laelaps | March 29, 2010
The fail whale comes to rest; the decomposing body of a gray whale is host to a diverse array of scavengers and other deep sea organisms. From Goffredi et al., 2004.
In the deep sea, no carcass goes to waste. Platoons of crabs, fish, and other scavengers make short work of most of the bodies which come to rest on the sea bottom, but every now and then the carrion-eaters are presented with a rotting bonanza; a whale fall. Muscle, viscera, blubber, and bone; it all gets broken down, but it takes so long that the whale carcass actually provides a temporary home for a variety of organisms…
laelaps | March 28, 2010
A stuffed polar bear (Ursus maritimus), on display at the New Jersey State Museum.
laelaps | March 27, 2010
A stuffed North American river otter (Lontra canadensis), in the collection at the New Jersey State Museum.
laelaps | March 26, 2010
A partially dissected head of an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), showing some of the internal anatomy, in the collection at the New Jersey State Museum. (And here is a similar preserved sea lion head in the same collection.)
laelaps | March 26, 2010
The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book?
Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will undoubtedly be in competition with numerous other science titles for the chance of being reviewed in the few publications which still review science books at all. Book tours, too, have become nearly extinct, and as a virtually unknown science writer I don't expect many (any?) people to show up at their…
laelaps | March 25, 2010
I'll be the first to admit it; the specimen was not much to look at. Seventy years after being dug out of the ground much of it had crumbled into four-foot-long Y, and the curved teeth that once stood upright in that jaw had slumped out of their sockets into the sulfur-smelling debris. All the same, it was an impressive sight.
During the past four years I have spent much of my free time reading about evolution and paleontology. Popular summaries, symposium volumes, technical papers; the numerous books that clutter my office and the disorganized mess of PDFs on my hard drive have taught me…
laelaps | March 24, 2010
Our temporary houseguest, Rusty, playing in a stream in northern New Jersey.
laelaps | March 24, 2010
Megarachne, (changed to Mesothelae for broadcast) restored as an enormous spider in the series Before the Dinosaurs: Walking With Monsters.
Imagine that you are are standing in a massive junkyard with the remains of cars strewn all about you. A few are relatively complete, but most of the heap is made up of bits and pieces of models from the entire history of automotive innovation. If you were to reach down and pick up one of the scraps, would you be able to tell the make and model of the car it came from?
The challenges a paleontologist faces in reconstructing the life of the past are…
laelaps | March 23, 2010
A stuffed cougar (Puma concolor), photographed in natural history collection at the New Jersey State Museum.
laelaps | March 23, 2010
A comparison of three-dimensional scans of hominin footprints. Top) A footprint made by an experimental subject using a normal, "extended" gait. Middle) A footprint made by an experimental subject using a "bent-knee, bent-hip" gait. Bottom) A Laetoli footprints. From Raichlen et al., 2010.
About 3.6 million years ago, at a spot now in Laetoli, Tanzania, a pair of hominins trudged through the ashfall dumped onto the landscape by a nearby volcano. We don't know for certain what they looked like (it is generally believed that they were Australopithecus afarensis from the presence of fossils…
laelaps | March 22, 2010
The skull of Mosasaurus maximus, photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.
laelaps | March 22, 2010
Last Friday I posted an open-thread in an attempt to gauge what readers might be getting from the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series (Parts 1, 2, and 3), and I was quite pleased by the response. I was glad to hear so many of you have found it useful (or intend to go back to it when you get your own book projects in order). There were also a few questions about the book-writing process, and I will answer them here.
Most of the questions were asked by Stan, and I'll go through them one at a time.
"How did you solve the balance between themes that you personally found interesting,…
laelaps | March 21, 2010
The mount of a musk ox (Ovibos moschatus), photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.
laelaps | March 20, 2010
The Brazilian pygmy gecko is mind-bogglingly small. As this clip from the recent BBC documentary Life illustrates, it is so minuscule that it is effectively watertight and can rest effortlessly on the surface of the water. It still amazes me that vertebrates can be that tiny.
LIFE will air starting Sunday night on the Discovery Channel (though, as it is narrated by Oprah in the US, I suggest you pick up the David Attenborough-narrated version on DVD instead).
laelaps | March 19, 2010
The skeleton of an elk-moose (Cervalces scotti), photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.
laelaps | March 19, 2010
At almost every aquarium I have ever visited with a seahorse exhibit, the plaque in front of the tank says the same thing: in seahorses and their relatives, males, not females, carry the babies. It is always interesting to watch the reactions of visitors to this curious fact. Adult men, for instance, sometimes seem unsettled by the thought of male pregnancy, but the reproductive reversal among the fish is often seen as kinda cute ("How sweet. A fishy dad taking care of his kids!"). As shown by a study by Kimberly Paczolt and Adam Jones published this week in Nature, however, there can be…
laelaps | March 19, 2010
Earlier this week David Williams (Stories in Stone), Michael Welland (Sand), and I started a blog series about the details of publishing a popular science book (Parts 1, 2, and 3), but I have been a bit underwhelmed by the response. I had been hoping for some input from other published authors, questions or comments from aspiring book writers, and for the series to take the form of a conversation. Instead I feel like I am talking to myself. Is there anything anyone would like to know about the process of writing a pop-sci book? Or would you all prefer that I just get back to the science…
laelaps | March 18, 2010
The preserved head of a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), dissected and dyed to show some of the glands inside the head. From the collections of the New Jersey State Museum (originally from the College of New Jersey).