Life Sciences
laelaps | April 7, 2008
Dr. Robert Bakker is one of the most famous paleontologists working today, an iconoclastic figure who has played a leading role of rehabilitating our understanding of dinosaurs from the inception of the "Dinosaur Renaissance" through the present. He is currently the curator of paleontology for the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Director of the Morrison Natural History Museum in Colorado, and has recently been involved in the study of the hadrosaur mummy "Leonardo." In 1986 he published the classic book The Dinosaur Heresies, fully bringing his revolutionized vision of dinosaurs to…
pharyngula | April 7, 2008
One of the serious shortcomings of Intelligent Design is that it does nothing to provide any new or productive insights into the workings of biology. ID proponents seem to be at least vaguely aware of this failure, in that they do frequently claim to be thinking about working on a preliminary, tentative approach towards the beginnings of a potential research program (my paraphrase), but most of the effort has been directed towards political and legal enforcement of their ideas, rather than actually testing those ideas. One advantage of pursuing only legalisms is that they don't give…
gregladen | April 6, 2008
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr....
Welcome to the Lucky 13th Edition of The Boneyard ... the Web Carnival about Bones and Stuff.
"The Boneyard is a blog carnival covering all things paleo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between. It's held every two weeks (the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month), traveling around to a different blog for each installment, connecting some of the best blogging on ancient life."
The previous edition of The Boneyard is here, at Dragon's Tales. The next edition of The Boneyard will be Here at Archaeozoology. If you would like to submit an entry to the next…
laelaps | April 5, 2008Last week I looked at reconstructions of Diplodocus (both humorous and scientific) by Oliver Hay and G.G. Simpson. After rifling through my collection of papers, I came upon a description of Diplodocus by H.F. Osborn and thought I would continue the trend I had set earlier.
In 1897, the AMNH sent a field crew to look over the famous Como Bluff quarries that were so productive for O.C. Marsh in previous years, and although the site was considered exhausted Barnum Brown quickly came across a Diplodocus femur. There was more than just a femur, however, and soon J.L. Wortmann was supervising the…
tetrapodzoology | April 5, 2008
In the previous article we looked at the discovery of the Red panda Ailurus fulgens, and also at some aspects of its biology and distribution. There's so much I didn't cover: Red panda physiology is bizarrely interesting, for example. In this article we're going to look at the Red panda's fossil relatives. As I implied in the last article, the Red panda's friends and relations once roamed far and wide. And remember that the term 'panda' belongs to the Red panda and its kin, not to the giant pandas (which are bears, and not close kin of pandas proper). The Red panda and its close relatives…
tetrapodzoology | April 3, 2008
They sit there, mostly curled up, mostly asleep, high up in tree-tops, sometimes chewing on bits of plants. But little known is that, deep within their furry little heads, they harbour an unknown desire: to take over the world...
Pet peeve # 113 concerns pandas: it's the generally held notion that 'the panda' is a big, bear-shaped black and white animal. In fact the Giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca is not the original panda: the Red panda is 'the panda', its name being derived (according to some) from the word 'poonya' (others doubt this: the names 'nigayla-ponya' or 'nyala-ponga' are…
razib | April 3, 2008A few months ago a paper came out, The Threat of Appearing Prejudiced and Race-based Attentional Biase, which got a lot of press. Here's the important part:
The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces. The researchers…
laelaps | April 3, 2008
A famous illustration of a swamp-bound "Brontosaurus" by Charles R. Knight. From Dinosaurs by William Diller Matthew (1915).
As I've been slowly reorganizing the mass of technical papers on my computer (1,600+ and counting), I've occasionally blundered into an old paper or two that I had forgotten about. I've already used two to create a somewhat superficial post about reconstructions of phytosaurs earlier today, so I'll run with the theme of paleontological reconstruction with Oliver Hay's ideas about the lifestyle of Diplodocus.
Published in 1908, the article seems like a good textual…
grrlscientist | April 3, 2008My recent visit to Manhattan Kansas and the Platte River, Nebraska, was the first time I've ever set foot into either state, so this is my complete bird list for that region. Life list birds are noted with red font.
