laelaps | September 19, 2008
H.F. Osborn and Barnum Brown's vision for "dueling" Tyrannosaurus.
Dawn glows along the shore of a lagoon near the sea three millions of years ago in Montana. The landscape is of low relief; sycamores and ginkgo trees mingle with figs, palms and bananas. There are few twittering birds in the tree-tops and no herds of grazing animals to greet the early sun. A huge herbivorous dinosaur Trachodon, coming on shore for some favorite food has been seized and partly eaten by a giant Tyrannosaurus. Whilst this monster is ravenously consuming the carcass another Tyrannosaurus draws near determined…
laelaps | September 19, 2008After finishing Life's Splendid Drama last night, I immediately picked up Don Lessem's Dinosaurs Rediscovered which had arrived earlier in the day. It's like a little time capsule representing the state of paleontology when I was a kid, people like Paul Sereno, Michael Benton, and Peter Dodson being the young up-and-coming crop of researchers in the field (with plenty of attention paid to folks like Phil Currie, Bob Bakker, and Jack Horner, too).
I'm about halfway through it, but reading about the exploits of so many researchers in the field has sadly reminded me of my own lack of field…
laelaps | September 19, 2008The lack of a proper title for my book (latest update here) has continued to vex me, even as I have made quite a bit of progress in fleshing out the chapters. A title is not necessary to my work at this stage, of course, but I feel that having a title helps keeps the voice of the book coherent. I also know that when everything is finished the title is going to be important in generating interest in what I have written (for, contrary to the old admonition, people do judge books by their covers), and I did not want to pick something boring (i.e. Evolution) or especially cliched (i.e. anything…
laelaps | September 18, 2008This past spring the science blogosphere was all a-twitter over the release of the creationist propaganda film Expelled. Was it a success? A flop? A big budget fluff piece that only attracted those already inclined to agree? Such debates aside, the release of Expelled and the opening of Ken Ham's Fun House (aka The Creation Museum) signals the fact that anti-evolutionists are willing to dump millions of dollars in attempts to "reclaim America for Christ."
While the museum in Kentucky* and Expelled have received plenty of press, modern day anti-evolutionists are trying to extend their…
laelaps | September 18, 2008It can really be a chore to track down old papers. While many journals have digitized their collections and placed them online, a subscription is often required to access old papers (even from the 19th century!)*. That's if the paper you're looking for was published in a journal that still exists, of course. There are plenty of journals that have gone defunct or are otherwise unavailable, a sad fact that keeps important papers out of the hands of students and scientists today.
[*This really aggravates me. Shouldn't these papers, in many cases nearly 100 years old or more, be freely available…
laelaps | September 18, 2008
A large piece of driftwood, photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | September 17, 2008
As ever, I didn't get as much done as I wanted to today, but I still added a few more pages. I would have accomplished more, but in my research I came across a few resources that had previously eluded me. A few (like a collection of papers by Lawrence Lambe, including his description of Gorgosaurus) were only tangentially related to the project, but others (like William Beebe's paper on the hypothetical bird ancestor "Tetrapteryx") are going to be essential to what I'm writing. I even found a bit of paleo-fiction relating to the urvogel, so I've got plenty of resources to mine.
Although I…
laelaps | September 17, 2008
"Leonardo," the mummy dinosaur, courtesy of the HMNS.
Although it got a brief treatment in the book Horns and Beaks, many people have been waiting for more information on the exceptionally-preserved Brachylophosaurus skeleton named "Leonardo." Due to be unveiled next week at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (the date was pushed back due to Hurricane Ike; the museum and Leonardo were unharmed), the fossil provides a unique look at the soft tissues of this particular dinosaur.
Dinosaur "mummies" have been found before, dating back to the 19th century, but in many cases little more than…
laelaps | September 16, 2008
From Garfield Minus Garfield.
I had planned to get at least 20 pages finished today, but I don't think I'm going to be able to make it. As it stands now I've got 15 pages, much of it brand new material, but after taking the bus home I have a splitting headache. Sitting on a bus during rush hour in New Brunswick means that you will be subjected to many short stops and starts (particularly since there's only a crowded, single-lane main road between campuses), and by the time I get home I usually want to sit down and not get up.
Still, I more than doubled my output from yesterday, and I have…
laelaps | September 16, 2008One of the most rewarding events I have ever attended was last year's Annual Science Blogging Conference in North Carolina. I got to meet a number of my favorite bloggers, made lots of new friends, and definitely enjoyed speaking about science blogging as a student. Now registration is open for ScienceOnline'09 (the 3rd annual meeting for science bloggers in NC), and I definitely would encourage you to attend. (I have already signed up.)
There is at least one important difference from the previous meetings, though. There is so much to do that the organizers have added a second day of talks,…
laelaps | September 16, 2008As I approach my one year anniversary of blogging here on ScienceBlogs.com, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of blogging. Being here on Sb has done a lot of good for me, from speaking engagements to opportunities to write academic & popular articles, but I have also been thinking of what my "next step" should be. Coincidentally, last night a number of bloggers posted some unrelated articles that corresponded to my own questions and concerns about science blogging.
At the World's Fair, Benjamin considers the failure of blogging to initiate…
laelaps | September 16, 2008Over the past few weeks a number of visitors have made it to this blog by searching the web for information about Sarah Palin & dinosaurs. Previously there wasn't much to say beyond a 2006 quote, but now new evidence has appeared that suggests that Palin indeed tried to get creationism into the classroom despite her public comments that she desired no such thing.
According to a little muckraking done by David Talbot for Salon.com, Palin may very well be a young earth creationist who tried to sneak fundamentalist religion into public schools;
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says…
laelaps | September 16, 2008
An Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | September 15, 2008
From Garfield Minus Garfield.
The beginning of classes has marked the start of a more chaotic daily schedule, one that often puts me in no mood to write. I want to work on the book when I have the time, but at the end of most days I feel like I've been trampled by a horde of freshmen (which isn't too far from the truth, as a matter of fact).
In any case, I more than doubled the material I had for the new version of my birds/dinosaurs chapter. This might not be especially impressive given that I had only three pages to start with, but I intend to keep up with the updates through the rest of…
laelaps | September 15, 2008
An illustration of a Brontotherium mount on display at the AMNH. Notice the healed rib. From Osborn, H.F.; Wortman, J.L.; Peterson, O.A. (1895) "Perissodactyls of the Lower Miocene White River beds." Bulletin of the AMNH; Vol. 7 (12), pp. 343-375.
Brontotheres have long been among the most recognizable of ancient mammals, even appearing in recent films like the Ice Age series, yet scientifically they haven't received very much recent attention. While they were of great interest to pioneering paleontologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the last "great" work on them was…
laelaps | September 15, 2008Yesterday a Church of England member announced that the institution owes Charles Darwin an apology. Writing directly to Darwin, the Rev Malcolm Brown said the church should be penitent "for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still." While initially reported as an apology from the church itself, a CoE spokesperson said that this attempt at posthumous reconciliation is being made by Brown and not by the church itself. Nevertheless, a new section on Darwin has been added to the Church of England website in the run-up to the "…