laelaps | May 7, 2010
A close-up shot of a giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
laelaps | May 6, 2010
One of the fossil fish I found in the Green River Formation of Wyoming.
I had my doubts about whether we were going to reach the quarry. The Toyota Yaris my wife and I had rented for our excursion through Utah and Wyoming was not designed to handle the rough dirt roads which wound their way through the grassy hills of the Equality State, but eventually the outcrop of grey-and-yellow rocks came into view. It was part of the famous Green River Formation, an approximately 42-53 million year old slice of earth's history known to be rich in fish fossils.
It did not take long to start finding…
laelaps | May 5, 2010
African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) don't have it easy. Their taste for large mammalian prey puts them in competition with lions and spotted hyenas for both prey and living space, meaning that wild dogs regularly have their kills stolen or are even killed by other predators. In fact, the dogs may even be unintentionally attracting the attention of these other hunters.
Like other social carnivores, African wild dogs communicate with each other through body language and olfactory cues, but they also employ a variety of high-…
laelaps | May 5, 2010
Rokan the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
laelaps | May 4, 2010
The skeletons of female (larger, background) and male (smaller, foreground) Dinornis robustus, with a pigeon skeleton for comparison. From Allentoft et al 2010.
A little more than 700 years ago, multiple species of the gigantic, flightless birds called moas were still running around New Zealand. They ranged over almost the entirety of the North and South Islands, from the coast to the mountain forests, but when the Maori people arrived in the late 13th century the birds were quickly driven to extinction. Within a few hundred years they were entirely wiped out (along with the immense Haast…
laelaps | May 3, 2010Way back in 1989 (I was only six!), Eugenie Scott and other members of the National Center for Science Education got together for a mock debate pitting evolutionary scientists against creationist impersonators at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. How things have changed (well, except young earth creationist arguments)...
laelaps | May 3, 2010
Breaking down a hyena kill. Given competition with other carnivores, prehistoric hyenas (like their living counterparts) would probably have disarticulated and transported parts of horses they killed. From Diedrich 2010.
In Hollywood films, there is nothing like an assemblage of bones strewn about a cave floor to testify to the power and voraciousness of a predator. Every skeleton is a testament to the hunting prowess of the carnivore, which causes even more alarm when the person who has stumbled into the cave realizes that they have just walked into a literal dead-end.
Although amplified…
laelaps | May 2, 2010
A keel-billed toucan (Ramphastos sulfuratus), photographed at the Central Park, Zoo.
laelaps | May 1, 2010
The skull of a juvenile white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in suburban Pennsylvania.
laelaps | April 30, 2010I feel like I have been run over by a truck. Between blogging, working on my book, fieldwork, pitching freelance articles, and research, I just didn't have the energy to come up with something new today. Instead enjoy this post, written a little more than a year ago, about how the hip of a fossil whale was mistaken for the shoulders of an ancient bird. -- Brian
The right hip of Basilosaurus as seen in Lucas' 1900 description.
If you were a 19th century paleontologist and you wanted a skeleton of the fossil whale Basilosaurus, there was only one place to look; Alabama. Even though fossils…
laelaps | April 30, 2010
A male pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), resting in the tall grass. Photographed on Antelope Island, Utah.
laelaps | April 29, 2010
Utah may seem like an odd place to search for primates, but you can find them if you know where to look. Although scrubby and arid today, between 46-42 million years ago what is now the northeastern part of the state was a lush forest which was home to a variety of peculiar fossil primates. Called omomyids, these relatives of living tarsiers are primarily known from teeth and associated bits and pieces of bone, but newly discovered postcranial remains may provide paleontologists with a better idea of how some of these ancient primates moved.
For most of their early evolution omomyids were…
laelaps | April 28, 2010UPDATE: Due to ongoing deliberations over the future of the New Jersey State Museum I have decided that it is in the best interest of the museum to remove this post, but I will continue to write about this story as more knowledge becomes publicly available. And, just so there is no misunderstanding, what I stated in the previous version of this post I wrote as a private citizen and not a representative of the museum itself - I am the equivalent of a volunteer and not employed by the museum.
Nevertheless, I feel it appropriate the outline what is publicly known about this controversy in the…
laelaps | April 27, 2010
Fossil fish from the Eocene age Green River Formation in Colorado. From Wikipedia.
I am pretty tired of Richard Dawkins putting down paleontology. In his 2004 tome The Ancestor's Tale, as well as in his latest book The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins felt compelled to cast the fossil record as an unnecessary bonus when it comes to demonstrating the reality of evolution. "The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure," he asserts in the latter book, "even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized." While this statement contains a crumb of truth - we have learned much about evolution…
laelaps | April 26, 2010
Check out my article on the atmosphere and evolution, "The History of Air", over at Smithsonian.
The Raleigh News & Observer has a brief interview with me (conducted by DeLene Beeland) on paleontology, evolution, and my forthcoming book Written in Stone. (Check out the comments, too - I already have fundamentalists praying for me *headdesk*)
The next time you use a latrine in Peru, watch out for two-toed sloths
Cool new science blog centered around Yale museum specimens - The Life You (And I) Never Knew
Welcome another paleo blog to the blogohedron - March of the Fossil Penguins…
laelaps | April 25, 2010
A family of North American river otters (Lontra canadensis), photographed in Yellowstone National Park.
laelaps | April 23, 2010
For at least 30 million years, bone-eating worms have been making their homes in the bodies of decomposing whales on the seabottom, but the rotting cetacean carcasses are not just food sources for the polychaetes.
The term "worm" immediately conjures up images of the red, squiggly things which crawl all over the sidewalk after it rains, but this imagery does not fit the boneworms of the genus Osedax. These worms start off life as sexless larvae, and the timing of their arrival at a whale corpse makes all the difference as to whether they will be male or female. If the larva lands on the…