laelaps | May 21, 2008 When I think about taphonomy, the science that studies what happens to an organism after death (often summed up as "the laws of burial"), my thoughts most immediately turn to large scavengers, wind, and water. When an elephant dies on the African savanna, for instance, the carcass is sure to attract carnivores that will strip some of the flesh from the bones and depending on the location of the body parts of it may or may not end up being preserved. It's easier to ignore the chemical changes and smaller organisms that contribute to the breakdown of a carcass, but the action of these…
laelaps | May 21, 2008
I haven't looked at my Sibley's to figure out what species this is yet, so for now all I can say is that it is a plover (and therefore a member of the Charadriinae). Shows how much I know. Wendy kindly informed me that this is a sandpiper (Scolopacidae), not a plover, although I'll still have to look up which one it is. (Photographed May 17, 2008 at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.)
laelaps | May 20, 2008[Note: I've received all the papers but one, which I may be able to get directly from the author. Many thanks to everyone who sent in papers; hopefully I'll soon be able to share some good news about the end to which I'm using these resources.]
Many thanks to everyone who sent me the Ichnos paper this past weekend; I will be blogging about dinosaurs and dermestid beetles soon enough. At the moment, though, I have a somewhat bigger project that I'm working on (but that must remain under wraps for the moment) involving T.H. Huxley and his thoughts on the relationship between birds and dinosaurs…
laelaps | May 20, 2008
A laughing gull (Larus atricilla) takes off. (Photographed May 17, 2008 at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware).
laelaps | May 19, 2008[Note: I believe I have all the entries that have been submitted for this edition of The Boneyard. If yours is missing please let me know asap and I will put it in immediately.]
Early Saturday morning, before the sun burned off the last bit of moisture left by the previous night's rainstorm, my wife and I struck off for the beach of Cape Henlopen State Park. In May and June, when the tide is high and the moon is full, horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) crawl out of the surf to spawn. Not all of them make it back to the water, however, and the beach was littered with slowly drying dead…
laelaps | May 19, 2008
Last month I posted an interview with paleontologist Bob Bakker, and while the scientific questions I asked stirred some discussion (including a response to some of the points from Jack Horner) a number of readers got hung up on the last part of the interview dealing with science & religion. Many of the comments on the original post disagreed with Bakker's criticism of Richard Dawkins, while creationists elsewhere on the web quote-mined the interview to support of their own views (see here and here, for example).
Just this past weekend Bakker sent me a reply to the comments that centered…
laelaps | May 19, 2008
In previous years I have had the good fortune of looking for fossils in the Inversand marl pit not long after a rain storm, the water washing away the sediment around small fossil shells and thus placing them on top of a little, sandy pedestal. I saw something similar this past weekend along the beach in Delaware, the recent action of water giving a number of shells their own little perch. The shells were small, in many cases little more than shell fragments, but as the photo above illustrates they still made for interesting subjects.
laelaps | May 18, 2008I just got back from my weekend trip to Delaware. Friday night was absolutely miserable (cold, wet, half-cooked hot dogs for dinner, etc.), but by Saturday morning the weather had greatly improved. Unfortunately, however, a big storm had thrown off the rhythms of the up the annual horseshoe crab spawning and the majority of the ones I saw were either dead or dying. Late Saturday night I stumbled across two "in the act" (the week before, apparently, there had been thousands along the beach), but otherwise I saw more sun-bleached carapaces than living animals. Still, it was a good trip and here…
laelaps | May 17, 2008
Blake Stacey has a review of The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing that is, simply put, and unalloyed pleasure to read. Indeed, it's so good that I have only two alternatives; try to improve my own reviews or commission Blake to start writing more of them!
