laelaps | July 12, 2008
A Przewalski's horse (Equus ferus przewalskii). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 11, 2008
Feeding "the littles" that were here a few weeks ago.
I think I have confused Charlotte, a diminutive female cat my wife and I adopted about two years ago. She was just a little runt when we took her in and she never had kittens, yet she has been acting a lot like a mother as of late. Given that it is the summer and there is a seemingly never-ending supply of kittens that need temporary foster homes, there have been "itty bitty kitty cats" in the apartment since April. With the last pair (Eliza and Madeline) Charlotte started acting a bit strange. Other than just wanting to constantly…
laelaps | July 11, 2008
Dun, dun. Dun, dun...
A Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 10, 2008They don't make commercials like this anymore. There's probably a good reason for that;
laelaps | July 10, 2008Although creationists try hard to be media-savvy, relying on rhetoric to make their arguments, I can't help but laugh at who qualifies as a star in creationist circles. While documentaries about evolution often feature people like Liam Neeson and Kenneth Branagh, z-listers like Kirk Cameron and Ben Stein are the best creationists can get, apparently. Apparently Charlton Heston did his part for the creationist cause, too, as I discovered while surfing YouTube this morning;
A planet where apes evolved from men dinosaurs lived with humans? According to the "scientists," yes, even though the…
laelaps | July 10, 2008
A gelada (Theropithecus gelada, right) and a rock hyrax (Procavia capensis, left). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 9, 2008It's getting to be that there are more transitional fossils than I have time to blog them. Back in February I wrote about Aetiocetus, an ancient toothed mysticete whale that also had baleen. Then, just a few weeks ago, I put up a few words on Ventastega, a genus that confirms the origin of tetrapods as a branching process.
Now there's a new paper in Nature by Matt Friedman proposing that the fossil flatfish Amphistium and Heteronectes represent intermediate forms between flounders and their more symmetrical ancestors. Carl Zimmer has already done an exceptional job discussing the study (…
laelaps | July 9, 2008The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach features a few thoughts from Gordy Slack on AiG's Creation Museum, which just passed the 1-year mark back in May. The controversy surrounding it has largely died down in the last year, particularly given the shenanigans involved with the release of Expelled, but Slack thought it profitable to take another look.
Slack starts off the piece by identifying what all the hubub is really about. While claims of creationists, like Tyrannosaurus rex lived alongside Adam & Eve and ate coconuts in Eden, are little more than delusions the…
laelaps | July 9, 2008Hot on the heels of the ScienceBlogs Book Club comes another special, limited-run blog all about alternative energy called Next Generation Energy.
The blog will be another active group discussion, with multiple authors (from Sb and beyond) throwing in on energy technologies and policy. The first topic gets right to the point, asking what the most viable energy solution might be as we are further mired in the energy crisis. The blog will only have a limited run, though, starting today and going through October 9, so be sure to keep up on what will surely be a lively discussion.
laelaps | July 9, 2008Is the National Geographic Society hurting science more than helping it? In December of 2007 the group launched a media blitz (including two books, a documentary, and a speaking tour) surrounding the exquisitely preserved specimen of "Dakota," purported to be an as-yet-undescribed species of Edmontosaurus. Although the NGS released a supplementary news report in March to keep everyone's interest going, I don't think I'm alone in expressing my frustration that this dinosaur has been widely promoted yet we're all still waiting for something, anything in the technical literature.
Those of you in…
laelaps | July 9, 2008
A Wolf's Guenon (Cercopithecus wolfi). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 8, 2008I made a bit of an error this past weekend. Wanting to make better use of my camera I eschewed the automatic settings I previously relied on for one that would allow me to change the shutter speed, contrast, white balance, etc. The photographs looked absolutely amazing when I saw the previews on my camera screen, but when I got home I noticed something disconcerting. You see, I had selected a high iso value, essentially making sure that I would have a fast shutter speed even in dim conditions. The trade-off is that the pictures come out incredibly grainy, looking flat rather than crisp. Take…
laelaps | July 8, 2008As I poked around the shelves of the Cranbury Bookworm a few weeks ago, picking up dusty and tattered copies of discarded volumes, I couldn't help but wonder what may eventually become of my own work. There were some classics on the shelves, earlier editions of books that have been printed and reprinted numerous times, but many more are books that have largely been forgotten. What would the authors think about what has become of their work? Not everything is important enough to repackage and retain as a keystone in the literature of one topic or another (in fact most things are not), and…
laelaps | July 8, 2008
Eliza
Madeline
Why start off the day with pictures of the kittens rather than a juicy science post? I think this explains it well enough;
more cat pictures
laelaps | July 8, 2008
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 7, 2008For H.A. Reid, the secretary of the State Academy of Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa, evolution and Creation fit perfectly together. Writing in the Kansas City Review of Science and Industry in 1881, Reid echoed the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson that it was impossible to look at the natural world and not see evidence for some kind of Creator;
The very nature and constitution of the human mind is such, that no man can talk or even think about his own existence and that of the visible world of objects around him, without assuming, even though he may deny it in words, the idea and the fact of a…
laelaps | July 7, 2008
Oh dear. I guess the History Channel decided that the U.S. needed an equivalent to "The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs" and will soon be featuring a show called "Jurassic Fight Club." Here's the synopsis;
JURASSIC FIGHT CLUB
They were the ultimate fighters -- prehistoric beasts who walked the earth millions of years ago. With cunning and strategy, they hunted their prey -- transforming the prehistoric world into a battlefield. Today, archaeologists are uncovering these battlefields -- and are gaining startling new insight into how quick thinking, maneuverability, and striking at the exact…
laelaps | July 7, 2008Last summer I started up the paleontology blog carnival The Boneyard, a bi-weekly gathering of links featuring the best of blogging about fossils. Sadly the carnival has now become defunct, and outside of Will (who has admirably tried to kick me in the butt to get it going again) not many people seem to miss it. Even when the carnival was active there were frequent delays, few actual submissions, and other problems. Many of these complications were my fault as I did not manage it as attentively as I should have, but it was always difficult to gauge just how interested everyone was when hosts…
laelaps | July 7, 2008
A black leopard (Panthera pardus). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 6, 2008
A clip from the Nature documentary "Murder in the Troop."
Before June of last year I didn't particularly like baboons. They seemed to be aggressive, ill-tempered monkeys that more often provoked a small sense of revulsion in me than curiosity. (In fact, for most of my life I thought primates were pretty boring; didn't they just sit around eating leaves and picking ticks off each other?) Then I happened to pick up Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir and that all changed. There was so much I didn't know about them and by the time I put down Sapolsky's book I had an interest and affection…