Evolutionary developmental biology

messed up, but also frickin' awesome.

Now, in addition to getting me in touch with my inner mentally unstable child scientist, this kind of experiment is where EvoDevo has begun to really revolutionize our understanding of evolution.

Because we've known that evolution can take place over a really long time, but we haven't really been able to figure out how it sometimes happens really fast.

Traditionally, one of the main ways that scientists have explained evolution is through genetic mutations, but an organism would have to do a lot of mutating to evolve from, say, a dinosaur into a bird.

But there was one problem.

It would have taken way longer for all of those mutations to occur than it actually took for dinosaurs to evolve into birds based on the fossil record.

Fortunately, EvoDevo is offering us an explanation.

A single mutation in the regulatory genes could have shut off the enamel and dentin production, and another mutation in another regulatory gene could have upped the keratin production from the level of make some scales to the level of make a beak.