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
Now on ScienceBlogs: That Which I Sowed in Tears, I Now Reap in Joy: A Love Letter to my Beautiful Readers
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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Concerning the argument from design, "You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.
Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 62.
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