Baby Aardvark
Category: Biology
A baby aardvark was born in Antwerpen zoo in Belgium two weeks ago.
Posted by Martin R at 3:05 PM • 0 Comments •
Aardvarchaeology
Martin Rundkvist's blog. Archaeology, skepticism, Sweden. And books and music and stuff.
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Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
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- 17th Century Pastoral Novel
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- Roy Zimmerman: You're Getting Sleepy
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- Opportunity Mars Rover Still Working After Eight Years
- How Is Energy Consumption Moderated In A Car?
- Baby Aardvark
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- Bengt Gabrielsson on Digging at the Finnestorp War Booty Sacrificial Site
- Martin R on 17th Century Pastoral Novel
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- Martin R on 17th Century Pastoral Novel
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Blogroll
Biology:
Viper Eating A Shrew
Category: Biology
Came across this viper on a bike path one evening in July.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 12 Comments •
Swedes Confused About Slugs
Category: Biology
When I explained that most brown slugs are not killer slugs, she asked, "So how do I tell them apart?". "You can't", I replied.
Posted by Martin R at 9:56 AM • 12 Comments •
Inside the Cephalopod Mask
Category: Food
Is this what you see when you take it off?
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
My New Neighbours, the Beavers
Category: Biology
Over the past decade or two, beavers have multiplied in my area, much as the wild boar population has exploded in this part of Sweden.
Posted by Martin R at 3:59 PM • 27 Comments •
Signs of Spring
Category: Biology
If you're in the northern hemisphere, what signs of spring have you seen?
Posted by Martin R at 9:25 AM • 29 Comments •
Monday Miscellany
Category: Archaeology
Lots of news in archaeology and biology.
Posted by Martin R at 2:14 PM • 24 Comments •
Dorrik Stow's Vanished Ocean
Category: Biology
I found Vanished Ocean to be a lively, engaging and solidly informative read, which even manages to make deep-ocean sedimentology look pretty exciting.
Posted by Martin R at 3:08 PM • 0 Comments •
Sunday Mushrooms
Category: Biology
I've never picked the ink caps before as I knew that the Common ink cap is poisonous at least in combination with alcohol. But now I know better. The shaggies are always plentiful around here!
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 17 Comments •
Science Fraud in Swedish Transplantation Biology
Category: Biology
The Swedish Research Council's expert panel has found professor Suchitra Holgersson guilty of severe science fraud.
Posted by Martin R at 12:50 PM • 12 Comments •
Shrooms
Category: Biology
I can report that the hills between Lakes Lundsjön and Trekanten are rich in boletes right now.
Posted by Martin R at 2:25 PM • 7 Comments •
Dinosaur Fountain Sculptures
Category: Biology
To either side of the main sculpture are smaller lizard-like beasts, clearly modelled after late-19th century palaeontology's ideas about dinosaurs.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 11 Comments •
Snorkeling, Eels and Sample Bias
Category: Biology
I've been fishing, swimming and walking the shoreline around my mom's summer house for almost 30 years. But I have never seen an eel before.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
Ant Killer
Category: Biology
I bought some insecticide. It looks like pale pink ice-cream sprinkles, and in fact consists mainly of sugar. But mixed into the sugar are two chemicals: one that makes the stuff taste awful to children and other large animals, and another that kills insects.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 16 Comments •
The Earth After Us
Category: Environment
To future geology, the heyday of Homo sapiens will just be one of several instantaneous mass extinction events in the planet's history.
Posted by Martin R at 4:14 AM • 15 Comments •
Invasive Species and Botanical Xenophobia
Category: Biology
Invasive species of course increase an area's biodiversity, at least in the short-term perspective. People are looking at ecology on the wrong scale level. Wait a thousand years before you decide whether a new arrival is good or bad.
Posted by Martin R at 11:23 AM • 30 Comments •
De Profundis
Category: Biology
Anoxic metazoans: that means multicellular beings like you, Dear Reader, who live without oxygen.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments •
Blackbird Evensong
Category: Biology
These spring and early summer evenings, when the light never really fades and the blackbird sings its heart out... They fill me with a nameless urgency.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Scilla siberica
Category: Biology
Spring is coming slowly, but it's finally coming. The squills have been awakened by heat radiating from our house, but still they reach for the sun.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Whale Bones Trawled Up From Bottom of Baltic Sea
Category: Biology
An unidentified whale beached itself and died in the area in 1709. Radiocarbon will tell if the newly found bones are likely to belong to that animal.
Posted by Martin R at 3:56 PM • 2 Comments •
Ancient Beetles Will Date Mesolithic Shorelines
Category: Archaeology
"Isn't it just too awesome to catch a glimpse of an Early Mesolithic summer -- the glinting of the blue-green forewing that's been resting in the sediment for 10 000 years. Those bugs buzzed for a summer and the sun glinted then too in their chitinous armour."
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 9 Comments •
The Value of Biodiversity
Category: Biology
My opinion is that that there is no such thing as abstract good. My reason for thinking we should preserve biodiversity is that it would be dangerous and aesthetically dissatisfying for humans if we lost it.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 16 Comments •
Population Will Come Down -- We Choose How
Category: Biology
It's up to us to decide if it should happen through contraception and a global single-child policy or through a catastrophic die-off.
Posted by Martin R at 2:45 PM • 88 Comments •
Fieldfares
Category: Biology
Great flocks of fieldfares are hanging around Boat Hill, feeding off the frozen parkland rowan berries instead of migrating.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
2009 Enlightener & Obscurantist Awards
Category: Skepticism
The Swedish Skeptic Society's annual awards for 2009 were announced yesterday.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 27 Comments •
Why Malt the Barley for Beer?
