laelaps | November 26, 2007By now I'm sure you've all heard about Ben Stein's upcoming Christian Crusade against us Devilutionists, Expelled, and as February approaches I'm sure we'll be seeing more hype about the films theatrical release. Indeed, just like movies like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Nativity Story, and the shallow Facing The Giants (I had no idea God cared so much about Friday night football) have been promoted to churches with special screenings, free clips, and other materials to get butts in the seats, I'm sure Expelled will try to create a Christian media blitz around the film, which shouldn't be…
laelaps | November 26, 2007
Admittedly, I am often somewhat fixated upon fossil predators, but herbivores can be just as varied and interesting as anything that fed upon them. Syndyoceras cooki, a protoceratid artiodactyl of Miocene age, is one such animal, and the two horns protruding from the front of its snout would be fused to create the characteristic "slingshot" in some later forms of this group.
laelaps | November 25, 2007As I described in the introduction to my more poetic post "There is a grandeur in this view of life...," fossil hunting is one of the most exciting and rewarding activities I've even taken part in. It might not be easy work and it often does not bear petrified prizes, but a few scraps of bone, a tooth fragment, or a fossilized shell is still an amazing vestige of a distant past that no human has ever seen. Young Earth Creationists, on the other hand, contend that the world is only about 6,000 years old and that when the first humans were evicted from Eden they had to content with the mighty…
laelaps | November 25, 2007To some, the universe is a place that has been fine-tuned to be "'just right' for life," a place where human beings (or at least organisms that are upright bipeds with binocular vision, large eyes, and grasping hands) are an inevitable consequence of evolution. I've never found such arguments (the anthropic principle and a teleological "march of progress" in evolution, respectively) to be compelling, but there are some who still advocate such arguments. Paul Davies is one such advocate, and he has just published an opinion article in the New York Times called "Taking Science on Faith" in…
laelaps | November 25, 2007
Yet another skull from the AMNH Hall of Primates, this time of a gorilla. This skull is quite different from those of the other apes I've put up recently, especially in the presence of a prominent sagittal crest for the attachment of jaw muscles.
laelaps | November 24, 2007I absolutely love this song, "Bastard" by Ben Folds,and Songs for Silverman is one of my most favorite albums of recent years;
The Ben Folds Five song "Best Imitation of Myself" (although this version is actually off the solo album Ben Folds Live) will always be among my favorites as well (don't be alarmed, there's no actual video component to this one);
laelaps | November 24, 2007
Today in 1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published (and immediately sold out). While Darwin published many other books during his life (including the very popular The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms With Observations of Their Habits), On the Origin of Species is by far the most famous and influential, and it is my own shame that my only copy is a small pocket version of it (although I do own 2nd edition copies of The Descent of Man and The Variation of…
laelaps | November 24, 2007The newest installment of The Boneyard is up at Self-Designed Student, and it's a whopper. Amanda has done an excellent job of combing the blogosphere for the best paleo-posts of the last two weeks, and I highly suggest that you do yourself the favor of checking it out!
The next edition will be up in two weeks at The Other 95%.\, and I'll be hosting Linnaeus' Legacy on December 5th, so get those links in soon!
laelaps | November 24, 2007Yesterday I noted how many of the Hominidae pass the "mirror test"; orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Gorillas, however, fail the test. Why should this be? The following video might give us a clue;
The juvenile in the baboon is scared as soon as it sees itself in the mirror, and this makes sense because direct eye contact is considered aggressive in baboons, just as it is in gorillas. The key to passing the mirror test is the ability to look at the image in the mirror long enough to match up the movements and realize that the…
laelaps | November 24, 2007The idea of a lost world, harboring Mesozoic remnants on a plateau in a steaming jungle or in a "hot spot" at one of the poles, has long enthralled writers of fiction, especially when there were truly blank spots on the map that had yet to be explored. The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle provided as wellspring of inspiration for later works (the film adaptation delivering convincing reconstructed dinosaurs for that era), the tale of a different lost world on Skull Island (King Kong) becoming a classic in cinema. Over time, however, such stories began to fade away, a rather late entry…
laelaps | November 24, 2007
Like many of the other photographs I've posted over the last week, this one also comes from the Primate Hall of the AMNH, this skeleton belonging to a gibbon (Family Hylobatidae). Gibbons are often called the "lesser apes" (they are not included in the Family Hominidae, which includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, humans, and extinct relatives), but they are among the most charming of all primates, at least in my opinion. What you might notice in the skull, however, is the size of the canines, a feature that might be unexpected in a monogamous animal. Enlarged canines are…
