laelaps | January 8, 2008
In the year I was born the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal delivered a highly popular and influential book about the chimpanzees of Arnhem Zoo, the Netherland facility housing the largest captive population of the apes in the world. At first such a book might not have seemed so exciting, the well-known studies of Jane Goodall or Diane Fossey among apes in Africa making a group of chimpanzees in a zoo seem bland by comparison, but de Waal took advantage of the opportunities for detailed observation the captive setting provided and painted a vivid picture of the complex social life of…
laelaps | January 8, 2008I'll admit it; I've been a slacker about putting up the Boneyard in a timely fashion. Zach, however, has graciously offered to start things up again with a brand-new edition coming this Saturday, so get your posts to me or to him soon! I also need some volunteers for hosting for the 26th of January and the 9th & 23rd of February, so if you're up to it let me know.
laelaps | January 8, 2008
From De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543) by Andreas Vesalius.
For everyone who loves old books (and old books about bones, at that) as much as I do, check out this website, which contains William Cheselden's Osteographia. Andreas Vesalius' De corporis humani fabrica libri septem is up there too, as well as a slew of other old anatomical works.
laelaps | January 8, 2008The Buzz on Sb today has to do with Matt Nisbet's endorsement of Francis Collins to be the science adviser to the next presidential administration, and everyone seems to be piling on. (I had originally written a post about this topic but foolishly deleted it because I thought no one would really care. I guess that shows me.) RPM has presented the most thorough response so far, showing that Collins has waffled on some important scientific concepts despite his work at the National Human Genome Research Institute (his theistic leanings definitely flavor his statements about evolution and biology…
laelaps | January 8, 2008I'm not going to make the error of mistaking a local weather change as an indication of global climate trends, but I have to say that the weather here in New Jersey has thrown me off a little. So far the winter has been pretty mild, and today the temperature was already 59 degrees Fahrenheit by the time I left for work (the forecast calls for a high of about 67). The temperature is forecasted to drop down into the 50's for the rest of the week, but if I didn't know any better I'd swear it was March.
laelaps | January 8, 2008
I'm not enough of an entomologist to know what species of insect this is, but I do know that it is a katydid (Family Tettigoniidae), although I used to refer to them as grasshoppers when I was little. Given that there are about 6,400 species worldwide and about 255 in North America, though, it'll take a bit of work to figure out what this one is. (If you happen to know the species identification, please speak up in the comments).
laelaps | January 7, 2008"It is the just complaint of serious men in this age of ours, which is so much more refined in letters and manners than the coarse ages of the past, that men are to be found who so heartily detest all fine literature that they would have only those arts and sciences endowed and accepted in our centers of learning which contribute to gainful employment, while they would have all others perpetually banished as vain and useless. Among the first of the latter they number the knowledge of natural things, and its most noble part, which we call Lithology; they pursue it with an especially censorious…
laelaps | January 7, 2008"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."
- Aldo Leopold ("The Round River," collected in A Sand County Almanac)
laelaps | January 7, 2008 It may not be a new paper, but this afternoon I came across an article by Mark Hafner published in the Journal of Mammalogy called "Field Research in Mammalogy: An Enterprise in Peril" that definitely struck a chord with me. When I decided to enter into the ecology & evolution major at Rutgers, I assumed that I would eventually be introduced to some field work and be able to focus on vertebrate zoology, but much to my dismay no such program seemed to exist. Much of the learning involved taxonomy in the lab, which (don't get me wrong) is important, but field studies seemed to be entirely…
laelaps | January 7, 2008
From De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543) by Andreas Vesalius
In 1646, the first edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica (or Vulgar Errors) first went into print, Browne's volume being an attempt to refute many of the erroneous "received tenets and commonly presumed truths" that would not go away despite their inaccuracy. Among the bevy of fallacious notions included in the book was a subject that often was a point of contention at the time; if the Biblical Eve was derived from one of Adam's ribs, from which side was the rib taken and therefore shouldn't the sexes…
laelaps | January 7, 2008Greg Laden has got the latest edition of Linnaeus' Legacy. Be sure to check it out!
laelaps | January 7, 2008
Today's beautiful picture of Sturt's Desert Pea (Swainsona formosa) was sent to me by one of my Australian readers, Peter. You can read all about this interesting plant at the Australian National Botanic Gardens website.
laelaps | January 6, 2008
Sorry for the lack of updates, everyone. I caught a pretty nasty cold over the weekend that knocked me on my butt and kept my updates to a minimum (plus I've been petsitting and not actually home since Christmas, so computer access has been a little spotty). I've also been working very hard on an updated and revised version of my essay on human evolution that is going to appear in The Open Laboratory, and while I would really liked to have added in even more references and resources than I already have, if I did I fear that the essay would become a book in its own right. Still, I've got some…
laelaps | January 5, 2008
Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) are, as the name would suggest, the largest living otters and the largest representatives of the Mustelidae. As anyone who has seen these animals in captivity or the wild can attest, they are also among the most gregarious of all mustelids and emit ear-piercing squeaks, squeals, and barks as they move around together. Groups are typically centered around a dominant breeding pair, residents defending territories against transients, and average group size is between 3 to 8 individuals.
laelaps | January 4, 2008
It's interesting where my name or photographs end up. As I vainly searched google to make sure no one was talking smack about me on the 'net, I saw that one of my photos of an Amur leopard (pictured above) ended up in the November 2007 edition of AppleSauce by the South Australian Apple Users' Club (which can be seen online here). If you end up borrowing one of my photos for your own publications or blog (it'd be great if you asked first, but I'm not going to cry about it), just shoot me an e-mail and let me know so I can have a look, too. Even if I stumble upon one of my pictures somewhere…
laelaps | January 4, 2008Say hello to the newest member of the Sb family, A Good Poop!
[I thought about changing the name of this blog to "A Decent Scat," but I figured that was just too close... Just kidding ;)]
laelaps | January 4, 2008
While they are often not the sort of films to win Oscars, science fiction movies have been around for nearly as long as there have been moving pictures, and Hollywood continues to pump out tales about time-traveling cyborgs, alien encounters, and man-made disasters. Sidney Perkowitz's new book, Hollywood Science, takes a look at a number of popular films that not only feature extensions of science but also a look at scientists themselves, what appears on the silver screen often being a reflection of our own attitudes and worries in a changing world. Movie scientists struggle with personal…
laelaps | January 4, 2008Some of the biggest misunderstandings about the evolution of life on earth surround the "Cambrian Explosion," the popular impression often being that complex multicellular life sprung up out of nowhere in an instant. While it does appear that there was an "explosion" and that new body plans identifying early representatives of various phyla evolved rapidly, the Cambrian extinctions are usually ignored, and so too are the strange creatures that lived during the Ediacaran. The Ediacaran Period preceded the Cambrian, and while its exact span has been difficult to determine, it has been estimated…
laelaps | January 4, 2008Non Sequitur replays the evolutionary tape with interesting results...
[Hat-Tip to Michael]