Greg Laden's Blog

A Very Cool Ancient Crocodile

Category: Crocodile

I have never actually seen a snake eat a crocodile or a crocodile eat a snake, but I am pretty sure I've seen a snake planning to eat a Nile Croc. And that was in the geological present. In the geological past, about 60 million...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:35 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Triassic Life on Land: I love this book

Category: Books

The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination....

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:42 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Extinction of the Old, Evolution of the New: What really happened to the dinosaurs?

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:15 PM • 50 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Gerta Keller goes after impact theory again

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....

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Posted by Greg Laden at 3:12 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 8:04 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Should we clone a Neanderthal. Or maybe two?

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 2:48 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Arabian Dinosaur Trackway Discovered

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....

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Posted by Greg Laden at 11:35 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

New in Paperback Book on Permian Mass Extinction

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:16 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Did sexist white males cause the extinction of the woolly mammoth, or was it climate change?

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 7:58 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Mammals and the KT Event

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 5:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks