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As a follow-up to yesterday's photo of a juvenile Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), here's a photo of the adult. The differences between the adult and juvenile are quite striking; the adult skull has a more pronounced brow ridge, smaller incisors compared to the rest of the skull, more prominent canines, and is a bit more prognathus (the jaw sticks out more). Indeed, the infants and juveniles of these apes are not just small clones of the adults but change in important ways as they grow and mature, although as I noted in the comments yesterday juvenile chimpanzees seem to be strikingly familiar…
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The new issue December issue of National Geographic, a Dracorex peering at me from the cover, arrived in the mailbox today, and I can't say that I was a big fan of the dinosaur feature that I blogged about a few days ago. While the main body of the article, an essay by John Updike, is alright, the thing that first grabbed my attention was the mention that perhaps Spinosaurus was "buffalo-backed," the elongated neural spines along its back supported masses of fat or muscle rather than a sail. Some pencil sketches illustrate the differing hypotheses, although I have to say that the "hump"…
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Things have been pretty busy lately; between schoolwork, my job, and reading I've been booked up over the past few weeks, making my blogging a little less prolific than I'd normally like. Here's a quick rundown of some recent personal news, though, that either didn't fit into anything else I wrote or might provide fodder for upcoming posts.
I've been able to rip through three books since the weekend; Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Life in the Triassic, Science Talk, and Discarded Science (expect a review of Science Talk within the next 24 hours). Tonight I picked up The Red Queen, although I'm…
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Sexual dimorphism in organisms is nothing new; it has long been known that in certain species one sex is often larger, flashier, or somehow markedly different than the other. In some species like the Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus), the mail carries a brightly colored train that is used to advertise to prospective female mates, while in the deep-sea anglerfish Suborder Ceratioidea the males are absolutely minuscule when compared to the females, fusing to the bodies of the larger sex and ultimately becoming little more than a sperm supply. Such differences are contrasted with the almost non-…
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The answer is probably readily apparent, but I thought that I'd put this picture up without identifying it straight away. What do you think it's from? I have no doubt most people will get it right, but ithis image reminds me one of the most interesting mechanisms for evolutionary change for another species.
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There are plenty of glossy, coffee table books out there, but while many are filled with beautiful photography very few offer anything of value in the text. Evolution by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu (text) and Patrick Gries (photography) is a striking exception, however, the informative prose wonderfully framing some of the best black and white photography that I've seen.
There is something strangely alluring about skeletons; they are not only the functional architecture of the bodies of vertebrates, but also have a strange aesthetic charm, hundreds of millions of years of evolution creating…
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Although the dinosaur halls of the AMNH are perhaps the most popular of all the exhibitions in the museum, the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs usually doesn't get as much attention as the Hall of Dinosaur Superstars Saurischian Dinosaurs. A few stop and look, but most pass right on through. "Triceratops? Great. Stegosaurus? Wow. Hadrosaurs? You've seen one, you've seen 'em all." This is a shame, especially because tucked away on the left hand side of the hall is a growth series of Protoceratops this is simply amazing, and right across from it is the famous diorama of a male and female…
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Usually when I get back from trips to the AMNH I unleash all the best photographs I took during the day in one post. This time, however, I think I'm going to parcel them out one by one in the Picture of the Day slot so they each get due consideration. This shot, however, is one of my favorites; the skull of an Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) in the Hall of Primates. It was disturbing to look at the skeletons and stuffed mounts of animals so like us put on display, the lemurs looking unnaturally fierce with cartoonish snarls and the great apes being merely shadows of the living animals they once…
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Update will be a bit sparse today; I'm headed off to the AMNH in New York City with the undergraduate anthropology club, but hopefully I'll get some photos up later this evening when I arrive home. Among my favorite 4th floor fossils I'll also be headed back to the human evolution exhibit where the above fossil, the skull of Proconsul is displayed. Initially discovered in 1909, there are now as many as four species of this Miocene primate, although debate still goes on as to whether it is actually an ape (putting it closer to the line that led to hominids) or closer to Old World Monkeys (…
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As we've seen with the last two movies featured here, there are some animals that naturally make good movie monsters. Sure, filmmakers might tack on a few feet and enlarge the size of their teeth, but sharks, crocodiles, and bears only require a setting and a foolish group of cast members potential victims to provide for a feature length film. It is the last of these "natural monsters" that we'll be dealing with today in the 1976 horror film Grizzly, featuring an antagonist that deadlier than your av-er-age bear.