laelaps | November 23, 2007As Sideshow Bob once opined, television is essentially a "bottomless chum bucket," and even when I am petsitting at a house with cable I usually prefer to read over endlessly channel surfing for a nature program that I probably won't like anyway. Some programs on PBS, however, are notable exceptions, and I recently came across some YouTube videos of a Nature documentary all about baboons that I wish I had caught when it aired. I didn't always like baboons, but between reading the excellent book A Primate's Memoir (if you haven't read it already, I urge you to do so) and taking a course with…
laelaps | November 23, 2007When I look in the mirror to shave every few mornings or so, I know I'm looking at a reflection of myself and not another human who happens to be doing just the same thing that I'm doing at the same time. Even though I can be a bit shy in person to person contact, I am not afraid of eye contact, nor was I when I was a child, which allowed me to make the connection that the image I saw in a mirror was really me many years ago. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and oranguatans can recognize themselves in a mirror as well (gibbons and capuchin monkeys can't, even though they can use mirrors in different…
laelaps | November 23, 2007
There is a wide diversity of machairodont sabercats in the fossil record, but the genus Smilodon is undoubtedly the celebrity of the group. Indeed, Smilodon seems to set the bar for other saber-toothed predators in the popular media, the carnivore being synonymous with the La Brea Tar Pits (even though the Dire Wolf [Canis dirus] is more numerous at the famous predator trap). This is not terribly surprising, though; the remains of Smilodon are plentiful, the skeleton can be fully reconstructed, and its enlarged canines make it look terrifyingly fierce, making it the Pleistocene mammalian…
laelaps | November 22, 2007One of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving growing up was watching some of the natural history programs that would often air during the day, anxiously awaiting the later galliform feast. One such show I remember quite well was a PBS series called The Dinosaurs! (Part 1: "The Monsters Emerge," Part 2: "Flesh on the Bones," Part 3: "The Nature of the Beast," and Part 4: "Death of the Dinosaur"). Unfortunately, the series is only available on VHS today (yet another reason for me to eventually purchase a DVD burner with a VHS deck in it), but someone has been kind enough to upload some of the…
laelaps | November 22, 2007
This is the impressive skull of a Saltwater Crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), the largest living crocodylian. What I find so interesting about the skulls of these animals is that the flesh is so closely attached to the underlying bone, the skulls of crocodylians requiring little imagination to discern what the animal would have looked like in life. While such a fearsome animal may cause us to keep track of how many deaths it is responsible for (the Saltwater Crocodile being the most dangerous to humans), the total number of deaths these animals are responsible for absolutely pales in…
laelaps | November 21, 2007
A holiday Barosaurus outside the American Museum of Natural History.
In theory I should have internet access over the next few days, but there is a possibility that I won't, in which case I just want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. Remember to appreciate the derived dinosaurian anatomy of your gobbler, especially the wishbone. Indeed, this is the time of year where paleontologists get to lecture everyone at the dinner table while the rest of the family rolls their eyes, but it's good to stop for a moment and remember that more than 65 million years ago the relatives of the turkey…
laelaps | November 21, 2007I've been excited about the release of the Aussie killer croc flick Rogue for quite some time now, the film looking like a better-than-average horror story (at least compared to films like Primeval and, shudder, Lake Placid 2). My patience, however, is being stretched rather than rewarded, as it appears that the release date for Rogue has been pushed back to January 2008 even though some movie websites still list it as being released on November 27, 2007 (and the official website still says it was supposed to be out November 8, 2007). Adding to this confusion, there's already an Amazon.com…
laelaps | November 21, 2007
ID advocates continue to try and peddle an intellectual "dead parrot" as if there's nothing at all wrong with it. Hopefully Polk County citizens won't be duped, but it looks like the local school board are a bit too creationism-friendly.
At the conclusion of the PBS documentary "Judgment Day" aired only a few weeks ago, various people from both sides of the evolution/intelligent design debacle in Dover, PA said that they don't expect the decision of Judge Jones that ID is creationism (and not science, to boot) to stop other school districts of trying to weasel intelligent design into the…
laelaps | November 21, 2007
Those who remember the Clinton sex scandal will probably recall the classic line "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," Bill Clinton floundering about in order to obfuscate inquiries into his improper conduct. While this is example is a somewhat comedic attempt at playing with the definitions of words, it is often important to consider what certain words mean in their past & present historical contexts, and in the book Science Talk Daniel Patrick Thurs takes on the evolution of what we mean by "science" and how that influences the gap between what (and who) is included…