laelaps | December 3, 2007
"What is that thing?" "Says here it's a bearcat." "Well which is it, a bear or a cat?." "I don't know, it's just weird." Short conversations such as this seem to pop up every few minutes around the Binturong (Arctictis binturong) enclosure at the Bronx Zoo's "Jungle World" exhibit, many people not knowing what to make of the hairy black creature sleeping on its platform. Even the popular name "bearcat" is confusing as the Binturong in neither bear (Family Ursidae) nor cat (Family), instead belonging to the Family Viverridae, which includes civets and genets. Binturongs are also nocturnal,…
laelaps | December 2, 2007As some of you might remember from my sporadic notes on my old blog, I'm in the middle of writing a book about evolution, the first draft of which I hope to have completed by the time I turn 25 on February 26 of next year. I was fairly productive for a few weeks but then hit a bit of a lull, but today I managed to bang out 5,200 words on evolution as fact and theory (modeled on my recent post dealing with the same subject). I tried to use a number of examples, but I gave the most detail to Steno's realization that the enigmatic glossopetrae ("tongue stones") of Malta were actually the…
laelaps | December 2, 2007
This is one of the three Amur Tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) born this past year at the Philadelphia Zoo. Despite such breeding success in captivity, however, it is difficult to release captive bred tigers back into the wild and animals bred in zoos do not contribute to replenishing depleted wild stocks (which sadly seems to be the case with many critically threatened big cats species).
laelaps | December 1, 2007
Most of my nightmares aren't rated PG, but if they involved a crazed and shirtless Leslie Neilson, they would be pretty terrifying indeed. Throw in a few cougars, birds, bears, wolves, a pack of purebred German Shepards, a motley crew of campers, and a mysterious hole in the ozone layer and you've got the 1977 film Something is Out There (also known as Day of the Animals), one of the worst revenge-of-nature films I've ever seen.
For some time movie monsters were aliens as mutants produced by exposure to radiation, but during the 1970's there was a shift to "monsters" being normal animals…
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 officially an old man; I intended to finish On the Origin of Phyla tonight and write about evolution as fact and theory, but instead I fell asleep at 7 PM after a trip to the grocery store. Lame... In lieu of anything substantial, then, here's one of my favorite Simpsons moments satirizing some of the super-conservative amendment proposals from recent years (Federal Marriage Amendment, I'm looking at you).
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…
laelaps | November 30, 2007
Indricotherium, the largest land mammal that ever lived as far as we know, must have been an impressive sight as it browsed among the trees of the early Miocene landscape of central Asia. Back then it didn't have a scientific name, though, as taxonomists had yet to evolve, and that was probably just as well as there is a bit of a muddle over the moniker of this animal. Although it is sometimes called "Baluchitherium", the name Paraceratherium has priority as it referred to the remains of the same animal. On top of that, the creature I've referred to here as Indricotherium was called…
laelaps | November 29, 2007
Here's a gift idea for any Monty Python fans you might know (and another here). Now if only there were a Night of the Lepus life-sized plush...
laelaps | November 29, 2007
A few weeks ago I posted a picture of Hermes, a kitten that I was fostering in my apartment and has found a loving home. When Hermes left, though, another kitten needed a home and his name was Cole, and he likes being a shoulder cat. He also likes to scream his little head off if you have food that he wants and pounce on your face in the middle of the night, but he's cute enough to get away with it. He too will go to adoption day this weekend and I have no doubt that someone will take him home.
laelaps | November 29, 2007According to a new article in The Times, an extremely productive Cretaceous bone bed has been found at Lo Hueco near the city of Cuenca (somewhere between Madrid and Valencia) in Spain, diggers for a rail project stumbling across the site. They're in a bit of a rush, though; they only have until the end of the month excavate the site before the diggers come back in. I guess there's just not stopping "progress," and although I'm sure the researchers will have plenty of time to study the bones in the lab a month is not enough time to give the fossils they attention that they need (or even to do…
laelaps | November 29, 2007
A close-up of the Triceratops mount on display at the AMNH.
Ornithischian dinosaurs don't often get much attention, perhaps because some groups (i.e. hadrosaurs) are often viewed as the "cows" of the Mesozoic, having almost the exact same body plan only differing in head ornamentation. Members of the family Ceratopsidae often have better publicists, though, Triceratops being one of the most recognized and popular of dinosaurs despite public unfamiliarity with many other ceratopsids.* It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that a new ceratopsid closely related to Triceratops…
laelaps | November 29, 2007
I had some amount of difficulty finding information about this animal, Blastocerus, because the plaque describing it at the AMNH called it "Blastoceros" and that was the name I attempted to look up. Once I learned of the mistake, though, much more information became available, although it was not quite what I expected. Many of the fossils I photograph and share here are of extinct representatives of animals, but Blastocerus is still around and the species Blastocerus dichotomus is a South American animal known as the Marsh Deer. Previously this deer ranged all over the South American…
laelaps | November 28, 2007
Tyrannosaurus rex is by far the most famous of dinosaurs, a creature that looms large in the field of paleontology as well as in the media. This amount of attention has caused plenty of controversy but it has also resulted in many studies of various aspects of one of the largest and most well-known extinct carnivores ever to have lived, and a new paper in the journal Paleobiology by Snively and Russell examines the prospect of "inertial feeding" in this titanic terror.
Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives (i.e. Tarbosaurus, Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, etc.) were definitely…
laelaps | November 28, 2007Things have been a little hectic lately, making me put off my long discussion on extinct sail-backed tetrapods, but today I heard about two new papers that definitely need some attention. A few bloggers have already mentioned the papers I have in mind, but I'm going to go ahead with my own thoughts on then anyway if for no other reason than to get the word out. If you're dying to know what I'm talking about, check out Zach's blog and a new addition to my blogroll, Vertebrate Paleontology Blog by Benjamin Burger, to find out more about some Cretaceous-oriented posts coming your way after I get…
laelaps | November 28, 2007
When we speak of "animal intelligence" chimpanzees and other primates often first come to mind, rats and pigeons used in lab tests coming in at a close second. If we just leave it with those examples, however, we ignore many animals that are highly intelligent but that aren't so easy to study or run tests on, the African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana) being one such creature (although we know all extant elephants to be highly intelligent, as well). While there might not be truth to "an elephant never forgets," they life in complex social groups and communicate with other elephants over…
laelaps | November 27, 2007Every once in a while the infamous "Mother of the Year" hoax appears in my inbox, the one in which it's claimed that a mother tiger who had lost he cubs instead took in some piglets as substitute children. While the truth behind the photographs is awfully sad, it seems credible because sometimes animals do look after babies that don't belong to their own species, and today one of the other great bloggers on this site, GrrlScientist, shared the following video of a crow (among the most intelligent of birds) caring for an orphaned kitten (here's a shorter version, minus Alan Thicke);
This…
laelaps | November 27, 2007Note: I originally wrote this post in a bit of frustration, and so I've drawn a line through much of the latter half that has more to do with science education and not the list. I still find it a bit strange than not one science book made it to the list when there were, in my opinion, some "notable" science books out this year, but some of my reaction to this was more of a rant than anything else. I'm not saying that there should be X number of science books on the list, but it's hard to believe that in a list of 50 books (being that half the list was fiction) not one science book was picked…
laelaps | November 27, 2007
Since yesterday's photo of Syndyoceras was so popular, I thought I would put up a photo of another protoceratid artiodactyl, this time Protoceras celer. Often found in deposits that were in proximity to streams, this animal showed some sexual dimorphism in its ornamentation, males (like the one pictured above) being more ornate than females.