Homicide detective Anthony Hollownton thought he had seen it all until he and his partner, Rick Nelson, are called to a murder scene unlike any Tony has come across. There are no witnesses and none of the neighbors heard a thing.

Once Tony starts to investigate the facts of the case become stranger and stranger. As the body count rises Tony is drawn into a world he did not know existed. Starting with a visit from a dead woman from his past. He must decide whether the paranormal truly exists or if these killing are some kind of delusional gang war.

Deuterostomes are a monophyletic group of animals containing vertebrates, lancelets, tunicates, hemichordates, echinoderms, and xenoturbellids. Four out of these six extant groups-vertebrates, lancelets, tunicates, and hemichordates-have pharyngeal gill slits. All groups of deuterostome animals that have pharyngeal gill slits also have a pharyngeal skeleton supporting the pharyngeal openings, except tunicates.

Evolution of solitary or colonial life histories in tunicates is accompanied by dramatic developmental changes that affect morphology and reproduction. We compared vasa expression in a solitary ascidian and a closely related colonial ascidian, in an effort to uncover developmental mechanisms important during the evolution of these contrasting life histories, including the ability to reproduce by budding.

Ascidian metamorphosis transforms a free-swimming larval chordate ascidian into a sessile adult through a distinct series of metamorphic events. Initially, larvae must become competent to respond to settlement cues. Settlement is then marked by dramatic body plan remodeling and may be accompanied by attachment to the substrate. Subtractive hybridization has revealed that many innate immunity transcripts are upregulated during metamorphosis in the ascidian Boltenia villosa.

Anural ascidians show embryogenesis during which tail formation does not take place. This mode of development is a derived character acquired several times independently in ascidian evolution. We identified approximately 20,000 each ESTs (i. e. 10,000 clones each were sequenced from both 5' and 3' ends) of adult gonads, cleaving-embryos, gastrulae/neurulae, embryos before hatching, and hatched larvae of the anural ascidian Molgula tectiformis, in order to comprehensively investigate the molecular mechanism of tailless evolution.

Genetic capacitors moderate expression of heritable variation and provide a novel mechanism for rapid evolution. The prototypic genetic capacitor, Hsp90, interfaces stress responses, developmental networks, trait thresholds and expression of wide-ranging morphological changes in Drosophila and other organisms. The Hsp90 capacitor hypothesis, that stress-sensitive storage and release of genetic variation through Hsp90 facilitates adaptive evolution in unpredictable environments, has been challenged by the belief that Hsp90-buffered variation is unconditionally deleterious.

This article presents the study of the activity and feeding pattern of a wild group of brown capuchin monkeys (MC-1) in a forest sector of the Tinigua National Natural Park (Meta, Colombia). This group was provisioned daily with a limited amount of food, usually bananas, for scientific purposes for more than 10 years; therefore, enjoying a food resource that did not vary spatially or temporarily. Using scan sampling, 971 hours of troop observation were completed during six months in 1995-96. MC-1 invested 55.2% of their time foraging, followed

Density and population status of red howler monkeys in an isolated bamboo forest fragment in La Tebaida, Quindío, Colombia. The majority of forest remnants in the coffee growing region in Colombia are guaduales, forests with a predominance of thorny bamboos (Guadua spp.). These remnants support the last remaining populations of red howler monkeys found between 800 and 1,300 m of altitude in the Central Cordillera of Colombia. Objective: To assess the population status of howler monkeys in a 51.4 ha-bamboo forest fragment