Thursday, August 31, 2006
Stanford's David Kingsley, a professor of developmental biology, has been putting manatee pelvic bones on a scale and weighing them. And, he's found that the left pelvic bone almost always outweighs the right.
Science Daily reports that the difference between the two-- the average left pelvic bone is 10 percent larger than its right-side partner--suggests that "mutations in the same gene may be responsible for the evolution of leglessness in animals as distantly related as 1,000-pound manatees in Florida and fish smaller than an index finger living in lakes and streams around the world."
Read more here.
