laelaps | January 24, 2009
From The Log of the Ark.
Young earth creationists love to talk about how there really was a global Deluge and that there were dinosaurs aboard the Ark, but rarely do you see any attempt on their part to visualize what life was like on Noah's ship. What did Noah and his family do to while away the hours? How did they manage to feed all the animals (and make sure the animals didn't feed on each other)? What happened when an animal got sick? These are absurd questions because there is no evidence for a global Flood or that a man named Noah commanded a ship full of two of every species, but…
laelaps | January 24, 2009
A grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), photographed at the North Carolina Zoo.
laelaps | January 23, 2009
The skull of Basilosaurus, from the 1907 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1900 the famous bone sharp Barnum Brown discovered the skeleton of a huge carnivorous dinosaur in Wyoming, and near its bones were a few fossilized bony plates. When H.F. Osborn described this creature as Dynamosaurus imperiosus he used this association to hypothesize that this predator was covered in armor, but as it turned out "Dynamosaurus" was really a representative of another new dinosaur Osborn named Tyrannosaurus rex. Osborn's famous tyrant showed no sign of being covered with armor, and the…
laelaps | January 22, 2009When I was a finalist in the annual blogging scholarship contest a few months back Amanda was one of the many people who supported me. (Thank you, again, to everyone who voted for me.) Now it is my turn to give something back.
Amanda is one of the brightest, not to mention kindest, people I know and I would hate to see her struggle to fund her college education. You can help her pay her college fees, though, by voting for her in the "My Favorite Toy" contest being held by Brickfish. She has fittingly chosen a "Brontosaurus" as her most beloved toy.
You can vote every two hours. Please give…
laelaps | January 22, 2009
A restoration of the Warren mastodon entombed in sediment, from Popular Science.
In 1841 S.B. Buckley was the first to mount a skeletal restoration of Basilosaurus, but his efforts to do so have generally been forgotten. The skeleton changed hands several times during the 1840's and Buckley's more accurate restoration was overshadowed by Albert Koch's monstrous "Hydrarchos", a fantastical creature made from Basilosaurus bones.*
*[I have to admit that that I have not seen any illustrations of Buckley's restoration. My statement regarding its accuracy is based upon his technical papers in…
laelaps | January 21, 2009
A Megatherium, from The Testimony of the Rocks by Hugh Miller.
I can't believe I didn't think of it at the time. During Glendon's session on Art & Science last weekend he asked the audience for specific examples of how art & science influenced each other. A few examples from modern science fiction films came to my mind but I forgot the most obvious example of all; cave art! The paintings made by ancient humans are not only beautiful but reveal details about extinct creatures as they were in life, thus being of value both as art and objects of scientific inquiry.
But what about…
laelaps | January 20, 2009A little more than halfway through the horror novel The Relic, a blood-spattered tale of a monster lurking in the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History, the scientist Greg Kawakita shows off his evolutionary extrapolation program to his colleague, Margo. It is a complex analysis system designed to take two DNA samples and spit out a hypothetical intermediate creature, essentially extrapolating what their common ancestor must have been like. In a test run, Greg has the computer scrutinize the DNA of a chimpanzee and a human;
Intermediate form morphological characteristics:
Gracile…
laelaps | January 20, 2009
A red wolf (Canis lupus rufus), photographed at the North Carolina Zoo. The two wolves in this enclosure were the least shy of any that I have seen (as Tracey said, they were "dogified").
laelaps | January 19, 2009
This blog has been a little quiet over the last few days, but I was simply having too much fun at the Science Online '09 conference to find the time to sit down and blog. I got to meet some of my favorite bloggers, too many to mention them all here (I would undoubtedly forget some if I tried to make a list), but I was certainly glad to catch up with old friends and make some new ones.
I didn't go just to hang out with other science writers, though. The primary reason I was at the conference was to co-moderate two sessions. The first, on using the web to teach college science with Andrea…
laelaps | January 19, 2009
A male Hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas), photographed at the North Carolina Zoo. Apparently I was a little too close for comfort and he made sure I saw how impressive his canines were.
laelaps | January 18, 2009
It took about 8 and 1/2 hours, but Tracey and I made it back to New Jersey safe & sound. I have a lot to share about my experience at the conference, but for now I figured I would just share one of my favorite photos from the NC Zoo. More tomorrow...
laelaps | January 18, 2009
A group of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
laelaps | January 17, 2009
A young white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
laelaps | January 16, 2009Finally, after a very strange day, I am able to sit down and relax. Last night I had intended to go to bed early to get enough sleep for the drive down to North Carolina but, for a variety of reasons, I did not get as much rest as I wanted to. There wasn't much I could do about this, though, and my wife and I hit the road at 12:30 AM.
Except the stops for gas, I drove 9 and 1/2 hours straight. Rather than heading straight for the hotel, though, my wife and I started out day in North Carolina at the NC Zoo, a location that was a lot farther away than I had anticipated. Many animals (polar bear…
laelaps | January 16, 2009
I had not noticed it at the time I took this picture, but this juvenile white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) had a compound fracture on it's lower left hind limb. It had been limping a little, but I did not figure out why until I saw this image.
laelaps | January 15, 2009
The skull of Koch's "Hydrarchos".
In the summer of 1845 Albert Koch was relieved to receive a collection of Basilosaurus bones he had collected in Alabama. He had shipped the fossils ahead of him to New York, but when he arrived at the city he was told that they ship they were on had wrecked. He feared the worst, but the salvagers had saved the bones and sent them to Koch free of charge. He did not call his reconstruction Basilosaurus or "Zygodon" (as he called it in his journal, a derivation of Zeuglodon, itself synonymous with Basilosaurus), though. The bones were said to represent a…
laelaps | January 15, 2009Late tonight (or is it early tomorrow?) Mrs. Laelaps* and I will start on our drive down to North Carolina for the Science Online '09 conference! We'll be making stops at the NC Zoo and the Duke University Lemur Center along the way, but when we recover from Friday's traveling we'll be ready for the great conference sessions on Saturday and Sunday. (I will be co-moderating two back-to-back sessions on the first day; "Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond" and "The Web and the History of Science".)
It is going to be a very busy weekend, but I look forward to seeing old friends** and…