Category: Featured

Eliseu wants to know more about past collecting in Bhutan:

I would be very interested to follow up the development of this case should someone have access to the mission reports and could shed some light on the main objectives, sampling strategies and findings of the collecting missions that took place in the country 30 years ago.

Our friend Xavier Scheldeman nails the passion flower problem:

While rather similar to Passiflora mollissima (now classified as Passiflora tripartita var. mollissima), the fruit in the picture actually is Passiflora tarminiana, a species that was only described in 2001 (by Geo Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, who was working in Bioversity’s office for the Americas at that time).

Read the whole comment here.

Jeremy explains Luigi’s overly telegraphic post on seed longevity:

Laconic, possibly to a fault. The point being that Olivia Judson’s normally impeccable science-writing has failed her this once, but comments there are closed, so Luigi is taking the opportunity to set her straight here. If she notices …

Mathilda corrects Luigi on cattle domestication:

“Mathilda goes on to hypothesize that cattle domestication may have started in the Sahara — before the growing of crops…”

Not really…

I point out that domesticated cattle only start appearing in Africa along with the Neolithic expansion from Asia and match the expansion of the Asian domesticates (other posts). The cattle at Nabta were probably captured and ‘kept’ from wild and not domesticated, like the Barbary sheep at Afada. Possibly to secure food for hard times or to make sure they had a cow to sacrifice on ritual days. There’s no evidence from the African languages or expansion patterns of morphologically domesticated cattle bones that cattle were ever domesticated in the Sahara until the concept had arrived from Asia.

Other relevant posts from Mathilda include this and this.

Luigi on Tropical fruit cocktail: