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A very nice review of our title: Alfred Russel Wallace: Explorer, Evolutionist and Public Intellectual - A thinker for our own times? by Professor Ted Benton has just been published in the latest edition of the Archives of Natural History 42.2 (Autumn 2015). click cover to go to the product page Some snippets of the review: "Combining expertise in sociology with detailed biological knowledge, Benton offers a stimulating intellectual history of Wallace, regarding him as a prototype of publicly- and politically-engaged science. In an era of discussions about science communication and the uncertain boundaries between professionals and public, Benton’s Wallace...

Scorpion fossils are possibly more diverse than you might expect. 128 fossil species are currently recognized, with some dating back as far as the Silurian period. They occur in various different rock types and also, more rarely, as inclusions in amber. Fossil scorpion from the Cretaceous Crato Formation, Brazil A new discovery, representing the first complete scorpions from the Permian period, has just been announced at a conference held in Germany. The fossils originate from a recently excavated locality in Chemnitz, Germany. It appears that explosive volcanism preserved the remarkable specimens in situ as part of the palaeosol and bedrock...

The following prelude to this blog post is taken from telesurtv.net "The publishing industry’s focus on profits amounts to a censoring of a diversity of viewpoints and experienceBooks are lives compressed, humanity summarised into screaming or striking stories. One would think the book world would be a safe haven from inequality, but instead the traditional publishing industry – the big corporate publishers - is perpetuating prejudice and limiting ideas by elevating certain authors, characters, and thoughts above all others, with significant social consequences.The big publishers are big businesses with monopolies over a product, as much as other industries. They are...

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the nineteenth century British naturalist, has many claims to fame. To mention just two, he is often referred to as the the “father of biogeography” and came up with the idea of evolution through natural selection independently and concurrently with Charles Darwin (he co-authored the paper with Darwin in 1858). Alfred Russel Wallace ca. 1895 Unfortunately, his great accomplishments are often overshadowed compared to Charles Darwin, though this has been rectified to some degree through numerous recent events and books to mark the centenary of his death in 2013. Sculpture of Alfred Russel Wallace in the...

Wing venation patterns in insects provide useful characters with which to classify living and fossil insects. Recently, quantification of its shape using landmarks (morphometric analysis) has increased the potential of wing venation to distinguish individual taxa such as species. However, the use of wing landmarks in elucidating how the species are related to one another (phylogenetic analyses) remains largely unexplored. In research just published in the journal Cladistics, Adrien Perrard and colleagues tested landmark analysis under parsimony (LAUP) to include wing shape data in a phylogenetic analysis of hornets and yellow jacket wasps. Using 68 morphological characters, nine genes and wing...