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Evolution, Life Sciences, Science Education, Human Evolution, and Stuff
Welcome to Greg Laden's Blog.
Category: Paleontology
Many years ago, a sudden event occurred that changed everything. Or at least, that is what we think now. But in truth, the event took longer than many today believe, and many of the specific details, the exact order of events, the actual meaning of...
Posted by Greg Laden at 1:15 PM • 50 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Extinction
Keller has been one of the leading voices opposing the impact KT boundary extinction hypothesis. According to a press release from her university, she has more on this matter....
Posted by Greg Laden at 3:12 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anthropology
One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and...
Posted by Greg Laden at 8:04 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Personally, I think we should start with a dodo, and then work our way up the ethical ladder from there. ... We know roughly how the sequence of life ran forward in time. What about running it backward? ... Last week in Nature, scientists reported...
Posted by Greg Laden at 2:48 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Paleontology
Dinosaur tracks are reported for the first time on the Arabian Peninsula. These new tracks are located in Yemen. This find is interesting and important for several reasons....
Posted by Greg Laden at 11:35 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time is a book by Michael Benton on the Permian Extinction now out in paperback. From the press release: Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact sixty-five...
Posted by Greg Laden at 1:16 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ever since 3,599 years ago humans have been asking the question "Why did our furry elephant go extinct?" What caused the woolly mammoth's (not to be confused with the also-woolly mastodon) extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted...
Posted by Greg Laden at 7:58 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A very important and truly wonderful paper in Nature described a tour-de-force analysis of the Mammalian Evolutionary Record, and draws the following two important conclusions: The diversification of the major groups of mammals occurred millions of years prior to the KT boundary event; and The...
Posted by Greg Laden at 5:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses,...
Posted by Greg Laden at 1:06 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name ... the Anthropocene ... are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to "Anthropocene" and I propose that...
Posted by Greg Laden at 7:07 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
