Larry Moran recently gave the lab a nice nod on his Sandwalk blog. It seems fitting to have one of the first posts on this new blog be an act of reciprocity. So here, in photographic form, is a personal nod to Sandwalk from the Sandwalk.

I’ll probably post a more detailed discussion of the association between genome size, metabolic rate, and flight another day. In the meantime, you can check out the original paper by Chris Organ and colleagues in Nature and the very nice piece about it by Carl Zimmer in Science that prompted Larry’s post. There is also a discussion by Greg Laden which seems pretty reasonable overall.
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Further reading:

Gregory, T.R. 2002. A bird’s-eye view of the C-value enigma: genome size, cell size, and metabolic rate in the class Aves. Evolution 56: 121-130.

Organ, C.L., A.M. Shedlock, A. Meade, M. Pagel, and S.V. Edwards. 2007. Origin of avian genome size and structure in non-avian dinosaurs. Nature 446: 180-184.

Zimmer, C. 2007. Jurassic genome. Science 315: 1358-1359.