laelaps | January 4, 2009
The reconstructed skull of Australopithecus afarensis, photographed at the American Museum of Natural History.
laelaps | January 3, 2009I am proud to announce that my post, "Who scribbled all over Darwin's work?", was selected for inclusion in the 3rd (2008) edition of The Open Laboratory. You can see a list of all the winners here , and I am pleased to see that my post will be printed alongside work from many of my favorite science bloggers. Congratulations are also due to Bora, Jennifer Rohn, and the judges, who have worked so hard on this project!
[As an aside, I am glad that this year I had no idea when the winning entries would be announced. Last year I was pacing the floor the night the results were scheduled to be…
laelaps | January 3, 2009
Earlier today I wrote a long rant about pop-science books (particularly mediocre ones), but I ended up scrapping it. After I ran out of hot air I hit a wall and did not want to post something that 1) I couldn't find a good way to finish, and 2) I wasn't going to be proud of. I was a bit cranky today anyway, so as was always good advice when I was little, I took a nap.
I had meant to wake up and work on my book some more, but I slept longer than I intended to. That's ok; maybe I'll be up later since I got some rest and put in the work then. Even if I don't, though, I did manage to nearly…
laelaps | January 3, 2009
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | January 2, 2009
A white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
laelaps | December 31, 2008Two thousand and eight has, to say the least, been a bizarre year for me. As I sit here watching the snow fall on a farm* nestled just outside the sprawl of Target stores and mini-malls in suburban New Jersey, I am not entirely sure how I feel about it.
*[My wife and I are pet-sitting for a friend, a welcome respite from life in our tiny apartment.]
Academically, 2008 has presented many trials. The mathematics courses I took, in particular, crushed my soul and made me miserable. Even the classes I did enjoy did little to mitigate the stress and frustration caused by the rest of my coursework…
laelaps | December 31, 2008
A white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
laelaps | December 30, 2008If you head over to National Geographic News, you can see my picks for the most important, most overlooked, and weirdest paleontology stories of 2008. Afarensis contributed picks for anthropology, and other prominent science bloggers did the same for their areas of expertise. Head on over and have a look!
laelaps | December 30, 2008
Shortly after my wife and I were married in the summer of 2006, but before our apartment was lined with overstocked bookshelves, we used to make at least one weekly stop at the local public library. While she browsed a wide array of sections, I invariably scaled the back staircase to the science section on the second floor. The question was not whether I wanted to read a science book, but which one.
One of the first I picked up was Stephen Jay Gould's essay collection The Lying Stones of Marrakech. Rightly or wrongly, I recognized him as the voice of evolutionary science, a topic that had…
laelaps | December 29, 2008I would not have expected the Italian actress, model, author, and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini to have ever used the phrase "I will dig my palpae in her epigyne!", but in her series of short films, Green Porno, she does that and more.
Developed for the Sundance Channel, Rossellini has created a series of films that makes Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation seem absolutely innocuous. Rossellini dresses up as a series of insects (often the male) and graphically reenacts the mating habits of the animals;
Here's the one she made about snails (DEFINITELY NSFW!);
You can find the rest…
laelaps | December 29, 2008
A double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | December 28, 2008I have to admit that one of my favorite targets of criticism is the "Dinosauroid," which I have previously mentioned on this blog multiple times (with the more detailed treatments here, here, and here). Even though paleontologist Dale Russell and taxidermist Ron Sequin stated that their hypothetical being might bear a little orthogenic bias, it was nonetheless presented a plausible hypothesis of what dinosaurs might have become had they not gone extinct. (Mind you, this predated the consensus that some dinosaurs still exist today; we just call them birds).
Perhaps, but the creature is so…
laelaps | December 28, 2008
The skeleton of a young chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), photographed at the American Museum of Natural History. If you look at the right first incisor carefully, you can see evidence of hypoplasia.
laelaps | December 27, 2008
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | December 27, 2008Eugene O'Neill's short play, The First Man, is a tale of birth, death, scandal, and family infighting, all involving an anthropologist set to scour Asia in search of the earliest humans. Collected with two other plays (The Hairy Ape and Anna Christie) in a 1922, the play contains a fleeting reflection of the scientific consensus at the time.
For a variety of reasons, from the pattern of fossil finds to racism and "pithecophobia", Asia was the preferred place to look for the earliest humans. (See Peter Bowler's Theories of Human Evolution for a survey, and Constance Clark's God - or Gorilla…
laelaps | December 26, 2008
Things have been a little slow here on Laelaps as of late, and for good reason. Between finals and the holidays I haven't had much time to sit down and write, but more importantly, I have been devoting most of my free time to working on the book.
I am still working on the chapter and human evolution, and it has become far more complicated than I had anticipated. Every time I think I have everything in order, I am reminded of something else important to the story I'm trying to tell. This is definitely going to be the longest chapter in the book, and even then some substantial cuts will have…
laelaps | December 26, 2008
A keel-billed toucan (Ramphastos sulfuratus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.