laelaps | April 12, 2009Ah, Easter. The holiday when many people ask "Wait, bunnies don't lay eggs. What gives?" Not everyone is a fan of the Easter Bunny, though. In Australia rabbits are a major pest and some have attempted to raise awareness of a local, endangered marsupial called the bilby by offering it as an alternative Easter mascot.
A greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis).
Personally, I think another Australian mammal is a better fit as an Easter mascot. The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is a monotreme, or one of the few mammals in the world that lays eggs. I would much prefer an Easter platypus to an…
laelaps | April 10, 2009After the recent eruption of geo-blogs here on Sb I bet physics fans will be glad to hear that we have just added an astrophysics blog, Starts With a Bang, to the stable. If photography is more your thing, though, you should check out the other new addition; a photo blog with rotating guest bloggers. First up is entomologist Alex Wild, and what he has shared so far has already made me a little envious.
laelaps | April 10, 2009
An artist's restoration of Hurdia. From the Science paper.
It is not easy working on Cambrian fossils. The petrified treasures are found in only a few places in the world, and even though many exhibit exquisite preservation they come from a time when life on earth would have looked very unfamiliar. One such creature, Anomalocaris, was a three foot long invertebrate that swam by undulating a series of lobes on either side of its body. In front of its mouth were two spiked tendrils that may have helped situate prey items to be processed by its conveyor belt of crushing plates that was its…
laelaps | April 9, 2009
When I first happened upon Sean B. Carroll's new book, Remarkable Creatures my first thought was "Damn! He beat me to it!" For over a year I have been preparing my own pop-sci book about paleontology, evolution, and the history of science, and as I skimmed through Remarkable Creatures I saw that Carroll had already covered a number of the same subjects. I would have been interested in Carroll's book regardless of my own project, but given my goal I knew I had to read it.
Fortunately for me Remarkable Creatures is not as similar to my own project as I had first thought. Instead it is a…
laelaps | April 7, 2009Ever since it was made available last month I have been anxiously awaiting the first formal reviews of the new edition of The Open Laboratory: The best science writing on blogs 2008. Today the first appeared over at the New Scientist, but much of it had little to do with The Open Laboratory itself. Although I was happy to see that my contribution about what Joseph Hooker's kids did to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species manuscript merited a mention, the rest of the review left me somewhat perplexed.
According to the author, Michael Le Page, the review was heavily influenced by the…
laelaps | April 7, 2009About a month ago I posted a photograph of one of my favorite subjects, one of the snow leopards (Panthera uncia) from the Bronx Zoo. Shortly after I put it up Judy, who blogs at crazybasenji.com, asked if I could send along a higher-res copy so that she could paint it! I was delighted by the idea, and I am happy to say that the painting is really starting to come together. Check it out;
Update #1
Update #2
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I can hardly wait to see the finished work of art!
laelaps | April 6, 2009As regular readers may (or may not) have noticed I have not been posting many updates about my book, still tentatively titled Life's Splendid Riddle, lately. The primary reason for that is because other projects have taken up much of my time, but it can also be frustrating trying to find something to say in my occasional progress reports. That's why I have decided to forgo my previous method of posting updates and start tweeting.
When I first heard about Twitter it sounded interesting but not like anything I was intending on signing up for. I am not interesting enough for people to care about…
laelaps | April 6, 2009
One of the unwritten rules of creating a good horror yarn is that the location your story takes place in has to be as frightening as your monster. The setting almost has to act an an extension of the bloodthirsty antagonist; a place that can more easily be seen as its lair than a place of human habitation. In Lincoln Child's latest novel Terminal Freeze that place is Fear Base, a rotting military facility shivering the the shadow of Fear Glacier, and it is stalked by something utterly horrifying.
Readers of The Relic, another horror novel penned by Child and his sometimes partner Douglas…
laelaps | April 6, 2009
A giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), photographed at the National Zoo.
laelaps | April 3, 2009In any book about evolutionary anthropology it is almost obligatory to cite Charles Darwin as the person who suspected that our species was most closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas, thus anticipating our modern understanding. In his famous 1871 book The Descent of Man Darwin wrote;
In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat…
laelaps | April 3, 2009
Rokan, a male Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), photographed at the National Zoo.