laelaps |
Am I a scientist? It seems like a simple question requiring little more than a "yes" or "no", yet I am at a loss as to how to answer it. Even though I have been called a scientist by people I respect I cannot bring myself to use the term to describe myself.
It is not that I am holding onto some vaunted ideal of what a scientist is or should be. It is not as if a PhD, a prestigious academic prize, or a paper in Science is required to lay claim to the title. Instead I think of a scientist as someone who actively participates in research (or has done so in the past) and shares the results of…
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Moropus, a chalicothere. From The Annual Report of the American Museum of Natural History.
Suppose for a moment that you are walking across a dry, wind-swept landscape known to be rich in fossils. During your perambulations you notice a large fossilized claw sitting on the surface; what sort of animal could it be from? There is a lot you would have to know about the area, like how old the rock in that spot was, but it would seem reasonable that the claw belonged to a large predator.
Nature, of course, is not so straightforward. Panda bears have teeth and claws that reveal their carnivoran…
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It would be fair to say that, until a week ago, I knew virtually nothing about J.B.S. Haldane. I knew he was a British biologist who helped form the subdiscipline of population genetics, but that was about it. Then, unexpectedly, Oxford University Press sent me a copy of What I Require From Life: Writings on Science and Life From J.B.S. Haldane.
What I Require From Life is neither an autobiography nor a comprehensive compilation of Haldane's writings. Instead it is a motley collection of Haldane's short essays written for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker (1937-1950) and pieces he…
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The "Newberg" (or Warren) mastodon. From Elements of Geology. Note the claw-like restoration of the feet.
How did the mastodon, Mammut americanum, feed itself? It is a fairly simple question best answered by looking to living elephants, but things were not always so straightforward. Early discussions of the mastodon focused, in part, on whether it was an herbivore or a carnivore. That its teeth were more rough and pointed surely meant that it had different dining preferences than mammoths or living elephants, both of which had flat molars for grinding plants. (If you want to learn more…
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The "Navel of the earth." From Paradise Found.
In 1885 the theologian William F. Warren, then president of Boston University, could no longer keep silent. Society was turning away from "old time religion" in favor of an ever-expanding naturalism that made(in Warren's view) the world a colder, darker place. The removal of the supernatural from science threatened all Warren held dear;
For many years the public mind has been schooled in a narrow naturalism, which has in its world-view as little room for the extraordinary as it has for the supernatural. Decade after decade the representatives…
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There are a number of things I have been meaning to blog about during the past week but for whatever reason they kept slipping my mind. Here's a brief collection of some neat stuff that I should have written about earlier;
Michael Barton, author of the Dispersal of Darwin, was interviewed for the the BBC's Pods and Blogs! I am certainly envious. You can listen in here.
A number of paleo-artists active in the blogohedron have started a new carnival, ART Evolved. The first edition will be posted at Prehistoric Insanity on March 1, and I certainly encourage you to check it out (if not submit…
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Everyone knows that 1859 was the year in which Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published, but there was a significant event in September of that same year that is often overlooked. It involved the new understanding that humans and extinct mammals (like sabercats and mammoths) had lived alongside one another in ancient Europe. This may not seem like a particularly controversial point now (who today could imagine "cave men" without mammoths and woolly rhinoceros plodding about the landscape?) but during the first half of the 19th century it was…
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There are times when it becomes abundantly apparent that I have been spending far too much time on the computer.
Yesterday afternoon I was preparing a "cheat sheet" for my statistics exam (don't fret; we were allowed one page of notes to bring to the test). I decided to write it up with a pencil rather than type it, and about 3/4 of the way through I thought "I'm thirsty, I think I will get a drink. I had better hit 'save' to preserve my work."
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
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An illustration of the Yale mastodon mount.
While planting corn on his Iowa farm around 1872 a farmer named Peter Mare found a curious carving. It was a smoking pipe in the shape of an elephant, a very odd item indeed, and he used it for its intended purpose until he moved to Kansas in 1878. At that time he gave it to his brother-in-law, but soon after a Reverend Gass came calling. Gass, an amateur archaeologist, wanted to purchase it, but the pipe was not for sale. Even so, the owner of the pipe allowed Gass to photograph it and make some casts, which he shared with the members of the…
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I have been out and about for most of the day and have not had much time to write. In lieu of a real post, here is a photograph of an Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) I took just this afternoon at the Turtleback Zoo in Essex, New Jersey.