laelaps | September 14, 2008I haven't seen this one yet, but here's the BBC Horizon program "Mystery of the Jurassic" about discoveries made in Jurassic-age rocks in Agentina by Oliver Rauhut and others;
laelaps | September 13, 2008Tyrannosaurus might be the most famous dinosaur, but its sleeker evolutionary relatives Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus have always had a special place in my heart. Here's a brief spot about Albertosaurus from the series Jurassic Fight Club (which is about as much as I can handle without becoming frustrated over something or other in the show), featuring (among other tyrannosaur experts) Thomas Holtz, who is celebrating a birthday today;
laelaps | September 13, 2008It has been about a week since my wife and I caught one of the feral kittens in the yard (named Owen), and he has been showing quite a bit of progress. Our cat Charlotte absolutely loves him, and here she is giving him a bath;
We also managed to catch Owen's brother, another orange kitten we've named Cope, who is also starting to relax a little. We're going to try to catch the two female kittens that are still out there, but if we can't do it this week the window for us being able to catch them and socialize them is probably going to be closed.
laelaps | September 13, 2008
An Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | September 12, 2008
A female okapi (Okapia johnstoni), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
There are few animals that I find as charming as the okapi (Okapia johnstoni). During the warmer months no trip to the Bronx zoo is complete until I stop by to see them. (Once the temperature drops they are taken off exhibit so they do not freeze.) While they may not always measure up to our standards of good manners, sometimes sticking their long purple tongues into their ears and noses, the okapi is one of the most beautiful animals I think I have ever seen.
Given that the nearest okapi is only a few miles away from me (as…
laelaps | September 12, 2008One of the most difficult things about writing about fossil whales is that so few of them have been figured in books and papers. There are a few skeletal reconstructions that are reproduced over and over and over again, but in my research some genera are only mentioned by name. Georgiacetus is one such example.
Georgiacetus is one of those neat archaeocetes that exemplifies the transition from land to water among the earliest whales. It was not fully aquatically adapted like Basilosaurus and Dorudon, but at the same time it was proportioned very differently from earlier creatures like…
laelaps | September 12, 2008I've been on about the history of science quite a bit lately (see here, here, and here), and as I've aired my gripes one point in particular keeps coming up again and again.
For various reasons the development of science (particularly those connected with evolution) in Victorian times has been extensively studied. There is still work to be done, but generally speaking there is an immense body of literature on science during the 19th century. This is particularly the case with geology & paleontology, associated sciences that came into their own during the 1800's and were important to the…
laelaps | September 12, 2008... that scientists are not historians, as John Wilkins points out. (Blake has also written a good post on this topic.) It is easy (and even preferable) to clearly distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, and sweeping generalizations about old ideas are often included to give clout to modern notions.
I found this out first hand while researching T.H. Huxley's work on the connection between birds and reptiles. From popular books to technical papers, many scientists (including some of the most prominent names working on feathered dinosaurs) have said that Huxley first proposed that birds…
laelaps | September 12, 2008I was really looking forward to attending the annual SVP meeting in Ohio this year, but after mulling things over I don't think it is possible for me to go. I simply can't afford the cost of the trip. I am very much saddened by this, particularly since I was looking forward to meeting so many people (and a owe a few folks a beer for their kindness to me over the past year), but it looks like I'm going to have to sit this one out.
If you are a paleo blogger and are attending, though, head on over to Julia's blog as there are plans to organize a plaeo-blogger breakfast. I'll be sad to miss it,…
laelaps | September 11, 2008As reported today in the Guardian, the director of education of the Royal Society, Michael Reiss, believes that creationism should be brought into the science classroom as an alternate "worldview" to evolution. It is not a misconception, fairy tale, or jumble of nonsense, Reiss argues, but just another way of looking at the world. What a bunch of bunk...
For years creationists have argued that the long public argument over evolution is not one of science, but of worldviews. We have all the same facts, they say, but we look at them through different "glasses." Reiss' position plays right into…
laelaps | September 11, 2008Here's another paleo video by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, this time about gluing fossils. The hadrosaur featured in it is "Peanut," a skeleton found in the same area as "Leonardo" (who we'll see more of this weekend on the Discovery Channel). Now they just have to make a video about all-purpose paleontological paper...
laelaps | September 10, 2008For over 120 years, the origin of whales vexed paleontologists. They were among the strangest of all mammals, creatures completely adapted to the sea with more in common with us than any fish (although at the beginning of the 19th century "common sense" said otherwise), and it was difficult to imagine how they evolved. If Charles Darwin was right and all life had evolved, different evolutionary paths diverging through time, then whales must have had some sort of traceable ancestry.
The discovery of fossil whales like Basilosaurus and Squalodon illustrated that the evolution of whales may have…
laelaps | September 10, 2008The first test of the Large Hadron Collider has successfully been completed, and guess what? We're all still here. I know virtually nothing of the physics involved but you can bet that more qualified science bloggers will be writing about the LHC today. Blake has a good play-by-play to get things started.
laelaps | September 9, 2008A few years ago I got the chance to see the Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries exhibit at the AMNH before it hit the road. I wish I could see it again now that I know a little bit more, but if you're in the Denver area you're in luck; the exhibition is opening there later this month. Here are some nifty advertisements for it at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science;
laelaps | September 9, 2008"... for in all the boundless realm of philosophy and science no thought has brought with it so much pain, or in the end has led to such a full measure of the joy which comes of intellectual effort and activity as that doctrine of Organic Evolution which will ever be associated, first and foremost, with the name of Charles Robert Darwin." - Edward Poulton, "Fifty Years of Darwinism" (1908)
Edward Poulton and T.C. Chamberlin may have been impressed by evolution by natural selection during the centenary celebration of Charles Darwin's (portrait on the lower right) birth in 1908, but…