laelaps | March 5, 2009
"Caught in an asphalt lake." From the November 1919 issue of The World's Work.
As much as I love visiting the American Museum of Natural History in its current incarnation I sometimes wish I could have seen the institution in earlier eras. It has undergone its own evolution and while plenty of classic and remarkable specimens remain on display there are many that have been removed, put in storage, or lost.
One such exhibit was the "asphalt lake" habitat group meant to portray the famous La Brea tar pits. I have no idea what became of it, but when on display it showed a Smilodon and a dire…
laelaps | March 5, 2009
I'm a little bit late on this one but I wanted to say "Welcome!" to the latest member of the Sb collective All of My Faults Are Stress Related. It's good to have another geo-blog around the place.
The first edition of ART Evolved has been posted. The inaugural edition features a slew of wonderful ceratopsian images, and I can hardly wait until the next edition (featuring synapsids).
During the Saturday night dinner at Science Online '09 I had the chance to chat with Karen James and Glendon Mellow and together we came up with an idea to raise some support for the Beagle Project. (…
laelaps | March 5, 2009
A pair of ring-tailed mongoose (Galidia elegans), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | March 4, 2009Later this month (March 20-22) I will be headed down to Washington DC to check out the national museum of natural history, the national zoo, etc. (It's about time, especially since I blog for Smithsonian...) I would love to set aside some time to meet some DC-area bloggers and readers while I'm there, though, so if you would like to organize a meet-up just say so in the comments. I'll work out the details once I know whether anyone is interested.
laelaps | March 4, 2009
The Burlington County skull. From Hrdlicka's Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America.
By 1859 it had become established that humans had a more ancient history than had previously been known, but just how old was Homo sapiens? This was a pivotal question, for the area of the world that could claim the oldest vestiges of humanity could provide crucial clues about the evolution and dispersal of our species. Asia, with its open plains and "vigorous climate", seemed like the best place to look for the stock from which humans arose but traces of prehistoric humans…
laelaps | March 3, 2009I had initially intended to write this post to coincide with my birthday last week but my research unexpectedly set me on the trail of Saartje Baartman. Below is the essay I had originally set out to write;
What to do about Charles Lyell? In September of 1859 he had announced to the scientists assembled at the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting that , contrary to previous belief, "it [was] probable that man was old enough to have coexisted, at least, with the Siberian mammoth." He also knew that the arrival of Charles Darwin's abstract on evolution by natural…
laelaps | March 2, 2009[Last night New Brunswick was buried under several inches of snow, shutting down the university and giving me the day off. I have been using my free time to get some reading done and work on a few projects but I did not want to neglect this blog. Here are the first several pages of the chapter on human evolution from Life's Splendid Riddle, the book in-progress I have so often mentioned here. I still do not have an agent and am unsure whether this book will ever make it to shelves, but I could not resist sharing this sample with you. Enjoy.]
Not long after the earth had been given form, when…
laelaps | March 1, 2009
I don't quite know what to make of Richard Fortey's latest book Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret life of the Natural History Museum. When I opened my copy to the first chapter I was expecting something like Douglas Preston's written tour of the American Museum of Natural History, Dinosaurs in the Attic, but Fortey's book turned out to be something entirely different.
I enjoyed Preston's book because it used a motley collection of artifacts, both on display and behind closed doors, to tell stories about the AMNH and the people who worked there. It was not comprehensive or even representative,…
laelaps | March 1, 2009
A white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in rural New Jersey.
laelaps | February 28, 2009
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | February 27, 2009
The "Hottentot Venus", drawn from a wax cast made in Paris. From The Human Race.
On December 31, 1816 Saartje Baartman died in Paris. She had been ill for three days, perhaps stricken with smallpox, before she and her unborn child expired. Better known as the "Hottentot Venus", Baartman was a celebrity in Europe known for being the antithesis of the European concept of beauty. She was a dark-skinned member of the Khoikhoi tribe of South Africa* with buttocks so large that they mesmerized Europeans. She was treated as a sideshow attraction, marveled at by scholars and the public alike.
*[I…
laelaps | February 27, 2009Many thanks to everyone who wished me a happy 26th birthday yesterday. I was surprised by the number of people who did, in fact, and I was glad to receive the kind greetings of so many friends.
Special thanks are due Amanda, as well, who sent me a shiny new copy of Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1. It came in the mail just as I was headed out the door and I was deeply tempted to call in sick from work so I could start reading it. Thank you, Amanda; I cannot wait to dive into it!
My "big gift", though, was a comparative skull set (fish, frog, lizard, pigeon, rabbit) from the Bone Room that…
laelaps | February 27, 2009
A Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | February 25, 2009So there I was, vainly searching Amazon.com to see if a subscription to this blog is available on Kindle (it appears not), when I was hit between the eyes by something unexpected.
A few of you may recall that a few months ago I wrote a lukewarm review of Jerry Coyne's new book Why Evolution Is True. It is not a bad book, and it actually is a good primer if you do not know very much about evolution, but there were a number of errors in it that I felt could have easily been avoided with a little more research.
How is this relevant to my opening statement? In searching for "Laelaps" on Amazon.…
laelaps | February 25, 2009
The skull of Gomphotherium, from Barbour's paper.
Regular readers of this blog are well aware that the "March of Progress", a depiction of the single-file evolution of humans from an ape ancestor, is a biological bugbear that refuses to go away. Even though the Great Chain of Being ceased to be useful in explaining the natural world centuries ago vestiges of it still remain in illustrations that depict evolution as "onward and upward." We have long known that evolution is a branching process yet the straight-line version is frustratingly difficult to dig out.
I was reminded of this while…
laelaps | February 25, 2009
A North American river otter (Lontra canadensis), photographed at the Turtleback Zoo.