Category: Biology
If yeast can make alcohol directly out of starch, why bother malting the barley before making beer?
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 17 Comments •
Dan Simmons's Scientific Let-Down
Category: Books
Dan Simmons published a wonderful, galaxy-spanning, mind-blowing sf novel in 1989: Hyperion. Then he followed it up with three more novels of which I have read two. They're OK, but not as good as the first book. Science fiction is...
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 23 Comments •
Only Certain Humans Ever Have Sex To Reproduce
Category: Health
Ed Yong's excellent post about fruit-bat fellatio received some even better, eye-opening comments from one Russell and Frog:Russell: "Tan is falling into the fallacy that animals have sex for the purpose of procreation. Or of writing as if. Those bats...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Fungal Research Tries To Surf MRSA Wave
Category: Biology
The research reported on is in fact irrelevant to the much-publicised concerns about MRSA and other bacterial strains that have evolved resistance to antibiotics.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments •
My House is a Wasp Condom
Category: Homeownership
The wasp nest is ejaculating its little emissaries, and my house is one big latex contraceptive.
Posted by Martin R at 2:41 PM • 13 Comments •
How To Get a Mink Skeleton in a Weird Way
Category: Biology
My friend Eddie the pagan goldsmith has inadvertently discovered an unusual way to acquire a clean mink skeleton. Here's what you do.
Posted by Martin R at 4:52 PM • 6 Comments •
Fresh Roadkill
Category: Biology
Its unblinking eye was very clear.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 9 Comments •
Giant Vertebra Belongs To Recent Sperm Whale
Category: Biology
During the big whaling era someone took the vertebra to the lake and threw it in.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Velvet Bolete Orgy
Category: Food
My wife and I made a short mushrooming excursion to Lake Lundsjön after lunch. Little more than half an hour in the woods garnered us only four species, but huge amounts of one: velvet bolete. We went home early...
Posted by Martin R at 10:57 AM • 4 Comments •
Begonia Joined by Spontaneous Mushrooms
Category: Biology
When I left my PhD student office at the Museum of National Antiquities I rescued a couple of angel wing begonias. One has recently been joined in its pot by spontaneously appearing yellow fungus.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 21 Comments •
First Interplanetary Travellers Will Be Little Swedes
Category: Space
Those microdaddies will go to Phobos and back, and then biologists will be able to compare them to their stay-at-home buddies to learn what the environment out there in interplanetary space really does to an Earth creature.
Posted by Martin R at 8:43 AM • 3 Comments •
150 Years of Continual Discoveries
Category: Biology
Sean B. Carroll's latest book, Remarkable Creatures, is a collection of mini-biographies of people who have made important discoveries in evolutionary biology.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
My Bird Ring
Category: Biology
On the island I found the dry leg of a dead bird on the seashore, soft tissue almost gone, sinews still holding it together, foot still covered with skin. And around the lower leg, an aluminium ring with a series of digits...
Posted by Martin R at 9:09 AM • 10 Comments •
Tern Island
Category: Sweden
Imagine a flat gneiss and granite plateau criss-crossed by huge faults and crevices. Now run a few glaciations across it, sanding it down real good, so that everything is rounded.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
North European Natural Caffeine Source?
Category: Biology
Most psychoactive substances only occur in a small group of closely related plants. But caffeine pops up in widely divergent branches of the floral kingdom.
Posted by Martin R at 9:53 AM • 8 Comments •
Biodiversity in Artificial Wetlands
Category: Biology
The press release claims that on one hand natural wetlands are not more biodiverse than recently dug ponds, on the other hand that biodiversity in wetlands increases with age.
Posted by Martin R at 8:47 AM • 0 Comments •
Signs of Spring
Category: Biology
Signs of spring so far around where I live, apart from the obvious sunshine and disappearance of the snow & ice:Crocus Snowdrop Scilla Blackbird singing at sundown (ah!) Magpies brawling...
Posted by Martin R at 9:11 AM • 15 Comments •
Early Archaeological Darwinism
Category: Archaeology
A less well-known way in which Darwin's great idea was misunderstood or misappropriated.
Posted by Martin R at 9:58 AM • 11 Comments •
Inventive Gay Dolphins
Category: Biology
I am impressed by the gay dolphins' invention of nasal intercourse.
Posted by Martin R at 7:21 AM • 14 Comments •
The Ethics of Overpopulation
Category: Biology
Our goal should never be to rid the planet of humans.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 98 Comments •
Only Population Size Really Matters for the Environment
Category: Biology
There is no way of life that is ecologically sustainable for a global population of more than a billion.
Posted by Martin R at 5:17 AM • 68 Comments •
Non-Chicken Laid First Chicken Egg
Category: Biology
Somewhere, sometime, the first bird that fulfilled a genetic definition of chickenhood hatched.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 26 Comments •
Irate Christian E-Mail
Category: Skepticism
A rare piece of irate e-mail.Hi Mr. Rundkvist, This is Gregory from the US. I was reading your thoughts on Dr. Moller and the Exodus Case. You criticize Moller for not trying to disprove his hypothesis. Tell me; do evolutionists...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 73 Comments •
"Sapiens" Is Not A Plural
Category: Biology
It is an adjective ending in an S, just like erectus, afarensis and neanderthalensis.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 26 Comments •
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