laelaps | July 29, 2008
Charlotte (the black one) and Dolly playing. Dolly went to the adoption center this past weekend.
Dolly
laelaps | July 29, 2008
A black-crested gibbon (Nomascus concolor), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 28, 2008When I first started attending Rutgers in the Fall of 2001 the university had the football coach come to speak to all the incoming freshman. Offering free red t-shirts he pleaded with students to start coming to the games, our team needing the support of students to start winning. Few people went, the stadium often being mostly empty, at least until 2006. Everything changed that year. The team started gaining victories on the astroturf and students flocked to the stadium, some cutting class for several days to make sure that they could get good seats for the big end-season games. Some nights…
laelaps | July 28, 2008
A silverback Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed on July 23, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
During my elementary school years I was spoon-fed the classic, textbook mythology about evolutionary theory. Although Jean Baptiste Lamarck had come up with a ridiculous notion to explain the neck of the giraffe the world was wholly unprepared for Charles Darwin's crystal clear scientific revelation in 1859, On the Origin of Species instantaneously being accepted as the only reasonable explanation for the unity and diversity of life. This is absolute nonsense, of course, but as we approach the "…
laelaps | July 28, 2008
A small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 27, 2008Here are a few other YouTube gems I just happened across; interviews with Stephen Jay Gould, Ernst Mayr, and E.O. Wilson conducted in the year 2000.
Stephen Jay Gould
Ernst Mayr
E.O. Wilson (part 1)
E.O. Wilson (part 2)
laelaps | July 27, 2008
Rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 26, 2008
A female Majungasaurus as envisaged by the creators of Jurassic Fight Club.
Imagine, just for a moment, standing in the middle of a Cretaceous forest 70 million years ago. The sunlight streaming through the canopy catches dust motes in the hot Madagascar grove, the calls of birds making the scene feel familiar despite being from another time. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, they cease, the undergrowth just beyond your line of vision creaking and cracking with the footfalls of something monstrous. The predator slowly comes into view through the trees, a male Majungasaurus with a bright red…
laelaps | July 26, 2008I haven't interviewed Paul Sereno (yet) but there are a few short interview clips up on YouTube where he reflects on his career as a professional paleontologist;
laelaps | July 26, 2008
Western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla, a silverback male [top] and females [middle and bottom]), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 25, 2008Beyond the importance of his ideas I find the life of Charles Darwin fascinating because of all the innumerable opportunities for history to have turned out differently. If his father had kept Darwin off the HMS Beagle, for instance, Darwin may well have had the quiet country parsonage he longed for, finding a non-controversial refuge in changing times. History, of course, turned out quite differently, but the more I learn about Darwin's life the more I appreciate the struggle involved in the development of evolution by natural selection.
Although Darwin unintentionally imitated some of his…
laelaps | July 25, 2008
A giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 24, 2008That long list of books is making the rounds again (Jennifer, Chad, Jessica, John, and Bora have already jumped in), yet I can't bring myself to join in the fun.
The list reminds me of something one of my high school English teacher once told my class. He was very concerned that we be "cultured" (no, not that way) and steeped in the classics, having us cut our teeth on Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky before hopefully starting up subscriptions to The New Yorker someday. I didn't particularly care; his culture was not my culture, then or now. Indeed, glancing over the selections putting the book…
laelaps | July 24, 2008Just for the hell of it (and because Jennifer did it first) here's a Wordle of my manuscript to date. I'll post new ones periodically to see if any evolution can be spotted as I continue to write.
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It's too big to fit here but click on through if you want to take a peek.
laelaps | July 24, 2008
The skeleton of a young Tarbosaurus. From the LiveScience article.
Poor Tarbosaurus. Even though it was a top predator during the Cretaceous most people have never heard about it, the theropod from Asia being a poor man's Tyrannosaurus. (Some people think that Tarbosaurus = Tyrannosaurus, but I side with those who hold that they are distinct.) Still, even though it is not as famous as it's North American cousin it is still pretty cool that the recovery of a nearly complete skeleton of a juvenile Tarbosaurus has just been announced. Discovered two years ago in the Gobi Desert the fossils…
laelaps | July 24, 2008In working on one of my projects I've run into a little snag; I need to get my hands on three papers by E.D. Cope and Rutgers does no have access to them. They are all in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, although the only reference to them I've found is from an old paper by H.F. Osborn in which he reproduced only a single page number from a multiple-page article. The references are;
A helpful reader was kind enough to send these to me. Thank you!
1866 Cope, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, p. 317
1867 Cope, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural…
laelaps | July 24, 2008
An ebony langur (Trachypithecus auratus), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo. Of all the animals at the zoo people stop to watch primates more than nearly any other group of animals. The monkeys & apes watch the primates on the other side of the barrier, too.
"What's that animal?"
"It's like a zebra mixed with a horse!"
"I don't like it."
And with that mother and teenage daughter walked off to inspect the red river hogs and gorillas of the Bronx zoo's Congo exhibit, ignoring the plastic slab explaining that the okapi in front of them is related to giraffes. I've seen the…
laelaps | July 24, 2008
A tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus sp.), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 23, 2008Given that today is a weekday and the weather forecast predicted a 90% chance of heavy thunderstorms I thought that the Bronx zoo would be mostly empty. I was way off. At times the crush of the crowds, vacationers and neon-clad elementary school groups, was almost too much to bear and I was actually a bit relieved when I made it home just as the storm broke.
Oddly enough it seems that many of the animals were frustrated today, too; snow leopards, rock hyraxes, small-clawed otters, and other animals were tussling with each other throughout the day. Still, despite the frequent bumps, jostles,…