laelaps | February 13, 2009I cannot recall precisely why, but okapis were on my mind this morning. Specifically, I was wondering what had become of the first photograph ever taken of a live okapi, an illustration I had heard about but had been unable to find. I was first put on the trail of the picture when, last September, the Zoological Society of London declared that they had the first photographs ever taken of an okapi in its natural habitat.
I was immediately skeptical of this claim. Had no one ever photographed an okapi in the wild? In my efforts to find an answer to this question I stumbled across references to…
laelaps | February 13, 2009
Black crested gibbons (Nomascus concolor), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | February 12, 2009Two hundred years ago today, in the little country town of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Charles Robert Darwin was born. No one then could have known that, fifty years and nine months later, Charles would deliver a treatise that would forever change our understanding of our place in nature. That is precisely what he did, though, and today many are honoring the evolutionary synthesis Darwin presented in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (to say nothing of his other works).
Indeed, today we are not so much celebrating Darwin's birth (if this were his primary achievement we…
laelaps | February 11, 2009
Brought to you by the very talented Scicurious (if you're not reading her posts, you are really missing out). Dare we start an LOLFossil competition?
[And wouldn't you know it, another one of my photographs has wound up in the 'Upcoming' section of icanhascheezburger.com. It is one of my favorites; two snow leopards I photographed at the Bronx Zoo in the summer of 2006.]
laelaps | February 11, 2009There has been an awful lot of hand-wringing going on over Charles Darwin lately. Some have picked up a long-running meme and proclaim "One hundred fifty years without Darwin is too long!" while others declare that we should kill every Darwin we meet. Just as every American president must "Get right with Lincoln" every biologist must "Get right with Darwin" in one way or another. (Thus far, I think Ed is the only one who has really got it right.)
What I find particularly amusing, however, is that those who assert that we must sweep Darwin under the rug to save biology do little to produce the…
laelaps | February 10, 2009
A restoration of Dunkleosteus, from Fishes, Living and Fossil.
About 370 million years ago, at a time when creatures like Tiktaalik were wallowing in the muddy shallows of freshwater lakes and rivers, the sea covered much of what is now North America and Europe. These waters were home to a diversity of fish, but among the most fearsome was Dunkleosteus, a 20-foot long terror with sharp plates around its moth that created a shear that could slice through the body of any animal unlucky enough to be its prey.
The creature we now call Dunkleosteus used to go by a few different names, however.…
laelaps | February 10, 2009
A Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | February 9, 2009
William Buckland, from Reminiscences of Oxford.
In the year 1166 a woman quietly passed away in a cave on Mount Pelligrino, Sicily. It was the end she chose for herself. At the age of twelve she had left home to become a hermit and devote her life to worshiping God, and her remains were left to rot in the isolated cave that was her home. Her name was Rosalia.
Then, in 1624, a deadly epidemic spread through Palermo. It was at this time that a sick woman claimed to have seen a vision of Rosalia, and for the plague to be ended, the apparition instructed, Rosalia's bones would have to be…
laelaps | February 9, 2009
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | February 8, 2009Back in November I mentioned that I might possibly follow in Ed's footsteps and put together a "Best of Laelaps" collection. The only problem was that it was difficult to pick out posts I was proud of; I didn't want to put out an embarrassing collection of slapdash essays.
By the beginning of January I had nearly forgotten about the project. I didn't feel like I could put together something worth having. As of late, however, I have warmed to the idea of compiling a series of essays in book form. This isn't a matter of just picking some of my better posts, but carefully selecting pieces that I…
laelaps | February 8, 2009
Since so many people enjoyed yesterday's photo of a sandpiper poking around a Delaware beach at sunset, here are two more photos of sandpipers I took the same evening.
laelaps | February 7, 2009Now this is pretty cool. Since 2007 the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton AL 288-1, that's "Lucy" to you and me, has been on tour in an exhibit called "Lucy's Legacy - The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia." I don't know if the exhibit is going to come close enough to me to allow me to visit it, but thanks to the website eLucy, I can look at the skeleton from home.
Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, the website allows you to compare Lucy's bones with those of a human or a chimpanzee. This is a great resource for anyone who has been aching for a closer look at the fossils than is often…
laelaps | February 7, 2009
A sandpiper, photographed at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, Delaware.
laelaps | February 6, 2009
The African lungfish Protopterus, from A Text-Book of Zoology.
Standing before the Linnean Society in 1839, the celebrated British anatomist Richard Owen delivered a detailed description of a strange new creature. Owen called it Lepidosiren annectans, an African relative of an eel-like animal that was found by the Austrian explorer Johan Natterer in the depths of the Amazon jungle in 1837. The naturalist sent two specimens back to the Vienna Museum where they were quickly described by Leopold Fitzinger under the name Lepidosiren paradoxa.
Fitzinger considered the organisms to be "…
laelaps | February 6, 2009
The shell of a horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) crawling withe ladybugs (Coccinellidae). Photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | February 5, 2009
*/
The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Colbert Report Full EpisodesPaul McCartney Appearance
Funny Political VideosMore Funny Videos
February 12, 2009 will mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and the naturalist shares his birthday with Abraham Lincoln. There will surely be a few articles comparing the two famous figures, particularly their views on race and slavery, but such articles will probably miss the greatest commonality shared between them. Both men have been written about extensively but are still poorly understood by…