Strange Worms Are Taking Their Place on Your Family Tree - Issue 34 : Adaptation
▻http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/strange-worms-are-taking-their-place-on-your-family-tree
Just before the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima, the land below appears smooth as glass. The bomb falls on a grid of streets aligned between lazy rivers. In footage from 1945, the city’s exceptional stillness seems to give the explosion oxygen. The calm before the storm is a standard trope for movie directors. Composers too. Without a prior silence, there is no “KaBoom!” Although they’d never admit it, scientists fall into the same storytelling trap. There’s no better way to emphasize a phenomenon than to clear the space around it. Science is rife with dramatic entrances: the Big Bang, the origin of life, the origin of animals. Biology students learn that animal lineages blossomed in the Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago. Shrimp-like monsters named anomolocaris swooped through (...)