Laelaps

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Laelaps is the blog of Brian Switek, a freelance science writer based in New Jersey. This blog frequently features his musings on paleontology, evolution, and the history of science. Switek also blogs for Smithsonian magazine's Dinosaur Tracking.

Switek's first book, Written in Stone, will be published next year by Bellevue Literary Press.

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November 7, 2009

Photo of the Day #756: American avocets

Category: Birds • Photography

American avocets (Recurvirostra americana), photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.

Posted by Brian Switek at 7:48 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

November 6, 2009

Photo of the Day #755: Dire wolf

Category: Mammals • Photography

The skeleton of a dire wolf (Canis dirus), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.

Posted by Brian Switek at 6:22 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

November 5, 2009

Where's My Elephant?

Category: Mammals • Nonsense • Paleontology

Almost every time I get into a discussion about woolly mammoths with someone the conversation eventually steers towards the topic of cloning a mammoth. "Wouldn't it be fascinating?", they often say. And with a little extra genetic engineering, many of my friends hope, maybe someone could create a breed of domesticated mini-mammoths that would definitely be in the running for the title of "Cutest Pet Ever" (at least until they left a mess on the carpet).

The possibility of housebroken mammoths, or at least mammoths in public zoos, seemed within reach in the spring of 1984. It was at that time that there appeared a curious article entitled "Retrobreeding the Mammoth" by Diana ben-Aaron in MIT's Technology Review. It announced that a woolly mammoth, or at least something so close to one that the public would exclaim "I can't believe it's not a mammoth!", had been successfully created through some dazzling scientific knowhow.

Read on »

Posted by Brian Switek at 2:41 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Photo of the Day #754: Giant bison

Category: Mammals • Paleontology • Photography

The skeleton of a giant bison (Bison latifrons), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.

Posted by Brian Switek at 6:15 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

November 4, 2009

The March of Progress Has Deep Roots

Category: Evolution • History of Science

A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress."

The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as representing evolution, but the tragedy of this is that it conveys a view of life that does not resemble our present understanding of life's history. Stephen Jay Gould addressed this two decades ago in his book Wonderful Life, in which he wrote;

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. Most people may know this as a phrase to be uttered, but not as a concept brought into the deep interior of understanding. Hence we continually make errors inspired by unconscious allegiance to the ladder of progress, even when we explicitly deny such a superannuated view of life.

Yet the imagery is just too good to resist, and our continual desire to know whether this or that fossil was ancestral to another keeps us thinking in terms of evolutionary "ladders." (A hominin clearly not ancestral to us such as Paranthropus robustus, for example, will never be as celebrated as one that might be closer to our ancestry.) The "March of Progress" is even more useful in terms of satire. What better way to show how backward or primitive your opponents are than to slot them early into the ape->human sequence or show them stamping in the opposite direction of "progress"?

Science historian Constance Areson Clark has recently reviewed the occurrence of this kind of imagery in a new paper published in the journal Isis entitled "'You Are Here': Missing Links, Chains of Being, and the Language of Cartoons." It is not just about the "March of Progress", nor does it mention its modern manifestations, but Clark does provide a few examples of how evolution was depicted in a non-Darwinian fashion. As it turns out, the "March of Progress" has pretty deep roots.

Read on »

Posted by Brian Switek at 1:50 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Photo of the Day #753: Goniopholis

Category: Paleontology • Photography • Reptiles

A restoration of the crocodyliform Goniopholis scavenging a stegosaur carcass. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.

Posted by Brian Switek at 6:27 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

November 3, 2009

Photo of the Day #752: Skeletonized trees

Category: Photography • Plants

A stand of dead trees near Artists Paint Pots in Yellowstone National Park.

Posted by Brian Switek at 6:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

November 2, 2009

Chipping Away at Written in Stone

Category: Books • Personal • The Great Book Project • Written in Stone

It has been a little more than a month since I announced my forthcoming book on paleontology and evolution, Written in Stone, and I have been hard at work on the manuscript. As it stands now the book is about 3/4 complete. Provided everything stays on schedule I should have a first draft of the whole book finished in about a month.

Read on »

Posted by Brian Switek at 2:52 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks