Friday Cephalopod: Will you be this pretty when you're dead?
Category: Cephalopods
Ammonite Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman....
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:01 AM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal

PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.
Richard Dawkins
Category: Cephalopods
Ammonite Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman....
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:01 AM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
Here's a nice video about pachycephalosaurs describing a little exercise in taxonomic consolidation....
Posted by PZ Myers at 1:28 PM • 46 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
Shubin had a tough act to follow, coming after Kingsley's great talk. I'm sure it will be good, though — last night I got a tour of his lab, saw the original Tiktaalik specimens and some new ones, and some...
Posted by PZ Myers at 2:18 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
Oops, missed the first part of this talk due to the distractions of Lunch. Walked in as he was talking about tree vs. ladder thinking (people have a hard time conceptualizing trees) and history as a chronicle — barebones description...
Posted by PZ Myers at 1:38 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
It's yet another transitional fossil! Are you tired of them yet? Darwinopterus modularis is a very pretty fossil of a Jurassic pterosaur, which also reveals some interesting modes of evolution; modes that I daresay are indicative of significant processes...
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:20 AM • 61 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Fossils
What a day to be stuck in airplanes for hours on end; I had to slurp in a bunch of files on my iPhone and then look at them on that itty-bitty screen, just to catch up on the story...
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:11 AM • 103 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Fossils
This is a very cool fossil, a tiny T. rex cousin called Raptorex. Well, tiny is relative — it was still as big as a human being — but it has the same proportions, the oversized fanged head, the tiny...
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:43 AM • 128 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History
It's the 100th anniversary (we can't say "birthday" for a deposit laid down half a billion years ago, I don't think) of Walcott's discovery of the Burgess Shale formation in British Columbia. I'm not quite sure what one does to...
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:28 PM • 119 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Fossils
This is the skull of an arthrodire, an armored placoderm from the Devonian. Somehow, 20 foot long predatory fish with a mouth lined with razor-edged bony shears has never made me think of sexy time…until I ran across this...
Posted by PZ Myers at 1:31 PM • 127 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Fossils
Here's an interesting use of tweening: take 5 fossil skulls, use the computer to interpolate between them, and animate the results. 3.5 million years just fly by in 5 minutes. (The sound track is a bit superfluous though—turn the sound...
Posted by PZ Myers at 8:10 AM • 83 Comments • 0 TrackBacks