laelaps | September 28, 2009For a handful of some of my favorite photos of big cats, check out this post on the website Paw Talk.
laelaps | September 28, 2009
A bison (Bison bison) near the side of the road on Antelope Island, Utah.
laelaps | September 27, 2009
A shot of the scenery taken on the way back from an early-morning hike to the Red Fleet Reservoir dinosaur track site in northern Utah.
laelaps | September 26, 2009
There are some new residents at the Bronx Zoo: spotted hyenas! I had never seen a live spotted hyena before, and I was quite surprised to find them in what had previously been the cheetah enclosure near the giraffe house. For more on spotted hyenas, see Sci's excellent post on hyena mating or my short essay on the "predatory intelligence" of hyenas in the online journal Antennae (p. 23-25).
laelaps | September 25, 2009
During my studies of the history of paleontology I have often stumbled upon the work of the same scientists over and over again. The 19th century anatomists Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley, especially, worked on a variety of fossil vertebrates and were critical to the establishment of paleontology as an evolutionary science, yet there are other influential researchers who have not retained the same level of notoriety. The Scottish paleontologist Robert Broom, an immigrant to South Africa who belonged to the generation of scientists after Owen and Huxley, was among these lesser-known…
laelaps | September 24, 2009
Scotland did not have much to offer 19-year-old Andrew Geddes Bain. Both his parents had died when he was a child, and even though he was educated his job prospects were few. When his uncle, Lieutenant Colonel William Geddes, left for South Africa in 1816 young Andrew decided to go with him to the British empire's southern frontier.
Once he arrived there, Bain found work where he could. He worked as a saddler, an explorer, an ivory trader, a soldier, and a road-builder, but in 1837 Bain read a book that would inspire him to look a little bit closer at the rugged landscape around him. That…
laelaps | September 24, 2009This year has seen an explosion of books written by science bloggers, and it looks like the trend is going to continue well into 2010.
Jason Rosenhouse recently published The Monty Hall Problem and is hard at work on a new title about what goes on at creationist conferences.
Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum released Unscientific America, and Kirshenbaum is nearing completion on a new book, The Science of Kissing.
The ever-popular Carl Zimmer brought us two new gems, Microcosm and the soon-to-be-released The Tangled Bank. I can't wait to see what's next.
Rebecca Skloot's long-…
laelaps | September 23, 2009
A group of small birds on the back of a bison (Bison bison). Photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.
laelaps | September 23, 2009
A pair of bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), photographed at Grizzly Lookout in Yellowstone National Park.
laelaps | September 22, 2009One evening, about a year ago, my wife returned home from some church function or other and said "I just saw a juvenile baboon beg to handle a mother's baby."
I had no idea what she was talking about. Where had she seen a baboon? Had she gone to the zoo instead?
In truth Tracey did not see an actual baboon. What she saw was an adolescent female human approach a new mother in an attempt to handle the mother's newborn child. This behavior is not restricted to humans. It is seen in other primates, such as baboons, something Tracey and I had both recently learned about through Dorothy Cheney and…
laelaps | September 22, 2009
A raven (Corvus corax), photographed at Yellowstone National Park. While there I observed that some of the birds would pick the splattered insects off cars for an easy meal.
laelaps | September 21, 2009The other day I had a little chat with Scicurious.
We talked about the usual things; the latest academic frustration, weekend plans, &c., but sooner or later we got onto the topic of science popularization. We both work hard to not only make science accessible, but to make it interesting, yet our daily pageviews our abysmally low compared to the stats of political, sports, or gossip blogs. We are trying as hard as we can to be good popularizers yet relatively few people are interested. Why?
This question has been made all the more frustrating by a handful of books published this year that…
laelaps | September 21, 2009
A male pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), photographed at Antelope Island in Utah.
laelaps | September 20, 2009
A view of Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park. Those are bison (Bison bison) in the foreground.
laelaps | September 19, 2009
North American river otters (Lontra canadensis), photographed in the Lamar Valley at Yellowstone National Park.
laelaps | September 18, 2009
Contrary to their herbivorous habits in the wild, the elephants that appear in the long-running animated show The Simpsons are often carnivorous. In almost every episode featuring an elephant the pachyderm puts another animal in its mouth (i.e. Bart's pet elephant "Stampy") if it does not actually consume it. An exception is the Asian elephant in the episode in which Kwik-E-Mart shopkeeper Apu gets married, "The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons."
Fortunately for the wedding guests, the Asian elephant Apu rides in on does not attempt to eat anyone. Instead the elephant is terrified by a mouse it…
laelaps | September 18, 2009
One of the "staircases" of rock in the thermal basin of Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone.