laelaps | June 4, 2010
A Utah prairie dog (Cynomys parvidens), photographed in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.
laelaps | June 3, 2010
The skull of a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), photographed at the AMNH's "Extreme Mammals" exhibit.
There was something strange about the assemblage of Homo erectus fossils found at Zhoukoudian - the famous 750,000 - 200,000 year old site in China popularly known as Dragon Bone Hill. Despite the abundance of skulls and teeth, there were hardly any remains of the hominins from below the neck. Where were the bodies?
The majority of Homo erectus fossils from Zhoukoudian were discovered and studied by an international team of scientists during the 1920's and 1930's. (Unfortunately most of…
laelaps | June 3, 2010
A golden-mantled ground squirrel (Spermophilus lateralis), photographed in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.
laelaps | June 3, 2010As you can probably tell from the last two "photos of the day", I'm back from Utah. It was a wonderful trip, but I have been too swamped with other projects/commitments to get this blog back up to speed. Regular blog entries will resume soon.
After reading S.J. Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack while in transit to and from the beehive state, however, I started to reconsider what this blog is meant to be. Specifically, I am thinking of writing higher-quality essays less often than simply trying to feed this blog every weekday. This will be an experiment (Laelaps is, after all, a writing lab first…
laelaps | June 2, 2010
Just a few of the many hoodoos which can be seen in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.
laelaps | June 1, 2010
Grosvenor Arch, photographed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah.
laelaps | May 31, 2010
The skull of Paranthropus boisei ("Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.).
Louis Leakey had a problem.
During the summer of 1959 he and his wife Mary recovered the skull fragments of an early human scattered about the fossil deposits of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The skull had been deposited among the shattered bones of fossil mammals and a collection stone tools, and this led Louis to conclude that it was one of our early ancestors. Only an ancestor of Homo sapiens could be a toolmaker, Louis thought, but the skull looked nothing like that of our species.
When Mary fit all the pieces…
laelaps | May 28, 2010
Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009)
When I hear the phrase "early human relative" I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely - it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed "Early human relative predates even dinosaurs"! Was this another fossil that…
laelaps | May 27, 2010
A young California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | May 27, 2010
The skull of Nyctereutes lockwoodi as seen from the side and above. From Geraads et al, 2010.
In 2006 paleoanthropologists working in Ethiopia made a spectacular announcement - they had found the well-preserved remains of a juvenile Australopithecus afarensis, one of our prehistoric hominin relatives. Quickly dubbed "Lucy's baby" this 3.4 million year old specimen graced the cover of Nature and numerous news reports, yet its description represents only a fraction of the paleontological work being done in the area. Many other fossil animals have been found along the banks of the Awash, too…
laelaps | May 26, 2010
The skeleton of Palaeobatrachus from Lake Enspel, Germany. From Wuttke and Poschmann, 2010.
In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin said of the fossil record:
For my part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, in which…
laelaps | May 25, 2010
Zeff the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | May 25, 2010
Close up of one of the Pipe Creek Sinkhole coprolites showing structures interpreted as hair (A) and a close-up of a mold in the coprolite thought to have been made by a hair (B). From Farlow et al, 2010.
Time and again I have stressed that every fossil bone tells a story, and, in a different way, so do coprolites. They are small snapshots of a moment in the life of an organism, often preserving bits of their meals, and while they may not get top billing in museum halls, they are among the most pungent reminders that weird and wonderful organisms really did live during the remote past. As…