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In this roundup, Katie Burke summarizes notable recent items about scientific research, selected from news reports compiled in the free electronic newsletter Sigma Xi SmartBrief. Online: https:// www.smartbrief.com/sigmaxi/index.jsp
Tiny Fossil Footprints
Amateur paleontologist Gloria Melanson was walking along the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in Nova Scotia, Canada - well known for the richness of Carboniferous Period terrestrial vertebrate fossils that are found there - when she noticed 30 tiny fossilized footprints in a slab of siltstone. They have been attributed to a juvenile amphibian of the species Batrachichnus salamandroides. The prints are 1 to 3 millimeters wide, making them the smallest tetrapod fossil footprints ever found. The entire body length of the animal that left the tracks was estimated to be 8 millimeters. (Image courtesy of Matt Stimson.)
Stimson, M., et al. The smallest known tetrapod footprints: Batrachichnus salamandroides from the Carboniferous of Joggins, Nova Scotia, Canada. Ichnos 19:127-140 (August 29)
What Genomes Do
Once the Human Genome Project was complete, researchers had identified the 3 billion nucleotides of the human genome, but their functions were still unknown. Although 20,000 genes that code for proteins were identified, those only accounted for roughly 1 percent of the genome. A research group called ENCODE was started in 2003 to reveal the functions of the rest of the...