Whereas] Almost half of Americans believe God created humans 10,000 years ago.

New evidence shows tropical honeybees survived the post-impact winter 65 million years ago that is thought to have helped kill off the dinosaurs… Honeybees trapped in amber before the asteroid strike are nearly identical to their modern relatives, data shows.

The first systematic attempt to map the Earth’s last uncharted biosphere - the oceans - has so far logged almost a quarter of a million species, researchers reported on Monday. And there may be ten times more species yet to find. Scientists from the International Census of Marine Life - a 10-year research effort - say that at the current rate of discovery, it could take 1000 years before the last ocean-living species is revealed. The project is a global attempt to catalogue and map discoveries, while co-ordinating research to find new species.

The mystery of how a type of lizard "walks" on water may have been solved, a group of US scientists believe… Harvard University's Dr Tonia Hsieh told the BBC World Service that experiments showed the lizard to be producing massive sideways force to stay upright.

Homing pigeons use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate their way home over long distances, scientists writing in Nature magazine claim. The pigeons probably use tiny magnetic particles in their beaks to sense our planet's magnetic field, scientists say The birds use their ability to create a map of this field and then use it to navigate back to their home loft, New Zealand researchers claim. It casts serious doubt on a theory that the birds use smell to navigate.

Today's official opening of the Darwin Gate signifies the end of years of preparation, design and hard work by dozens of people across Shropshire. The landmark moment will see the seven metres-tall structure officially opened at Mardol Head in the town's West End more than five years after the idea for a new county town sculpture was first mooted.

New evidence casts doubt on the theory that sabre-toothed cats, mammoths and other big North American mammals were driven to extinction by human hunting. Genetic analysis of bison remains shows their populations started to crash around 37,000 years ago - long before humans arrived in the New World. Researchers claim that climate change and other factors are more likely culprits in the extinction.

Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that's made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding? The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin's paintings, and beneath it the letters "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M." It has long been rumoured that these letters - which have baffled some of the greatest minds over the past 250 years, including Charles Darwin's and Josiah Wedgwood's - provide clues to the whereabouts of Christ's elusive cup.

Wolf eradication in the US has had a far more devastating impact on the genetic diversity of remaining populations than previously thought, a new study reveals. Although wolves were systematically eradicated across North America over the last couple of centuries, it had been thought that the human impact on the Canadian wolf population - which is currently a relatively healthy 70,000 - was minor. Conservationists therefore assumed that the Canadian population had the same level of genetic diversity that had existed in the 19th century - prior to the mass slaughter - and that small-scale re-introductions of these wolves into the US would lead to diversity on a par with this earlier period. But these assumptions were wrong, according to researchers from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and the University of California Los Angeles, US, who looked at the genetic diversity of the original wolf populations using DNA analysis. They used bone samples taken from grey wolves dating from 1856 - held in the National Museum for Natural History in Washington DC - and compared this genetic diversity with that of modern wolves.

…In Friday's issue of Science, Michael Balter reports that a prominent Indonesian anthropologist, Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University, thinks Homo floresiensis was a microcephalic. He has taken possession of the fossils to study them, and this has a number of researchers worried. Jacob is known to guard fossils in his vault, and so he may essentially be making it impossible for other researchers to look at them. Balter quotes one of the authors of the original report on the fossils, Peter Brown of the University of New England in Australia, saying, "I doubt that the material will ever be studied again."

Otters are up, dormice are down, and rabbits are running rampant. These are just three of the findings on British mammal populations released by the Mammal Society.