At it's heart, Grizzly is the tragic story of a cousin of Gentle Ben who loves…
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As some of you might know, in addition to my cats Chase and Charlotte I keep my apartment open to "transient" cats that need someplace to stay before getting adopted. Beatrice was the first cat we took in, but when she went to stay at a local Petsmart in the hopes that someone would see her there and take her home we were told that a little orange kitten needed a home to be socialized in before he was adopted. I named him Hermes, and he's the little fuzzball pictured watching Logan's Run with me in the picture above. He also went to adoption day at Petsmart today, but even though he was only…
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Just in case you haven't had enough of enigmatic dinosaurs over the past 24 hours, National Geographic is apparently planning a new article all about "Bizarre Dinosaurs" in their December 2007 issue. How do I know this? If you go to the National Geographic Society website featuring some reconstructions of a certain sauropod celebrity and click the "Dinosaur Wallpaper" button on the left, a chorus line of odd dinosaurs shows up with the caption "From 'Bizarre Dinosaurs,' National Geographic, December 2007." There's Amargasaurus, Carnotaurus, Dracorex, Epidendrosaurus, and (one of my personal…
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John Scalzi visited the infamous AiG Creation Museum, took a slew of pictures, and now he's running a caption contest. You can find the full set of photos online and all the details of the contest can be found here (the deadline is this coming Sunday), but don't forget to check out the initial report on the trip to the House of Ham.
[Hat-tip to Molly who pointed me to this (and created her own humorous image)]
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I'm sure other Gmail users have noticed how they modify the ads that show up based upon the content of your e-mails; a little creepy, but I can understand the logic of it. Still, discussing evolution in an e-mail exchange seems to only to attract creationist adverts, and I am sick and tired of seeing advertisements for Expelled and "refutations" of evolution from everystudent.com all over my inbox. I don't think I've ever seen an advert for something positive about evolution, and that's really a shame; if people are talking about evolution via e-mail they're only going to get links to…
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I made yesterday all about sauropods as the announcement of Nigersaurus was sure to be big in the news, but in all the hubub some significant events were overlooked. First off, my fellow scibling Darren of Tetrapod Zoology fame announced the publication in the journal Palaeontology of a paper he co-authored with sauropod specialist Mike Taylor on an "immensely" amazing find that was right under everyone's noses for some time; Xenoposeidon proneneukos. Make sure you read Darren's summary, the SV-POW! coverage, and Mike Taylor's summary (with a link to the paper itself!). This announcement…
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The Giant Anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) is one of my all-time favorite animals, and anytime I get to see one up close is a treat. Perhaps my affinity to them stems from the fact that they are simply so bizarre, the long tubular jaw, huge claws, and bushy tail making these animals seem like they were assembled from leftover parts in a creation myth. Ant-eating seems to have been a lucrative niche, though, as Pangolins (Manis sp.) are convergent with Myrmecophaga in having no teeth in their jaw, large claws to rip into ant/termite nests, and a long sticky tongue. Such similar morphology…
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Paleontologist Paul Sereno with the bizarre skull of the strange sauropod Nigersaurus taqueti, announced today in the open-access journal PLoS.
When you hear the word "sauropod," what's the first image that comes to mind? For many people it's an immense, dull colored behemoth lumbering across the landscape (or perhaps wallowing in a swamp if you were first introduced prior to the Dinosaur Renaissance), its long neck stretching out to crop conifers from the high branches of nearby trees. Edwin Colbert pins down this classical image of "Brontosaurus" in his book The Year of the Dinosaur (…
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Barosaurus lentus by Michael Skrepnick
Barosaurus lentus is one of the many dinosaurs that are both familiar and rare, one skeleton being mostly complete but the 5 others that are currently known are much less so. Known from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western United States, this dinosaur is perhaps most famously (and controversially) reconstructed in the Grand Rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History, rearing up to protect a juvenile from a marauding Allosaurus, although a recent news story from the Royal Ontario Museum tells of the second most complete specimen…
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There could scarcely be a better name for the skeletal remains of the extinct sauropod pictured above; Apatosaurus, the "deceptive lizard," proving to be the center of controversy for many years. The "tale of the missing skull" and the Apatosaurus/"Brontosaurus" controversies are perhaps the most well known, coming to a head when the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp mixing the right body with the wrong name, but the debate over which name is right (and which skull should be on the mounts) has often centered on preference as much as scientific reality. The skeletons have been corrected and…
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I originally wrote this post off the top of my head, groping (somewhat unsuccessfully) to find the right words to express my enthrallment with natural history. I edited it substantially here without changing the main points of the argument, and I feel that while it could use some improvement it stands as a much better piece of writing as it is now.
Up to my ankles in marl, the July sun blazing overhead, the remnants of an epoch long vanished from this earth see the light of day again for the first time in over 65 million years. There is nothing particularly spectacular about the chocolate-…