Posted by andrewgillis on June 23rd, 2020
One night, during the summer of 2012, I found myself sitting in a cottage in Woods Hole, trying to explain to my parents why I’d spent much of my professional life studying the little skate (Figure 1). I was a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University at the time, and working almost exclusively with skate as[…]
Posted by andrewgillis on April 19th, 2016
The origin of paired fins is a major unresolved issue in vertebrate evolutionary biology, and has been a topic of debate among palaeontologists, comparative anatomists and developmental biologists for over a century. Central to any question of “evolutionary origins” is the concept of homology: the sharing of features due to common ancestry. Homology may explain[…]
Posted by Kate Criswell on October 7th, 2015
Greetings! My name is Kate (but you can call me skate) Criswell and I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. I study axial column evolution and development in fishes, and my developmental study organism is the little skate, Leucoraja erinacea. Little skates are little known[…]
Posted by the Node on March 2nd, 2015
And the winner of the latest round of images from the Woods Hole embryology course is… the skate embryo! Here are the full results: – SEM of butterfly scale: 93 votes – Drosophila embryos: 37 votes – Skate embryo: 241 votes – Swallowtail wing: 79 votes Many congratulations to Mary Colasanto (University of[…]
Posted by the Node on February 10th, 2015
Time for the slightly delayed third round of images from the 2013 Woods Hole embryology course! Below you will find 4 beautiful images from the course. Choose the one you would like to see in the cover of Development by voting on the poll at the end of the post (you can see bigger versions by clicking[…]