Search this blog
Profile
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
• a longer profile of yours truly
• my calendar
• Nature Network
• RichardDawkins Network
• facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• Atheist Nexus
• the Pharyngula chat room
(#pharyngula on irc.synirc.net)
I reserve the right to publicly post, with full identifying information about the source, any email sent to me that contains threats of violence.
Random Quote
(
Complete listing)
I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one doubts the existence of material objects and holds that the world may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
[Bertrand Russell]
Recent Posts
A Taste of Pharyngula
(
Complete listing)
Recent Comments
Archives
Blogroll
(
Complete listing)
Other Information
Subscribe via Email
Stay abreast of your favorite bloggers' latest and greatest via e-mail, via a daily digest.
Sign me up!
Fossils:
This story is in the news again, so I've reposted my description of the paper from 3½ years ago. This is an account of the discovery of soft organic tissue within a fossilized dinosaur bone; the thought at the...
Read on »
Posted on July 30, 2008 11:07 AM • 54 Comments
Guess who's next in line to get a certain famous fossil? The Pacific Science Center will be exhibiting Lucy between October and March. Even if I can't arrange it, I expect you lucky Pacific Northwest residents to all make the...
Posted on July 10, 2008 9:47 AM • 37 Comments
The paleontologists are going too far. This is getting ridiculous. They keep digging up these collections of bones that illuminate tetrapod origins, and they keep making finer and finer distinctions. On one earlier side we have a bunch of...
Read on »
Posted on June 27, 2008 8:33 AM • 117 Comments
Sometimes, the politics of science can get ugly, and they don't get much uglier than this ghastly mess going on among paleontologists. I've read a couple of accounts of this story so far, and it sounds to this outsider...
Posted on June 2, 2008 12:37 PM • 62 Comments
It's not often that something as delicate as details of the reproductive tract get preserved, but here's a phenomenal fossil of a Devonian placoderm containing the fragile bones of an embryo inside, along with the tracery of an umbilical...
Posted on May 29, 2008 4:23 PM • 73 Comments
It's another transitional form, this time an amphibian from the Permian that shares characteristics of both frogs and salamanders — in life, it would have looked like a short-tailed, wide-headed salamander with frog-like ears, which is why it's being...
Read on »
Posted on May 25, 2008 3:15 PM • 57 Comments
Check it out: it's yet another transitional form, a 92 million year old snake with two hindlimbs. Cool! Just last week I was told that none of these things exist....
Posted on April 10, 2008 9:34 AM • 90 Comments
It means "devil toad," and it was a 10 pound monster that lived 70 million years ago, in what is now Madagascar. It's huge, and judging by its living cousins, was a voracious predator. If it were alive today,...
Posted on February 19, 2008 5:11 PM • 82 Comments
The capybara is the current champion for rodents of unusual size — it weighs about 60kg (about 130 pounds); another large rodent is the pakarana, which weighs about a quarter of that. Either one is far too much rattiness...
Read on »
Posted on January 18, 2008 1:19 AM • 70 Comments
(hat tip to RBH)...
Posted on January 16, 2008 8:25 PM • 36 Comments
We've got a splendid new analysis of a southeast Asian artiodactyl from the Thewissen lab that reveals that these little deer-like animals are a sister taxon to whales — so this pushes our understanding of the ancestry of whales yet...
Read on »
Posted on December 19, 2007 8:26 PM • 55 Comments
Those of you who have been pregnant, or have been a partner to someone who has been pregnant, are familiar with one among many common consequences: lower back pain. It's not surprising—pregnant women are carrying this low-slung 7kg (15lb)...
Read on »
Posted on December 15, 2007 1:38 PM • 42 Comments
If you've been following Lio lately, you know he has a new arthropod friend, rescued from the dinner pot. Unfortunately, Lio missed the big news. The fossil record has yielded various gigantic arthropods, in contrast to their diminutive proportions today....
Posted on November 21, 2007 2:13 PM • 50 Comments
Last August, when I was at the Sci Foo camp, Paul Sereno brought along the skull of one of his latest discoveries…and whoa, is it ever a weird one. This is Nigersaurus taqueti, an herbivorous dinosaur with specializations for...
Posted on November 15, 2007 12:11 PM • 115 Comments
Early Cambrian shrimp! I just had to share this pretty little fellow, a newly described eucrustacean from the lower Cambrian, about 525 million years ago. It's small — the larva here is about 1.8mm long, and the adults are...
Read on »
Posted on October 10, 2007 4:00 AM • 43 Comments
