laelaps | December 20, 2007
Deer are not the sort of animal you would normally expect to have fangs, but some of them actually do. Well, the males do, anyway. The Common Muntjac (Muntiacus muntjak, pictured above) is one such minuscule cervid, although the genus Muntiacus contains about ten species and many subspecies within each of the ten. The Musk Deer (Moschus sp.) is larger and the males of that species have even larger canines, but they belong to their own family (the Moschidae) and are not "true" deer. Speaking of muntjacs, though, as Darren notes in a recent post the Chinese Muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi) was…
laelaps | December 19, 2007
A beautiful artistic reconstruction of Indohyus by Carl Buell.
The study of the origin of whales has undergone so much change during my own lifetime that it's sometimes hard to keep up. When I was very young, Basilosaurus was the fossil whale representative, but being that it was already a whale it didn't solve the problem of whale origins. Newer discoveries of older cetaceans in Asia like Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, Kutchicetus, and Rodhocetus provided a group of transitional types that stunned vertebrate paleontologists, but a major debate loomed over these fossils. While it first appeared…
laelaps | December 19, 2007
Barbary Macaques (an adult male and an infant). Via Wikipedia.
Part of the experience of living in an apartment involves occasionally being subjected to the sounds of members of our own species mating. While the torrid love affairs of our neighbors might keep us up at night, though, there's a good reason why they do it (just as there's a good reason why there's a whole business based upon the proclivity of some men to drop loads of cash to listen to a woman pretend to have orgasms over the phone), at least if we're anything like Barbary Macaques (Macaca sylvanus). In a new study published…
laelaps | December 19, 2007
Awful Changes.
Man found only in a fossil state -- Reappearance of Ichthyosauri.
A Lecture. -- "You will at once perceive," continued Professor Ichthyosaurus, "that the skull before us belonged to some of the Lower order of animals the teeth are very insignificant the power of the jaw trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food."
[Cribbed from Neil.]
Every once in a while scientists get thrown a curve ball by the popular press, a kind of question that requires a short and carefully-devised answer as the query, in any other setting, what make the…
laelaps | December 19, 2007
The Pygmy Marmoset (Callithrix (Cebuella) pygmaea) is an interesting little primate. While it is often said on documentaries or zoo enclosure descriptions that they are among the most "primitive" of primates, marmosets actually have a number of derived features. On their hands, for instance, they have claws called tegulae instead of flattened nails. At first this would seem to be a characteristic that was retained from their ancestors, but tegulae are actually modified nails, meaning that the marmosets evolved claws in something of an evolutionary reversal. Likewise, marmosets often give…
laelaps | December 18, 2007When I started blogging about science a little less than a year ago I had two main goals; to make it to ScienceBlogs.com and to have a post published in the 2007 edition of The Open Laboratory. It's obvious that I've achieved one, but I'd love to get into the Open Lab, too, and if you haven't already I would encourage you to submit the post that you liked best that I wrote this year for consideration (although I thank those of you who have already done so). I've thrown in one or two myself, but it is very difficult for me to choose so I'll take whatever suggestions you all care to offer…
laelaps | December 18, 2007Preface
I originally wrote this post during the late summer of this year, a piece that was fraught with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and an overall cumbersome attribute that made me admire anyone who was able to get through the whole thing. I have revised and edited the text starting with the first word, adding in some new information along the way, and I hope you enjoy what I feel is a better and more cohesive review of how our own species has seen itself during from the early days of natural history to the present. Some of the major debates (i.e. the origins of bipedalism) are…
laelaps | December 18, 2007
Nearly everyone has a book out about environmental crises these days, from scientist E.O. Wilson (The Creation) to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (A Contract With the Earth), but in many cases the conciliatory volumes aren't very good. Everyone has something to say about pollution and global warming, but the amount of people who seem to actually know anything about ecology seem to be in the minority when considering recent popular treatments, but Michael Novacek's Terra is a refreshing break from books that try to cash in on current environmental concerns without having much…
laelaps | December 18, 2007
The Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) is a creature that I am at least somewhat familiar with; I see them every day on my drive to work. Whether they're just circling overhead or picking on a deer carcass, turkey vultures don't seem to have any problem inhabiting the landscape with people and are probably among the creatures (like the white-tailed deer, coyote, and grey squirrel) that will survive the increasing suburban sprawl of this state, if not benefit from it. The individual pictured above, however, was photographed while I was hiking this past fall at Bear Mountain State Park in New…
laelaps | December 17, 2007
When the topic of persecution of scientists by religious authorities comes up, Galileo is typically mentioned most often, Giordano Bruno every once in a while, and Hypatia of Alexandria not at all. A longer list of figures who entered "warfare... with theology in Christendom" could be conjured up as well, even Linnaeus raising the hackles of the Vatican for grouping Homo sapiens in with primates. A more modern, though no less tragic, story involves the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the main focus of Amir Aczel's new book The Jesuit and the Skull.
