What Newspaper Science Columns have in Common with the Coelacanth
Auth promo for this column.
We at Planet-of-The-Apes may well be living fossils, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Planet-of-The-Apes is, first and foremost, a weekly newspaper science column that appears every Monday morning here and in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We now compete with all manner of blogs and tweets and the like, but whether newspaper columns are near extinction remains to be seen.
The theme of Planet-of-the-Apes is evolution. Every week it appears with a drawing by Inquirer artist Tony Auth. Tony created the video below, which shows another living fossil, a fish called the coelacanth. This fish looks virtually unchanged from the fossils its ancestors left behind during the age of the dinosaurs.
And while it may not show it, there's no question the coelacanth has evolved over time. And so have we newspaper columnists. This site contains not only columns but related blog items that provide additional materials, reader reactions, interviews that came in late, updates, corrections, and interesting evolution news not covered in the column. We're also open to suggestions from you.
Why evolution? Because it's not just a field but an idea that threads through multiple areas of science and culture.