laelaps | June 29, 2009
A young Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | June 27, 2009Here are a few snapshots of the foster kittens that have been running around the place lately:
Psghetti. She was adopted the day I took this photo.
Meatball. She is Psghetti's sister, and still needs a good home.
Leela. She loves to "help" when I'm working at the computer.
Teddy. He and his brother Stitch have grown quite a bit since I last posted a photo of them.
And, as a bonus, part of a really beautiful sunset as seen from my office. To see the heavy rain in this lighting was spectacular.
laelaps | June 27, 2009
The theme from the animated (1986) Transformers film.
I had promised myself that I would not blog about Transformers 2. I knew it was going to be awful, but against my better judgment I went anyway. (Given that MST3K was one of my favorite shows, I figured I could at least have some fun riffing on it.) Now that I have seen it, though, I must break my promise.
Military fetishism, incomprehensible action sequences, sexism, racism, and gaping plot holes pervade big budget summer action movies (i.e. anything by Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich, &c.), but there was one scene in particular that…
laelaps | June 27, 2009
An American toad (Bufo americanus), photographed along the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey.
laelaps | June 26, 2009I have been thoroughly enjoying my copy of The Paleobiological Revolution (edited by David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse), so much so that it has inspired me to get to work on some new academic papers. I will post a review of the book sometime this weekend, but here is a quote that is going to be very important to my discussion from G.G. Simpson's 1944 masterpiece Tempo and Mode in Evolution:
The attempted synthesis of paleontology and genetics, an essential part of the present study, may be particularly surprising and possibly hazardous. Not long ago paleontologists felt that a geneticist was a…
laelaps | June 25, 2009
Richard Owen's restoration of Glyptodon. From Brinkman (2009).
Perhaps one of the primary reasons that there is so much to say about Charles Darwin is that he left us so much material to scrutinize. Outside of his famous printed works there are numerous notebooks and a staggering amount of personal correspondence which are constantly being parsed for insights into how he formulated his evolutionary ideas. Indeed, there is still scholarly debate about when Darwin embraced the idea of evolution and what observations spurred him to that intellectual turning point, and a new paper by Paul…
laelaps | June 24, 2009
Since the early 20th century, at least, young earth creationists have attempted to blame Charles Darwin for genocide, world wars, and whatever political movements seemed most threatening at one time or another (i.e. communism). What Darwin is faulted with changes with the times, but most recently young earth creationists have focused on hot topics from Darwin's own era: racism and slavery. From the Answers in Genesis tract Darwin's Plantation to the upcoming (and unethically produced) documentary The Voyage That Shook the World, creationists claim that Darwin's evolutionary vision undermined…
laelaps | June 24, 2009
Mother gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) Mandara holding her child Kibibi. Photographed at the National Zoo.
laelaps | June 23, 2009If you can handle some more hype about human evolution, here's a snippet from the (more or less) recent BBC documentary "The Ape That Took Over the World." It is about the controversial placement of Kenyanthropus in hominid evolution;
I do not have time to do a full write-up here (especially since I have not as yet seen the show in full), but the evolutionary placement of Kenyanthropus is more controversial than this clip admits. Kenyanthropus appears to be a hominin, but whether it represents a new genus, an already-known form of Australopithecus, or something else is still being debated…
laelaps | June 22, 2009Fossil teeth can be tricky things. In 1922 paleontologist H.F. Osborn believed that he had found the first evidence of an extinct fossil ape from North America on the basis of a worn molar from Nebraska, but it later turned out to be the tooth of a prehistoric peccary. Four years later, by contrast, Davidson Black named a new species of ancient human on the basis of a handful of teeth recovered from Dragon Bone Hill in China. These turned out to belong to Homo erectus. Both paleontologists made bold steps on the basis of sparingly little evidence, but with entirely different outcomes.
Last…
laelaps | June 22, 2009
Rokan the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), photographed at the National Zoo.
laelaps | June 21, 2009
A calf and its mother (Bos primigenius taurus), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
laelaps | June 20, 2009They Might Be Giants is soon going to release a new educational album called Here Comes Science, and one of the songs on it is about paleontology! It's hard to make out most of the lyrics from the video below, but it's called "I am a Paleontologist."
laelaps | June 20, 2009
Two Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | June 19, 2009
A red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus), photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.