Those plucky penguins--already passé. Whales and polar bears--just fads. But dinosaurs have kept their scaly grip our imaginations. The new DinoBase from the University of Bristol in the U.K. offers plenty of information for everyone from dino dabblers to devotees who want to check whether there's such an animal as "Elvisaurus." (There isn't.) A database holds vital statistics--such as length, weight, and time span--for several hundred dinosaur species, including Stygimoloch spinifer (above), a 3-meter-long herbivore from what is now Montana. Its elaborate headgear might have served as a weapon or as a lure for mates. Visitors can tour a gallery of dino art or dig into the site's forum for announcements of fresh finds and the latest on current debates, such as whether commercial fossil hunters hurt or help paleontology.

Volume 316, Number 5828, Issue of 25 May 2007

After spending years collecting specimens in exotic locales, a young British naturalist dreams up an explanation for how one species transforms into another. The description fits Charles Darwin, but it also matches Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the co-discoverer of natural selection and one of the 19th century's leading biologists. Wallace was also one of the founders of biogeography, the study of organisms' distribution.

A new online exhibit from the Natural History Museum in London documents Wallace's work and life with annotated selections from his writings and other memorabilia, such as a plate of a ring-tailed lemur from a 1900 collection of his articles. You can browse some of his travel dispatches, including the letter in which he describes the destruction of all his South American specimens in a shipboard fire. Other offerings indicate that Wallace didn't resent being overshadowed by the older scientist. For example, Wallace wrote a friend that he was "thankful that it has not been left to me to give the theory to the public."

Volume 315, Number 5811, Issue of 26 January 2007

Devotees of DNA bar-coding, a method of differentiating species using short, standard DNA sequences, hope to speed the description of new kinds of organisms and make it easier for nontaxonomists to identify tricky specimens such as the tachinid fly (Adejeania vexatrix). Keeping track of the latest developments in the field is Mark Stoeckle, a physician who teaches in the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University in New York City. Last March, Stoeckle launched the Barcode of Life Blog, which provides weekly news updates, analyses of papers, and other information. Recent posts, for example, discuss the technique's success in distinguishing hard-to-separate species of red algae and why the mitochondrial DNA sequences often used as bar codes differ more between species than within them.

Volume 315, Number 5810, Issue of 19 January 2007

What can you do if your local school board proposes a curriculum that downplays evolution? Or if your hometown newspaper runs an editorial supporting "intelligent design"?

This new site from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland, offers advice and resources for scientists who want to defend Darwinism. Downloadable documents provide pointers on meeting with public officials, testifying at school board hearings, and related topics. Much of the advice is common sense, but some of it may be counterintuitive for scientists. For example, although you want your papers to run in prestigious journals, an op-ed will probably have more impact if it appears in the local paper than if it's accepted by The Wall Street Journal. The site also furnishes PowerPoint files on topics such as the importance of learning about evolution.

Volume 315, Number 5808, Issue of 05 January 2007

The Atapuerca hills in northern Spain have been alive with the sound of picks and shovels, as archaeologists disinter the oldest hominid fossils in Europe and other important remains. Read about the history of the excavations at this site from the University of Burgos in Spain and the Atapuerca Foundation. The pages profile locales such as the Gran Dolina cavern, which has yielded 800,000-year-old skull fragments and other bones that may belong to a new human species, Homo antecessorr. For the latest dig news, check out the report on this year's finds, which include the first nearly complete human skull unearthed in the area in more than a decade. The site also features a timeline that lets you cruise through 6 million years of human evolution, pausing at milestones such as the invention of tools some 2.5 million years ago and the settlement of Europe about 1 million years ago.

Volume 314, Number 5807, Issue of 22 December 2006

One of the new species Charles Darwin discovered during his round-the-world voyage in the 1830s was the South American flightless bird Rhea darwinii. But the father of natural selection and his companions had eaten most of the first specimen before he realized its significance. Darwin tells that story in the first edition of his Journal of Researches, which makes its Web debut at this new archive hosted by Cambridge University in the U.K.
Curated by science historian John van Wyhe, the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online holds all of the great evolutionist's publications, myriad manuscripts, and more than 150 works about him. The archive also presents the previously unpublished field notebooks from the Beagle voyage, including one volume missing since the 1980s. And it is the first Web site to post all six editions of the Origin of Species, allowing readers to trace the evolution of Darwin's thinking.

Science 3 November 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5800, p. 733

As an essayist, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) elegantly elucidated the intricacies of evolutionary theory while citing everyone from Darwin to Joe DiMaggio. As a scientist, he was one of the originators of the punctuated equilibria hypothesis, which states that evolution runs in fits and starts, not smoothly. To sample Gould's oeuvre and bone up on evolutionary thinking, click over to the Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive, hosted by undergraduate Miguel Chavez of Yuba College in California. The site's library brims with writings by Gould and others that tackle some of his favorite subjects, including the levels at which natural selection acts, creationism, and the controversy over intelligence testing and heredity. The multimedia section houses audio interviews with Gould and numerous other evolutionary bigwigs. You'll also find reviews of Gould's works and links to full-text versions of some of his books.

Science 27 October 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5799, p. 571