"Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits." - Charles Darwin

Supplementary videos

How snakes lost their legs: Sonic Hedgehog mutation
How whales lost their hind legs: comparative embryology (and Sonic Hedgehog)
Archaeopteryx the feathered dinosaur grows like a dinosaur, not a bird
Asian-American Land Bridge (Beringia) - for mammoths and humans
Triploid Watermelon: artificial selection with Colchicine
Triploid Oysters: cannot reproduce, but grow fast
Tragopogon: Understanding the evolution of polyploidy
Polyploidy everywhere 3:00-4:40 sugar cane, banana, cotton, cacoa, wheat, strawberry; oysters

Extra credit readings

• Greenish Warbler, a 'ring species'? Phys.org 5/25/14
• Four-legged snake ancestor dug burrows BBC News 7/24/15
• How Ancient Whales Lost Their Legs University of Florida News 5/22/06
• Why do humans get goosebumps Scientific American 9/1/03
• Tsetse Flies Lactate and Give Birth to Live Larvae Discover Magazine 4/20/12
• Birds that make teeth EurekAlert 2/21/06
• Afrotheria: Unexpected Relatives! Yale Peabody Museum 2008
• Afrotheria: Plate tectonics meets genomics PNAS 1/2/01
• Evolution in the Order ELEPHANTIDAE Cornell University 2015
• The Elephantidae: Elephants and mammoths UC Museum of Paleontology 10/2011
• Woolly Mammoth migration Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose
• Did Darwin get it wrong? Searching for the ancestor of Darwin's finches On Science 2005
• Evolution of Wheat CerealsDB
• Evolution of Cotton PNAS
• Triploid and tetraploid oysters U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization 2005

Additional material

• Explore the tree of life
• Tree of Life Explorer