laelaps | July 17, 2008Ok, maybe the name isn't as catchy as Jurassic Fight Club but that's what it's all about; ancient critters ripping the guts out of other ancient critters and how we know they did it. I'll have a review of the first episode, featuring Majungasaurus, up next week, but in the meantime the History Channel has released a slew of videos and other materials to look over prior to the premiere (including a game that I'm sure will remind a few of you of Primal Rage).
The show itself features a number of experts but the main host is "Dinosaur George" Blasing, and while I'm not on board with all of his…
laelaps | July 17, 2008
Nine reasons not to date a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Also check out Zach's post refuting Jack Horner's hypothesis that Tyrannosaurus was an obligate scavenger. The piece was inspired by the new symposium book Tyrannosaurus rex, The Tyrant King; I can't wait to get my claws on a copy of my own (but I should finish Rex Appeal and Tyrannosaurus Sue first).
Now if only that anxiously awaited technical book about "Jane" would come out...
[Hat-tip to Thomas Holtz]
laelaps | July 17, 2008
A male cougar (Puma concolor), photographed July 15th, 2008 at the Philadelphia zoo.
laelaps | July 16, 2008[Note: Apparently Emma Marris didn't like Sizzle either, and you can read her review in Nature. I'm definitely interested in seeing more reviews of the film from various sources as we get closer to the release date.]
After reading Chris Mooney's hyperbolic review of Sizzle this morning I have to admit I was a little pissed off. While I panned the film Chris went head-over-heels for it; it seems that we saw two different films. Maybe we did. Although the topic of science communication is an undercurrent through the film (breaking to the surface in a few places) I did not think that framing was…
laelaps | July 16, 2008It's been nearly a month since I posted my last book progress update. When I posted the last update the summer still seemed to stretch ahead of me, yet now it's the middle of July with the beginning of the fall semester feeling imminent. What's worse, I don't think I'll be able to hit my goal of having the first draft completed by the end of the summer.
There are a few reasons for this. First is my precalc class, which has met for three hours a night, three nights a week, since the beginning of June. I go to the lectures the same days that I work an eight hour day so by the time I get home at…
laelaps | July 16, 2008I've never liked the term "Darwinism." To me it has always been more of a watchword that might indicate that I was talking to a creationist, a term I generally do not encounter unless I'm reading or hearing an argument against a straw-man version of evolution. (I'm not a big fan of "evolutionist," either.) It may have been useful in the past, when evolution by natural selection (as popularized by Darwin) was competing with other systems like Neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis, but today it doesn't have any relevance. (It should also be noted that A.R. Wallace wrote a book on natural selection…
laelaps | July 16, 2008
Two of the three male Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) born at the Philadelphia Zoo last year. Photographed July 15th, 2008.
laelaps | July 16, 2008Bora has got the first edition of the history of science carnival The Giant's Shoulders up at A Blog Around the Clock. There's lots of great stuff, and I certainly recommend that you give it a look.
Speaking of carnivals, after giving it some thought I'd decided to pick up The Boneyard again, albeit in a slightly modified form. Keep your eyes peeled for an announcement about the new format this week.
laelaps | July 15, 2008Today my wife and I celebrated two years of marriage, which meant heading to the Philadelphia zoo in the morning, tubing on the Delaware River in the afternoon, and a nice dinner when we got home. I've got plenty of new shots to share, but I'll start things off with one of the most unique ones, a Galapagos tortoise on skates;
It seems that this individual has trouble walking so the zoo staff rigged it up with some wheels. It got around just as well as any of the other tortoises in the enclosure, although I had never seen such a technique used to help a tortoise before.
laelaps | July 15, 2008
Small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinerea), photographed July 5th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 14, 2008
Sizzle, the new documentary by Flock of Dodos creator Randy Olson, describes itself as "a movie you'll feel passionate about (even if you don't know why)." This description is particularly apt, although perhaps not in the way that the team behind the film expected.
Randy Olson is concerned. An Inconvenient Truth was a great film but there are still hordes of people who deny human activities are changing the world's climate and reputable climate scientists seem nowhere to be found. He decides to set off on an admirable quest to find the top climatologists and find out what they have to say…
laelaps | July 14, 2008Remember my Spore critter, Anomalonychus? Well now it's up on the SporeVote webpage, along with creations from other Reed Cartwright and Craig McClain. Apparently I'm not cool enough to be featured on the front page with Adam West, MC Hammer, and Carlos Santana, but it's still good to have my profile up there. If you want to have a look go to SporeVote.com, make a selection from the "More Spore" menu, and then look for my picture.
laelaps | July 14, 2008
The type skull of Velociraptor mongoliensis. From Osborn, et al. 1924.
By the summer of 1993 Velociraptor had become a household name. Although Deinonychus had long been my fleet-footed favorite the olive-green "clever girls" of Speilberg's film soon outshone all of their relatives and gave Tyrannosaurus a run for it's money.* Velocriaptor is hardly a new dinosaur, however. It was discovered during the famous expeditions to Mongolia made by the AMNH in the 1920's, the team setting out to find the "birthplace" of all mammals and coming back with loads of new dinosaurs. Velociraptor…
laelaps | July 14, 2008John Wilkins recently announced that he has an article about science blogging in press over at Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and many congratulations to him. The piece is definitely worth a look, appraising science blogs in terms of how they impact science communication and may benefit historians, but there was one aspect of the paper that bothered me. While many science bloggers are graduate students and researchers (as mentioned in the paper) there are many, like myself, who do not have such ties to academic institutions. Indeed, there are many bloggers who can write eloquently and…
laelaps | July 14, 2008
A series of photos of gulls, photographed at Ocean Grove, NJ on July 13th, 2008.
laelaps | July 13, 2008Sorry for the lack of posts today, everyone. I spent most of the afternoon at the beach, taking pictures and reading Rex Appeal. I did manage to get a few pretty good shots, although I'm saving a series of them for tomorrow. Here's a little something for now (and thank you to whoever added today's snow leopard photos to StumbleUpon. I'm glad you liked them!);
laelaps | July 13, 2008
A female snow leopard (Panthera uncia). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
This snow leopard is another female, the sister of the one pictured above.
laelaps | July 12, 2008Majungasaurus is one cool theropod. Not only does is have a neat, knobby skull but the numerous remains of this dinosaur allowed for an entire series of papers on it to appear in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoirs. Although it is hardly a household name quite a bit is known about this predator from the ancient sediments of Madagascar, and the Witmer Lab has recently put up some really cool 3D animations of cutting planes through the skull of Majungasaurus;
There's also some cool video of sagittal slices through the skull of Majungasaurus;
You can expect to be hearing more…
laelaps | July 12, 2008
It's only been in the last year that I've obtained a deeper appreciation for the history of science. Natural history is utterly enthralling, of course, but the history of the naturalists that have shaped our understanding of the world are just as fascinating. For my own part, the essays of Stephen Jay Gould (particularly in The Lying Stones of Marrakech, which I first picked up last year) have given me a deeper appreciation for the history of thought in paleontology and evolution. In fact, I was so struck with Gould's titular essay from Lying Stones that I immediately ordered a copy of The…