Life Sciences
tetrapodzoology | December 13, 2007
In, as usual, a desperate effort to bring in the hits, I thought I'd go nuts and see what posting about the Loch Ness monster might do for my stats. Hey, maybe I could throw the word sex in there as well. There: sex, there, I said it again. But seriously... anyone who's anyone has heard of the Loch Ness monster. And most people know that various photos, allegedly depicting the Loch Ness monster, have been taken over the years. Many people have heard that some, or all, of these photos are dubious, or fake. But that's where it ends for the vast majority of people. I would imagine that - as…
laelaps | December 13, 2007Over the past two decades there has been an explosion in the number of large theropods that have been discovered (or as we shall see, rediscovered) in Africa and South America, the predatory dinosaurs of what was once Gondwana being just as large and terrifying as their more famous Northern Hemisphere counterparts. Abelisaurids (i.e. Carnotaurus, Rugops, Majungasaurus), Spinosaurids (i.e. Baryonyx, Suchomimus, Irritator, and Spinosaurus), and Carcharodontosaurids (i.e. Giganotosaurus, Tyrannotitan, Mapusaurus, and Carcharodontosaurus) have all emerged from the rock at an alarming rate,…
tetrapodzoology | December 11, 2007
I'd like to talk about the filming of long-eared jerboas Euchoreutes naso (after all, I covered them on ver 1 back here), about the reclassification of Brontornis (again, covered on Tet Zoo ver 1 here), about Aaron Filler's new paper on bipedality in hominoids (see the PLoS pdf here), and about astrapotheres, swimming giraffes, Loch Ness Monsters, British iguanodontians, proterosuchids and phytosaurs.. but right now I want to get this Australian murid thing finished. You'll need to have read part I before proceeding. Here we go, hold on to your hats...
Wurlies: time capsules of palaeoclimate…
pharyngula | December 10, 2007Who knew we were so wicked? Slimy Sal Cordova thinks that being
sodomized by horses is concomitant with "Darwinism", and Joe Blundo claims The Golden Compass is superfluous as a recruiting tool for atheists because we have the video game Grand Theft Auto, some stupid sitcom called Two and a Half Men, slasher movies, Girls Gone Wild videos.
I had no idea these were the rites of my ideology.
I've never played Grand Theft Auto, I might have seen ten minutes of that sitcom once before turning it off, I dislike slasher movies, and not only haven't I seen Girls Gone Wild, I think the whole concept…
voltagegate | December 10, 2007
If you travel I-68 and any of the joining roads in the near future, you will almost certainly see creeping flat beds hauling gargantuan turbines, blades and other pieces of future wind towersup the mountain to join those already adorning the Western MD/PA ridgelines.
One or two car escorts follow close behind in the far right lanes. Some of the pieces are so large that you have to pull halfway in to the adjacent lane to avoid them. Despite your feelings about wind towers, you just can't avoid feeling awe at their sheer size.
I've watched wind towers sprout up rapidly in this area over the…
grrlscientist | December 10, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Winter in NYC means the return of migratory White-throated Sparrows, Zonotrichia albicollis (this bird is in its first winter plumage). There are thousands of these birds in Central Park and in the other parks here, subsisting on grass seeds along with crumbs and other foods that people give them.
Image: Kevin T. Karlson [larger view].
Birds in Science
Divers exploring a water-filled sinkhole in the Bahama Islands recently recovered one of the world's largest and most pristinely preserved collections of animal and…
revere | December 10, 2007The debate about how much wild migratory birds contribute to the spread of highly pathogenic influenza/A H5N1 goes on. According to a sensible Commentary in Nature (Dec. 6) it needn't. We should have taken steps some time ago to answer an answerable question. But we didn't and still haven't initiated those steps:
Two years ago, some believed that H5N1 viruses were poised to spread around the globe on the wings of migrating wild birds. A massive effort was mounted to track their movement but, as of September 2007, very few positive birds have been found in tests of over 300,000 healthy wild…
tetrapodzoology | December 9, 2007
We are surrounded by annoying misconceptions about the diversity of animal life. For me, one of the most annoying and persistent of these is the idea that... drumroll... Australia is a 'land of marsupials' where - bar humans and introduced species like dingoes and rabbits - placental mammals have no presence. Well, it just ain't so...
In fact about 25% of Australia's mammal fauna is made up of placental mammals, and I'm not including marine mammals like sealions and cetaceans, nor bats, in this count. We are in fact talking about rodents, and specifically about murids at that (Muridae is the…
tetrapodzoology | December 7, 2007
Specializing on locomotor ecology*, my good, long-standing friend Mary Blanchard of the University of Liverpool's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology has been spending a lot of time on Madagascar over the past several years, and has been looking at a lot of wild lemurs. She has studied the ecology of wild indris Indri indri, Diademed sifakas Propithecus diadema and Grey bamboo lemurs Hapalemur griseus griseus, and has also collected data on the diets of wild Ring-tailed lemurs Lemur catta, Verreaux's sifaka Propithecus verreauxi and Black-and-white ruffed lemurs Varecia variegata…
grrlscientist | December 6, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, evolutionary behavior, sociobiology, ornithology, birds, avian, evolution, William Dilger, Agapornis roseicollis, Agapornis fischeri, lovebirds
Peach-faced lovebirds, Agapornis roseicollis (left)
and Fischer's lovebirds, Agapornis fischeri (right),
can interbreed to produce sterile offspring.