Michael has the scoop about a Royal Society podcast about the "true Darwin." Even during his own time Darwin's views were sometimes twisted or misrepresented, and it is certainly important to ask the question "Which Charles Darwin are we talking about?" Have a listen, and then why not pick up On the Origin of Species or The…
laelaps | May 17, 2008
Zeff, a female Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed this past March at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | May 16, 2008During the past two weeks I've read a number of books, but few of them have been as enjoyable as those written by Martin Rudwick (The Meaning of Fossils) and David Quammen (The Boilerplate Rhino). Serendipitously, there are new articles out about both authors; the History of Science Society has a biographical sketch of Rudwick honoring his reception of the Sarton Medal, and on the Montana State University website you can find an interview with Quammen.
The works of both authors have been highly inspirational and enlightening to me in my own quest to become a more professional writer, and if…
laelaps | May 16, 2008I'm sorry to say that things with Rutgers are still a mess, but the spring semester is over and now I've got about three months to work on some of my projects. There's a lot I want to do, but most importantly I want to become a better writer and photographer. Towards that end I have set a few goals for this summer, and even though I've stated them before I thought that I would re-iterate what I want to accomplish;
#1) Finish my book. - I haven't added anything new to my book in a long time, mostly because final exams were much more of a priority. Now that I have much more time to devote to…
laelaps | May 16, 2008
A snow leopard pair (Panthera uncia), photographed at the Bronx zoo in 2006.
I've been lucky enough to get a few halfway-decent photographs of snow leopards during my regular visits to the Bronx zoo, but they're absolute rubbish compared to the photography in the feature "Out of the Shadows" in the latest issue of National Geographic. Indeed, snow leopards are among my favorite felids and the photography by Steven Winter shows them at their best.
A snow leopard about to take a cat nap at the Bronx zoo (photographed this past March).
laelaps | May 16, 2008
A white nosed coati (or pizote, Nasua narica), photographed last year at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | May 15, 2008
As regular readers of this blog know, I have an extreme affinity for museums and always welcome the news of a long-lost specimen that was locked away in storage turning out to be something new and significant. In 2006 one such discovery occurred when Mike Taylor (seen left, holding the specimen) came across a sauropod vertebra named BMNH R2095, a fossil that would turn out to be something so entirely different that one year later it was assigned the name Xenoposeidon. Mike Taylor has done much more than bring Xenoposeidon to light, however, and I caught up with him to ask a few questions…
laelaps | May 15, 2008I just realized something; I'm not going to be able to put up the special edition of The Boneyard #20 this Saturday as planned. Being that I'll be somewhere along the shores of Delaware trying to photograph some horseshoe crabs I won't be able to see all the last-minute submissions and put them up. So, instead of putting it up on Saturday, I'm going to post the carnival on Monday. That gives everyone who wants to put in an entry a few more days to come up with something (all entires will have to be in before 10AM eastern time on Monday). I've received a few wonderful submissions so far, but I…
laelaps | May 15, 2008Columbia University Press is presently having it's "White Sale" until May 31, and there's a lot of good books going on sale for cheap. The "Science" section has some particularly good stuff, like Slotten's The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, Agusti and Anton's Mammoths, Sabertooths, and Hominids: 65 Million Years of Mammalian Evolution in Europe, Laporte's George Gaylord Simpson: Paleontologist and Evolutionist, and even some more technical material like The Eocene-Oligocene Transition: Paradise Lost by Prothero and New Approaches to Speciation in the Fossil…
laelaps | May 15, 2008Later today I'll be posting the next installment of my series of interviews with paleontologists, this time asking Mike Taylor to tell us a little about PhyloCode, strange sauropods, and the present "Aetogate" controversy (just to start). It's another long, detail-rich interview, so be sure to check back later today to have a look.
laelaps | May 15, 2008
A greater mouse deer (Tragulus napu), photographed last year at the National Zoo.
[Note]: My brand new Nikon D60 arrived yesterday, so I'll soon have some brand new images to use for this daily photo post.
laelaps | May 14, 2008
A Plains zebra (Equus quagga), photographed last year at the Philadelphia Zoo.