Category: Anatomy

Cryptic Female Choice

March 4, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

One of the reasons why large mammals are shrinking is because smaller beings need less and are more resilient. In the light of threatening climate change the small have a greater chance at survival, which from an evolutionary perspective, makes smallness an attractive feature. People…

Aligning the Loops

February 19, 2023 By arne hendriks Off

A study published in the journal Biology Letters finds that the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of being a specific height are unevenly distributed between the sexes. For women looking to pass on their genes it is better to be short as this is considered to…

Environmental Stress Hypothesis

November 10, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

The past 2.000.000 years have seen an increase in estimated body size among most Homo species from an average of 50 to 70 kg. Environmental challenges, such as arid conditions and low resource availability or habitat instability and resource fluctuation, faced by hominin species, are often overcome by…

Big Hand Hug

June 29, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

Acromegaly is a serious growth disorder that results in continuous growth of the body as a result of a benign tumor of the gland that produces growth hormone. Before medication made it possible to suppress this unnatural growth patients would simply grow to their untimely…

Micro Insects

April 20, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

There are clear advantages to becoming very small. Micro-organisms gain access to new niches, acquire new food sources and avoid predation. They shrink towards abundance. Yet there are limiting factors to how small an animal can become including the disruption of thermoregulation or respiration, water…

Lancelot’s Pony

January 22, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

The importance of the horse for social, cultural, and economic life in the Middle Ages made them a research focus for both historians and archaeologists. A recent paper in the International Journal of osteoarcheology presents a dataset of English horse bones from 171 unique archaeological…

Butterfly Goalie

January 18, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

When something grows, other things shrink in comparison. Sports are often an interesting discipline to investigate this simple principle and its effects. In ice hockey the relatively small size of the goal makes it effective for a goal tender to put as much of the…

MCR3

November 7, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

According to research at the University of Cambridge the protein melanocortin receptor 3 appears to have an important role in linking signals of caloric sufficiency to the control of lineair growth of the human body. The research provides a mechanistic basis for the global secular…

Short-Tongued Bombus

April 10, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

A study in Science shows that in a period of just 40 years two alpine bumblebee species (Bombus balteatus and Bombus sylvicola) rapidly evolved significantly shorter tongues. Short-tongued species are more generalist foragers, able to feed on many different types of flowers. They are replacing more specialised, long-tongued…

Court Dwarfs

December 6, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

If we are to overcome the irrational prejudice against smallness we must understand how its current perception is the cumulative result of past ways of seeing. Rather than being an abstraction such ‘traditions of perception’ can often be traced back to specific historical traditions and…

Guts for Brains

January 12, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

The human brain is generally regarded as the organ that makes us stand out from all other life. People have unusually large brains in relation to the size of the body: About 3x larger than the brain of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. And…

Fisherian Runaway

June 5, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Fisherian runaway is a mechanism proposed by the mathematical and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher, to account for the evolution of exaggerated male ornamentation by persistent, directional female choice. When females are attracted to a certain trait within males, this trait over time gets over-emphasised because males with the trait…

Shaq Sequence

May 4, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Shaquille O’Neal is an American retired professional basketball player. At 2.16 m tall and 147 kg, he was one of the heaviest players ever to play in the NBA. His size inspired the Shaq Sequence, an number of images used by The Incredible Shrinking Man to illustrate the ramifications…

Kleiber’s Law

September 10, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Large animals have slower metabolisms than small ones. A mouse must eat about 35% of its body mass every day not to starve whereas a human can survive on only 2%. The relationship follows a power law: basal metabolic rate (R) is proportional to the…

3rd Trimester Foetal Hunger

July 14, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

Perhaps pregnant women in their last trimester shouldn’t eat too much. In the winter of 1944/45 the Second World War resulted in a severe famine in the Netherlands. The Dutch survived on as little as 30% of their daily needed caloric intake. It is a…

Japanese Miniatures: Social Kogao Chins

April 21, 2015 By arne hendriks 0

A Japanese company for beauty products has developed masks to reduce the size of your face. The inside of the mask is laced with the metal germanium and generates heat on the skin surface to make you sweat out excess moisture. The existence of this…

The Turkish Seat

April 20, 2015 By arne hendriks 0

The Turkish Seat, also known as the Sella Turcica, forms a bony throne for one of the most important protagonists in our ambitious desire for a smaller human species: the pituitary gland. It is here within the deepest part of the cavity (called the hypophysial fossa) above…

Non hopping Kangaroo

November 24, 2014 By arne hendriks 1

When asked what defines a kangaroo, most people would probably say it’s the fact that they hop. Christine Janis of Brown University was studying a species of giant kangaroo, the Procoptodon goliah when it occurred to her that its weight of 240 kg, it’s bone…

The Baby Illusion

September 16, 2014 By arne hendriks 0

Dr. Jordy Kaufman, senior researcher at the The Swinburne BabyLab, asked himself why many parents, after the birth of a second child report that their first child appears to grow suddenly and substantially larger? Is it simply because of the contrast that stems from the comparison of the…

The Puppet in your Eye

October 18, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

You’ll find that in most, if not all, European languages the black spot in the middle of the eye is known as the pupil. Etymologically, pupil is derived from the Latin word pūpilla which means puppet, or small child. The meaning of the word pupil…