laelaps | May 13, 2009This coming Saturday the American Museum of Natural History is going to lift the veil on their new temporary exhibition Extreme Mammals, and I was fortunate enough to get an invitation to the blogger preview being held the day before. This coming Friday from about 4 to 5:30 PM I'll be wandering around the new exhibit, taking photos and (hopefully) blogging about it right from the scene. Expect lots of pictures of Ambulocetus, Uintatherium, and other fossil beasts that evening.
If you can't make it to NYC during the run of the exhibit, though, you can check out a lot of the materials being…
laelaps | May 13, 2009
A group of herring gulls (Larus argentatus) tries to avoid an incoming wave. Photographed at Spring Lake, New Jersey.
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laelaps | May 12, 2009
At this moment there are more anti-creationism books available than I care to count. While they can be exciting for neophytes to dig into many repackage the same information and arguments over and over again, and they can quickly grow boring for those who have been following the creationism controversy closely. That is why I was excited to see that the new book For the Rock Record: Geologists on Intelligent Design was going to allow geologists and paleontologists to respond to creationist claims.
The primary difficulty with the volume, however, is that intelligent design does not have much…
laelaps | May 12, 2009Over at loveart there is a great interview with Sb's own Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera. There's plenty there about science, journalism, art, blogging, and how they all intersect, so I definitely recommend that you give it a look!
laelaps | May 9, 2009I never really liked the many incarnations of Star Trek on television. I remember the episode of the Next Generation where the crew was devolving, but that's about it. That's why I was a little unsure of whether I would enjoy the big screen reboot of the franchise. After just seeing it, though, I have to say I was very impressed. The film really fulfilled the potential the series carried while honoring the source material. There are a few other science fiction extravaganzas I plan on seeing this summer (i.e. Terminator: Salvation and Transformers 2), but it is going to be hard to beat Star…
laelaps | May 9, 2009
A domesticated horse (Equus ferus caballus), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
laelaps | May 8, 2009
The skeleton of Inostrancevia, a Permian synapsid from modern-day Russia. From the American Museum Journal.
The science of paleontology has long been concerned with searching out the origins of modern groups of animals, but at the turn of the 20th century there were frustratingly few transitional fossils. That evolution had occurred was generally agreed upon, but where the transitional forms might be found, what they would look like, and what mechanisms drove their evolution remained disputed. Among the murkiest of these subjects was the origin of mammals.
In an 1898 letter published in…
laelaps | May 7, 2009Do you like Permian synapsids? If you do then you definitely should check out this month's edition of the ART Evolved carnival. I particularly like Nima Sassani's Greg-Paul-like illustration of a pack of Inostrancevia.
laelaps | May 7, 2009As reported in the New York Times Carole C. Noon, the founder of Save the Chimps, passed away this week. She was 59 and suffered from pancreatic cancer.
I first learned of Carole and Save the Chimps when I saw the documentary Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History. Since 1997 Noon and her organization have worked to acquire and care for chimpanzees used in biomedical experiments, the entrainment industry, or kept as pets.
One of the biggest wins for Save the Chimps was when the organization was able to rescue 266 chimpanzees that were being improperly kept (and even abused) at the Coulston…
laelaps | May 7, 2009
Mother gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) Mandara holding her child Kibibi. Photographed at the National Zoo.
laelaps | May 6, 2009I was planning on writing about G.G. Simpson's influence on paleoanthropology today (and more generally why paleoanthropology seems isolated from vertebrate paleontology), but the papers I need are beyond my reach. If someone has the proper access could they please send me;
Simpson, G.G. 1950. Some Principles of Historical Biology Bearing on Human Origins. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Bio, 15, 55-66
doi:10.1101/SQB.1950.015.01.008
and
Laporte, L.F. 1991. George Gaylord Simpson as mentor and apologist for paleoanthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 84, 1-16
doi:10.1002/ajpa.…
laelaps | May 5, 2009
Tai Shan the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). Photographed at the National Zoo.
laelaps | May 5, 2009
The Calaveras skull, front view. From Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America.
In February of 1866 the Illinois-born blacksmith James Mattenson* decided to try his luck beneath Bald Hill in Calaveras County, California. There was a chance that the subterranean depths of the hill were streaked with gold, and to this end Mattenson sunk a mine shaft into the rock. For one hundred feet below the surface the hill was nothing but solidified lava, but fifty feet below that the hill was made up of interspersed layers of gravel and volcanic tuffs. Mattenson had…
laelaps | May 5, 2009Since Bora mentioned it...
The hungry hunters go after some jumbo-sized Syndyoceras.
laelaps | May 4, 2009
A swarm of hunters tries to take down a Uintatherium. Nevermind that it lived over 35 million years before the first hominins appeared...