Images: LoveBirds New Zealand.
Is behavior genetically "programmed" or is it the result of learning? Or is it instead a little bit of both? This is the old "nature versus nurture" argument that has occupied behavioral and evolutionary scientists, psychologists and even…
tetrapodzoology | December 6, 2007
We returned late last night: it was a journey involving koalas, Pallas' cat and Asian golden cat, wolverines, rhinos, anteaters, Ceratosaurus, a toy armadillo, and yet again those bloody ichthyosaurs. Thanks to those who've been leaving comments in my absence, I'll address some of the points in due course. Anyway.. so, Tet Zoo has recently played host to articles on deer and carnivorans and, all too briefly, to weird turtles and red bats. But you know that, eventually, we had to return to anurans right?
Yes, finally, we come to the last group of ranoids, last group of neobatrachians, and…
evolvingthoughts | December 4, 2007
Forget about the season; virgin births can happen any time of year... and anywhere.
So there is an Ask a Scienceblogger question about virgin births. In zoology this is called "parthenogenesis" (which means "virgin birth"), and in botany it is either called "vegetative reproduction" (think: cuttings) or "apomixis", in which unfertilised seeds germinate. I want to talk today about what that means for our taxonomies.
A long-standing reaction to the notion of there being asexual reproduction is that every novel individual, or any individual who has a mutant gene, would necessarily be its…
laelaps | December 4, 2007
George and Charles H. Sternberg's "Trachodon" (=Edmontosaurus) mummy, discovered in Wyoming in 1908. Image from Osborn, H.F. (1912) "Integument of the iguanodont dinosaur Trachodon", Memoirs of the AMNH ; new ser., v. 1, pt. 1-2.
Dinosaur "mummies," specimens that have undergone unusual preservation and retain some skin impressions along with the bones, are always exciting when announced, one of the most famous being the "teenage" Brachylophosaurus dubbed "Leonardo." (See here for information from Kodak on Leonardo, as well as this page from the Judith River Dinosaur Institute) This…
grrlscientist | December 3, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
A brown pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis, relaxes on a people-watching and photography trip at the Port Aransas Birding Center, Texas.
Image: Scott Lewis [MUCH larger view].
Birds in Science
A £200,000 study into what happens when people hear birdsong is taking off. Researchers at Aberdeen University in Great Britain will spend two years listening to birds to find out how their songs, calls and cries become a part of people's lives. "Listening to birds: an anthropological approach to bird sounds" has received…
gregladen | December 2, 2007The Courier Journal is a regular normal every-day newspaper out of Louisville, Kentucky. James K. Willmot is a normal every-day former science teacher at a Goshen Kentucky school. He works in a lab now in Britain, but he's from Louisville. The following Op Ed in the Courier-Journal by James Willmot should be sobering for anyone living in the readership zone of that paper, or anyone with kids in the area:
There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source…
pharyngula | December 2, 2007Here's a very useful document that I got from August Berkshire (you can also get this in pdf form from Minnesota Atheists): 34 Unconvincing Arguments for God. I guess he forgot to include all the convincing arguments for gods, but I'm sure some wandering delusional troll will try to provide some. That's OK, I'm sure August would be willing to increase the number in his title.
Anyway, maybe a better title would be "34 arguments for god, and why they are unconvincing". Go ahead and make suggestions to improve them, I think August will be checking in and following along.
34 Unconvincing…
laelaps | December 1, 2007If there is any phrase that is sure to raise the hackles of an evolutionary biologist, it is that evolution is "just a theory." This rallying cry of creationists plays off of the public misuse of the term "theory" to mean "Any wild guess that comes to mind which doesn't have substantial evidence to be taken as fact." Issac Asimov put this more humorously in his essay "The 'Threat' of Creationism" (1981) when he wrote;
Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning…
laelaps | December 1, 2007
I absolutely love this photo of a male Amur Leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) having a quick drink at the Philadelphia Zoo; the only thing that spoils it is the fact that it's drinking out of a bowl, making it look more like a housecat and one of the Great Cats. As I've noted here before, visiting this particular individual is always bittersweet and Amur Leopards could be extinct in the wild during my lifetime, this animal being kept in a relatively small enclosure, often looking a bit bored. He likes to sit near the glass so lots of people come by to take pictures next to the "big kitty…
laelaps | November 30, 2007I'm hard at work on my sail-backs vs. buffalo-backs post (as well as another piece for later today about evolution as fact and theory), but if you're looking for some interesting reading here's a smattering of links I think you should check out;
My friend Kate has written up a thoughtful reply to my post about animals "mothering" other species, and also has a great piece on surprising sexual selection in topis. Hell, just read her blog regularly; you won't regret it.
Likewise, fellow zoology blogger Anne Marie has a great post on Maned Wolves (her specialty) and Aplomado Falcons. I won't…
denialism | November 30, 2007Let's talk about Uncommon Descent for a moment. One of the recurring complaints we've been hearing from the evolution denialists there is this refrain that whenever a evolutionary explanation for a result gets reevaluated, it's a sign that we "Darwinists" are somehow being dishonest and fitting any data to the theory of evolution. Evolution, therefore, isn't falsifiable. For example, two posts, one from BarryA, the other from O'Leary (commenting on this ARN nonsense, wrongly suggesting that results that falsify evolutionary theory have been discovered - like the recent hypothesis the…