laelaps | November 1, 2009
A slab containing many specimens of the Jurassic ammonite Dactylioceras. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 31, 2009
Dinosaur National Monument, Utah. The glass building houses the famous fossil wall and will soon be replaced with a new permanent visitor center.
laelaps | October 30, 2009
Whenever I sit down to write an entry for this blog I remind myself that I might not always speak the same language as the people I am trying to reach. A statement that might be technically accurate, such as "Mammuthus primigenius was a Late Pleistocene proboscidean with a Holarctic distribution", will likely cause nonspecialist readers to go cross-eyed and vow never to visit this blog again. Instead I have to remember what it was like when I began to teach myself about paleontology and evolution. What do those words mean? And how can I quickly and accurately define them without sacrificing…
laelaps | October 30, 2009
A reconstruction of the skull of Torvosaurus based upon the few parts of skull material that have been recovered so far. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 29, 2009
As strange as it might seem, the living African and Asian elephants are only the remnants of what was once a very diverse array of proboscideans. In the not-too-distant past elephants and their closest relatives occupied Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, Central America, and South America, but almost all of them had perished by about 10,000 years ago.* Of these recently-extinct forms the most iconic was the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, which was covered in long coats of shaggy hair. They were cold-weather mammoths, inhabiting chillier regions than their North American cousin the…
laelaps | October 29, 2009
The sun peeks through the clouds of a passing storm. Photographed from the Strawberry Bay campground in Utah.
laelaps | October 28, 2009
Skeletons of the early horse-relative Eohippus (left) and modern Equus (right). From Animals of the Past by Lucas.
During the early 20th century many biologists were considering a variety of mechanisms other than natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change. The trouble was that many of those researchers were often vague when it came to the details of how such alternative processes might work. Such was the case with paleontologist Frederic Augustus Lucas, who apparently preferred to think of evolution as variations stimulated by the environment building upon themselves…
laelaps | October 28, 2009
A restoration of Utahraptor in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 27, 2009
An American mastodon, Mammut americanum, from F.A. Lucas' Animals Before Man in North America.
Throughout high school and college I was taught the same thing about the history of science. Young earth creationists had a stranglehold on explanations for life's origins until the fateful year of 1859 when Charles Darwin convinced all but the most ardent fundamentalists that evolution by means of natural selection was a reality. It is a neat and tidy story, a tale in which one book changes the world forever, and it is completely wrong.
As I started to dig deeper into the history of science I…
laelaps | October 27, 2009
A restoration of Archelon in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 26, 2009Last week I reviewed part 1 of the upcoming NOVA miniseries, "Becoming Human." It was a fair introduction to early human origins even if it was marred by persistent references to an illusory onward-and-upward march of human progress. Where the first episode primarily concerned itself with australopithecines, however, Homo erectus is the star of part 2.
The first part of this episode recapitulates what was covered in the last installment. Viewers are brought back to the African rift valley, the place where the "huge evolutionary step" between apes and humans took place. This is a bit of a…
laelaps | October 26, 2009
A cast of Dimetrodon in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 24, 2009
The view behind our campsite at the Green River Campground at Dinosaur National Monument, Utah.
laelaps | October 23, 2009The stench emanating from the putrefying mammoth carcass carried for miles.
Though kept out of the sun by the long shadows of the surrounding pine trees, the corpse reeked as the flesh, sinew, and bone of the mammoth's body were slowly parceled out into the ecosystem by scavengers. The woolly elephant's eyes had been pecked out long ago, and the intricate musculature of its trunk lay in tatters, but there was still plenty of meat to go around.
The grisly death site buzzed with activity as less magisterial creatures went about their dirty work. Black birds jostled for the best access to blood-…
laelaps | October 23, 2009
A black bear (Ursus americanus), photographed in Grand Teton National Park. It was the first of two my wife and I saw walking along the Leigh Lake trail that afternoon.
laelaps | October 22, 2009If you have not heard enough about fossil primates in the past month already, I will be on today's edition of BBC Radio 4's "Material World" to talk about Ida and Afradapis. My interview will follow one about Ardipithecus ramidus with Tim White and Yohannes Haile-Selassie, so if you are interested in primate evolution you should definitely tune in. The program airs in the afternoon in the UK, but in case you miss it it should be available through the show's website.
laelaps | October 22, 2009
With a park ranger so close, this Yellowstone bison (Bison bison) makes sure to cross at the intersection.
laelaps | October 21, 2009
The restored lower jaw of Afradapis. From the Nature paper.
This past May a 47 million year old fossil primate named Darwinius masillae, better known as "Ida", burst onto the public scene. The lemur-like creature was proclaimed to be the "missing link" and the "ancestor of us all", but the actual science behind Ida was drowned by a tide of media sensationalism. Press releases and documentaries proclaimed that Ida would "CHANGE EVERYTHING", but despite such promises the sky remained blue, my cats continued to wake me up at 5:30 AM, and the primate evolutionary tree did not suddenly…