Eastern Kansas/Nebraska Bird List
Snow goose, white and blue phases
Canada goose
Cackling goose
Wood duck
Gadwall
American Wigeon
Mallard
Blue-winged teal (plentiful)
Northern shoveler
Northern Pintail
Green-winged teal
Canvasback
Redhead (only one pair, but they were very close to the road)
Ring-necked duck
Greater scaup
Bufflehead
Hooded merganser
Red-breasted merganser
Ruddy…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2008tags: migrating sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis, Platte River, birds, birding, bird watching
Sign about the Platte River in Nebraska.
Image: GrrlScientist, 2008. [wallpaper size].
This past weekend, Dave, Elizabeth and I drove from Manhattan, Kansas to the Platte River in next-door Nebraska to see the migrating sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis. These flocks of migratory cranes are a mixture of greater and lesser sandhill cranes along with some hybrids between these two subspecies, often referred to as intermediate sandhill cranes. (There also are sedentary subspecies of sandhill cranes,…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2008tags: Hymenoptera, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Ant species (but which one, Alex?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
The ants run away ..
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
Thus ends the AMNH subway art series. In short, I photographed all of the tile mosaics (uptown-bound platform, entrances and stairways), several…
tlambert | April 2, 2008James has written an open letter to Kevin Rudd. Key paragraphs:
Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and…
clock | April 1, 2008Climate Change And Human Hunting Combine To Drive The Woolly Mammoth Extinct:
Does the human species have mammoth blood on its hands? Scientists have long debated the relative importance of hunting by our ancestors and change in global climate in consigning the mammoth to the history books. A new paper uses climate models and fossil distribution to establish that the woolly mammoth went extinct primarily because of loss of habitat due to changes in temperature, while human hunting acted as the final straw.
Anne-Marie, Kambiz and artificialhabitat have more.
Study Questions 'Cost Of Complexity…
grrlscientist | April 1, 2008tags: Hymenoptera, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Ant species [detail]
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
loom | March 31, 2008These biologists are holding out on me.
I've been writing about biology for quite some time now, and sometimes I think I've got a pretty good sense of the scope of life. Neurosurgeon wasps--got it. Eels with alien jaws--check. And then I stumble across something new, or should I say, new to me.
This week's revelation is androgenesis. Androgenesis is what happens when kids get all their genes from their father. Normally humans and other animals produce offspring by combining DNA from both mother and father, an arrangement that's often the case in plants as well. Both sperm and eggs only get…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Female Ocellated Turkey, Meleagris ocellata,
in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the Southern Yucatan
in the state of Campeche. They are endemic to the region
and are known locally as both Pavo Ocelado or Guajalote Ocelato.
Image: Kevin Sharp. [larger size].
Birds in Science
If you read nothing else in this issue of Birds in the News, then this is the story to read. A serious affliction has been observed in birds in the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state; Long-billed Syndrome…
sb admin | March 31, 2008In case you haven't heard, cooking food is bad--at least according to the raw food movement. This movement has developed over the last 5-10 years, and is still fairly fringe, but fad diets, restaurants, stores, and websites devoted to raw foods are flourishing. Let's see what they're up to.
According to one popular website, we should begin our story by thinking about a few questions:
What other animal on earth denatures its food by cooking?
What other animal on earth suffers from all the health challenges that we face?
What did people eat before there was fire?? They ate it RAW!
This is…
edyong | March 31, 2008You might not be that impressed to receive a clump of grass or branches on a first date, but a boto dolphin might think differently. A new study suggests that these Amazonian dolphins wave bits of flotsam to attract mates.
The boto is a freshwater river dolphin that swims through the currents of the Amazon and the Orinoco. They are elusive creatures that are difficult to study, so very little is known about their social lives.
Tony Martin from the University of St Andrews spent three years in the Amazonian Mamiraua reserve studying the behaviour of botos. During this time, he spotted over…
grrlscientist | March 28, 2008tags: Odonata, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
A dragonfly species (but which one?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
kevin z | March 28, 2008To piggy back on Peter's ice sheet-o-mania posts today, Marsha Walton reports at CNN.com what it means to the animal life in the Antarctic when an ice shelf collapses:
" Another warming ocean event that scientists are studying closely is the migration of king crabs. Marine remotely operated vehicles have captured photos of these giant crabs on the Antarctic Slope, where underwater land starts to rise up to the southernmost continent.
It's the first time in tens of millions of years that these predators have appeared that close to Antarctica.
Crabs and other marine invertebrates die when the…