Spanning The Globe June 2026
- marketingc8
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
It’s time to go spanning the globe for anatomy news and notes!
Who’s A Good Boy?
Come with us now to the end of the Paleolithic Period, specifically to about 14,000 years ago. As the New York Times recently reported, there was a “hot new trend” in the lifestyle of these hunter-gatherer societies.
Dogs.
The Times article, discussing two new papers published in the journal Nature, provided the “first definitive genetic evidence that dogs existed” in the Paleolithic period, long before humans developed agriculture.
The discovery was based on Paleolithic dogs found at five archaeological sites in Europe and Western Asia. And it suggests that dogs have been among us for about 5,000 years longer than previously understood
Examining the genetic similarities across the sites, the researchers found something surprising. No, not that Paleolithic dogs were allowed to sleep on the equivalent of Paleolithic couches.
Good guess!
It was that the dogs of that time were more closely related to each other than the hunter-gatherers who gave them a home.
Whoa.
Uh, we mean woof!
Climbing Out of the Water
Now let’s slip back much further in time to the Cambrian Period, about 500 million years ago. It’s a pivotal moment in Earth’s history and it would last about 54 million years. (Just a few!) The main headline of the day was the “Cambrian Explosion,” the rapid diversification of most major animal phyla.
Arthropods. Mollusks. Chordates. Trilobites.
But what was the genetic shift for moving out of the water? Biologist Jialin Wei, writing in a recent article on Phys.org, described a 2025 study that explored the genetic material of 150 living animals in search of the “genetic basis of adapting to life on land.”
“We found that most transitions to land were accompanied by a large gene turnover, with many gene gains and reductions happening at the same time,” she writes. “The ability of genomes to gain and lose genes played a key role in animal adaptation to new habitats.”
That discovery, Wei writes, “led us to ask what these genes do and wonder why some were retained while others disappeared. Using analytical techniques and powerful computer tools, we found that genes repeatedly gained across distantly related land-based lineages were involved in functions related to dehydration. They were also often related to stress response (such as temperature, UV radiation, contaminants found on land, and toxic compounds from plants).
The genes that were lost or diminished were often linked to regeneration, diet and biological clocks such as day and night cycles.”
Burrowing Bats
Okay, now let’s zoom up to much more recent history—to 15 million years ago (or so) and head to New Zealand, where the fossilized remains of a “giant burrowing bat” have been discovered by researchers from the University of New South Wales and other researchers from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
According to a news release from Finders University (Adelaide, Australia), these burrowing bats were three times the size of an average bat today. These “peculiar animals,” the news release stated, “do not fly but scurry about on all fours, over the forest floor, under leaf litter and along tree branches, while foraging for both animal and plant food.” In fact, this new bat’s diet was more expansive than most other bats.
It took the team more than a quarter-century to assemble enough specimens to be able to understand the characteristics of this particular bat and understand its diet.
Fun fact: There are over 1,500 known species of bats worldwide. They make up 20 percent of all classified mammal species. How many bats are there worldwide? Nobody knows for sure. But the Bracken Cave in Texas holds roughly 20 million individual Brazilian free-tailed bats.
Twenty million.
One bat from every citizen of the entire state of New York.
.
.
.
.
Comments