laelaps | June 24, 2008The American Museum of Natural History Research Library has recently put up a website ("Picturing the Museum") containing hundreds of black & white photos of museum exhibits, dioramas, and behind the scenes prep. It is a treasure trove of photographic information; I just wish I could have seen some of these exhibits first hand! The behind the scenes photos are some of the most interesting, though, like this photo of the cleaning of an elephant skin;
American Museum of Natural History Library http://images.library.amnh.org Image # 280023
Here are a few links to some other favorites,…
laelaps | June 24, 2008In an essay called "The Reception of the 'Origin of Species'" printed in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (and reprinted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley), "Darwin's Bulldog" T.H. Huxley described the intellectual shock of understanding Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection;
As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter, were very much in my own state of mind -- inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists, "a plague on both your houses!" and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and…
laelaps | June 24, 2008By the time I leave work at the end of the day I feel like I've been run over. I don't do anything particularly stressful or demanding while sitting at my desk but by 3:00 I feel utterly drained. For the past several years my workspace has been a grey cubicle piled high with so many documents that I'm not entirely sure why most of them are important anymore, the constant hum of the computer and headache-induced fluorescent lights slowly wearing me down over the course of the day. Even if I swivel my chair around I can't even look out someone else's window; after 8 hours in my artificial…
laelaps | June 24, 2008
The backside of a Grevy's zebra (Equus grevyi) at the Bronx Zoo. This particular species is the largest of the living species of zebra and can be easily identified by its smaller stripes. Photographed in May 2007.
laelaps | June 23, 2008On April 19th Philadelphia marked the beginning of it's "Year of Evolution," a year-long celebration of the science that, to paraphrase Dobzhansky, makes sense of biology. Jon Hurdle has an article about the festivities in today's New York Times, but right out of the gate what could have been a good article is marred by putting everything in the context of the evolution v. creationism culture wars. Rather than praising Philadelphia for supporting good, established science the year-long series of events is tacitly cast as a reaction to creationism;
In the long-running culture war between…
laelaps | June 23, 2008Everyone seems to be talking about Nicholas Carr's recent article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (see here, here, and here) and I'm not one to buck the trend, although there is one aspect of Carr's piece that I find a bit frustrating. It is way too long! I would probably fare better with the print version but for me the online version is damn-near unreadable after a few paragraphs. Admittedly, as someone who writes super-long posts in a relatively small font (I'm working on it), I recognize the plank in my own eye, but I think there may be more involved here than Google scrambling our brains.…
laelaps | June 23, 2008If you liked last week's post about the creation of The Whale at the AMNH you will definitely want to check out the new issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. The theme for the present issue is "rogue taxidermy," and it includes pieces on strange amalgamations of stuffed animals, nature dioramas as art, and other related stories. If you're interested in the topic in general then you should also have a look at Windows on Nature, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, and Evolution, too.
The main page for the magazine says that it's looking for submissions on a number of topics…
laelaps | June 23, 2008
A female Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed last year at the Bronx Zoo.
That's the question posed in the cover story of the latest issue of National Geographic. On July 22, 2007 five mountain gorillas (Gorilla berengei berengei) were murdered at Virunga, the population made famous by the work of Dian Fossey and her book Gorillas in the Mist. Combined with an earlier attack in the area seven gorillas were executed for unknown reasons within the space of two months, the presence of several warring Congolese militia factions in the area providing an overabundance of suspects but a…
laelaps | June 23, 2008I knew I would have to bite the bullet and get to Charles Darwin eventually. I have mentioned Darwin here and there as I have gradually expanded my other chapters, but up until last night I did not have any section specifically addressing how the idea of evolution by natural selection came about. (I have actually spent far more time talking about T.H. Huxley, Richard Owen, Albert Koch, and William Buckland, at least thus far.) The story of both the man and the idea have been told so many times that I do not want to simply summarize other more in-depth biographies, the sheer volume of Darwin's…
laelaps | June 23, 2008
Two grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) playing in their pool at the Bronx Zoo. Photographed in May 2007.
laelaps | June 22, 2008Reflecting upon my high school science education, there isn't very much I can remember. Physics and chemistry are largely a blur (vague recollections of Avogadro's number and the time when my experiment exploded are all that remain) and the hours I spent in biology were largely a waste. For all the pressure put on us students to excel, taking the college-level AP classes early, I graduated high school with a passion for science but almost no real knowledge of it. I was not served well by the textbook procedures and had I not already resolved to be a scientist I probably would not have…
laelaps | June 22, 2008
A rather large bit of driftwood. Photographed at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, Delaware on May 17, 2008.
laelaps | June 21, 2008I stopped by the Cranbury Bookworm this afternoon to indulge myself in a minor book-buying binge (or at least a smaller one than the last time I went during their 1/2 off sale). Here's what I picked up for $21;
People of the Lake - Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin
The Emergence of Man - John E. Pfeiffer
Alfred Russel Wallace - Peter Raby
African Genesis - Robert Ardrey
Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes - Stephen J. Gould
Good Natured - Frans de Waal
Almost Human - Shirley Strum
I almost picked up a 1925 book called Evolution for John Doe (later called Evolution for…
laelaps | June 21, 2008Here's my first Spore critter, "Anomalonychus." I'll have more on the Spore Creature Creator (and why it's so damn fun to play with) soon;
laelaps | June 20, 2008
As I was skimming through Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), a book that injects a fair amount of Lamarckian evolution into a children's moral fable (the character Mother Carey "make[s] creatures make themselves."), I came across a section that made me grin.
During the course of the story the protagonist Tom is told that he needs to go see the Gairfowl, an old Great auk bird of high breeding (the Great auk just having become extinct in 1852. Thanks to Allen for the correction about the meaning of "Gairfowl."). I do not know what Kingsley thought of the evolution of birds (T.H.…
laelaps | June 20, 2008
AO-4, from the Marine Mammal Science announcement. (arrow added)
On October 28, 2006, fisherman that were capturing individuals of a group of 118 bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) near Taiji, Japan for exploitation in aquaria noticed something peculiar about one of the captured individuals. While the vast majority of dolphins have only two front flippers one particular female had a set of small pelvic flippers. Many whales (particularly baleen whales) have the vestiges of hips and leg bones inside their bodies but a whale with external pelvic fins is an even rarer find. A new paper…
laelaps | June 20, 2008During my first visits to the American Museum of Natural History in New York the only thing that impressed me more than the skeletons of the dinosaurs was the sculpture of the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), posed in a dive above the Hall of Ocean Life. I had seen pictures of blue whales in books and eagle-eye views of them in documentaries, but the sheer size of the cetacean astounded me (especially because I was still so small!). No trip to the museum is complete without at least peeking into the recently refurbished Milstein Hall of Ocean Life to see the whale, but what most people don…
laelaps | June 20, 2008For those of you who subscribe to Natural History there is an excellent article (featuring the always astounding artwork of Mauricio Anton) about the evolution of canids in the new issue. If such a short article on ancient dogs and their relatives isn't enough for you, though, you're in luck. Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History by Wang & Tedford has just been let off the chain and I can't wait to pick up a copy.
laelaps | June 20, 2008After many long nights of scribbling down potential titles for the book I think I've finally got one that fits. Beyond the content itself I wanted to choose something that reflected the changes my thinking went through during the writing process (and the changing of my expected date of completion), thus leaving me only one clear option. Chinese Democracy.
Now that I have a title I can start plans to get this thing to eventually appear on bookshelves, and taking a cue from some other recent events I'm trying to work something out with Coca Cola where everyone in the country will be offered a…