As my wife…
laelaps | December 17, 2007As suggested by Blake Stacey, here is a list of the 10 most horrible books I've read this past year. Some are widely recognized as being atrocious, but others were either disappointing or served up a side of "woo" without question, which definitely puts the book on shaky ground. So, without further introduction, here's the "bottom ten";
# 10) The Last Dinosaur Book - W.J.T. Mitchell
It was hard putting this one on the list, but I had to pick 10 and so it must be done. Mitchell's book isn't absolutely horrid (it's well-illustrated, which is a plus), but he never really quite "gets it" when it…
laelaps | December 17, 2007
A beautiful Barosaurus lentus by Michael Skrepnick. Click the image to see it full size.
A little over a month ago I shared a beautiful black & white drawing paleo-artist Michael Skrepnick created for the unveiling of "Gordo," a long-lost Barosaurus lentus that has now gone on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. Now Mike has graciously allowed me to post his absolutely gorgeous colored version of Barosaurus, an very wonderful reconstruction, indeed. Unfortunately for those in the area of the ROM I wasn't able to post this sooner as there was a big event this past weekend,…
laelaps | December 17, 2007I apologize, dear readers, for the lack of posts. It's final exam time, yet again, and I've been repeatedly given the famous RU Screw in a number of ways altogether unpleasant and aggravating. I just have one more final to go (Living Primates), but I still have to fight the Man about changing majors before next semester kicks up again. If only I had known the horror that is Rutgers before I decided to come here, but now that I've gotten myself stuck in the academic morass that is this university I feel like a Smilodon mired in the Rancho La Brea tar pits with no way out. The only way to do…
laelaps | December 17, 2007
Here's a shot of a Black Rat Snake (Elaphe obsoleta) my wife and I (almost quite literally) stumbled across during a hike in New York this past fall. It wasn't too happy with me taking pictures, but I was able to get some decent ones. As you can see from the photo, though, it's a rather plain black snake and it has a number of common names. Some taxonomic arguments surround it, however, some favoring splitting the species up into several based on location and DNA.
laelaps | December 16, 2007
Camarasaurus is a bit of an under-appreciated sauropod, not being nearly as famous as Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, or a number of others. Still, during a recent visit to the AMNH I was struck by something about its skull that I hadn't noticed before; it has some very big holes. While it might be difficult to tell from this angle, the skull of Camarasaurus has a very large orbit and a very large nasal area, the bony struts running between the holes being relatively thin. While I'm not suggesting a direct evolutionary relationship, it did remind me of the skull construction of the…
laelaps | December 15, 2007I've read more books than I think I can remember during 2007; the new bookshelves I obtained this past fall are now buckling underneath the weight of the accumulated mass and the volumes that keep are seemingly without a home. Some books I've been meaning to get to for some time and haven't read, others I ripped through with great interest, and others were so utterly terrible that I'm tempted to remove them from my library altogether. In any case, here's a listing of what I can remember reading this year, from the very best to the absolute worst;
[Note: These aren't ranked in any way, it's…
laelaps | December 15, 2007
Everyone knows that "A" is for "Aardvark" (unless you'd prefer the scientific name Orycteropus afer, in which case "O" is for "Orycteropus"), but that's all most people seem to know about this animal. It almost looks like two people were having a fight over a pig, pulling at both ends in some sort of "Just-so" story that ended up with the creation of the first Aardvark, but the animals pictured above have nothing to do with pigs at all. Indeed, Aardvarks belong to their own order, Tubulidentata, within the Afrotheria, seemingly being a very old lineage that has not changed very much through…
laelaps | December 14, 2007
It makes sense I think; anyone who's been following this blog for a while knows my affinity for big cats. If you want to see what your Daemon would look like, visit The Golden Compass website.
laelaps | December 14, 2007I'm sure that there are cases all over the world every day like this one that are generally ignored, but case of a creationist who killed a biomedical scientist during an argument over evolution has made a few of my fellow bloggers take notice. While it might be tempting to point at creationists and say "See! They're murderous theists!" details about the stabbing are sparse. According to a report about the incident from The Age, Alexander Christian York (the creationist) killed Rudi Boa (the scientist), Boa being on vacation with his girlfriend. All three were camping at Blowering Holiday…