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January/February 2018^ DISCOVER^91
FROM TOP: DENISE APPLEWHITE/PRINCETON OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS (2); HERVÉ SAUQUET AND JÜRG SCHÖNENBERGER
The First Bud
❯
NO FOSSIL? NO PROBLEM!
Without any preserved
evidence, researchers hunting
for the elusive ancestral flower —
the first flowering plant from which
all others evolved — had to get
creative. A team collected data on
nearly 13,500 floral characteristics,
the largest such data set ever
assembled, and ran it through
sophisticated statistical analysis to
model what the first flower looked
like more than 140 million years ago.
The result, published in August in
Nature Communications: a bisexual,
radially symmetric bloom.
GEMMA TARLACH
❯
THE EGGS WE SCRAMBLE AND FRY
typically span a humdrum range of
colors, sizes and shapes. But the avian
kingdom lays eggs of vast variation.
When it comes to shape, biologists have
long wondered why, say, murres have pointy
eggs, yet ostrich eggs are rounder. Aristotle
suggested males come from rounder eggs,
and others suggested elongated eggs
wouldn’t roll off cliffs.
In a June paper in Science, researchers
finally cracked the case. Princeton’s Mary
Caswell Stoddard and her team examined
some 50,000 eggs from 1,400 species
provided by the Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology at Berkeley. They found no nesting
habit links, but did see a pattern correlating
with flight ability.
Frequent fliers, like murres, have
streamlined bodies and more elliptical eggs,
while birds who like their feet on the ground
— say, ostriches — have rounder ones. So
overall it’s the bird that shapes the egg,
forever proving which comes first. ERIC BETZ
Birds’ Egg Shapes Eggs-plained
Mary Caswell Stoddard (left) and her team
studied thousands of bird eggs, finding a link
between egg shape and flight ability.