laelaps | March 30, 2008A number of science bloggers, myself included, often write about the current manifestation of creationism that is presently popular, but lately I've been starting to wonder why creationism is so well-received in the first place. Despite the fair amount of attention Expelled has attained on science blogs, it seems that most members of the public don't even know it's going to come out. Creationists have published their own technical journal for years, yet outside of a handful of "creation scientists," no one seems to care. Dozens of creationist books, essentially rehashed tracts of previously…
laelaps | March 30, 2008I was able to get a considerable amount of reading done this past week (I read Glorified Dinosaurs, Feathered Dragons, Fossils, and Major Transitions in Vertebrate Evolution cover-to-cover), but I ended up being greatly disappointed by one of the books I read. Although I wasn't expecting a popular review like Colbert's Evolution of the Vertebrates, a number of the entries in Major Transitions in Vertebrate Evolution were beyond my comprehension. I'm sure it's a valuable book with plenty of good information inside it, but the authors of the various papers didn't seem like they cared much for…
laelaps | March 29, 2008Sometimes textbook cardboard refuses to disintegrate. According to scientific lore, T.H. Huxley singlehandedly slew Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce during a debate at Oxford in the sweltering heat of an 1860 summer, causing a woman to faint and sending Robert Fitzroy, (former captain of the HMS Beagle when it took Charles Darwin around the world) into a frenzy, stalking the aisles and shouting "The book! The book!" while holding a bible aloft. It's a nice story, but like many such tales, it's probably not true.
Although the legend of Huxley's great victory over Wilberforce continues to this…
laelaps | March 29, 2008
"Leonardo," the mummy dinosaur.
News of the well-preserved skeleton of the Edmontosaurus "Dakota" have been featured prominently in the news lately, but according to an announcement made this weekend, another exquisitely-preserved hadrosaur is going to be put on public display this coming September. "Leonardo," a beautifully-preserved Brachylophosaurus, will be presented to the public starting September 19, 2008 in the exhibit "Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation" at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Eventually the exhibit will tour the country, but if you want to…
laelaps | March 29, 2008Sometime in the night, Laelaps passed the 100,000 visit mark! Thank you all for helping to make this blog what it is now; it would be quite different without the support of so many readers and other writers.
This blog also just recently passed the 2,000 comment mark, and I'm trying to think of a prize for the person who makes the 5,000th comment. I've got an extra copy of Ralph O'Connor's The Earth on Show on hand, as well as a few other books, so maybe I'll make up a little paleo prize-pack.
laelaps | March 29, 2008It's amazing how things come together, sometimes. I mentioned that I wanted to start a series of "Profiles in Paleontology," and an opportunity to ask Robert T. Bakker some questions about the evolution, extinction, and daily lives of dinosaurs presents itself almost immediately. Expect to see the interview sometime early this coming week.
laelaps | March 28, 2008I find bones utterly fascinating, and I'm very happy to say that I have a spouse that understands and appreciates this. That's why when my wife spotted a dessicated deer carcass on the side of the road, she said "Do you want to stop and see it?" rather than "Eww!" It was what was left of young adult male deer, his antlers being relatively small, and just about all the internal organs had rotted away. The head was arched back over the vertebral column, the feet had fallen off the limbs, and the skin was a tough "jerky" that ran down its back, curling in on itself like a scroll.
The skeleton as…
laelaps | March 28, 2008I thought the whole "digital pet" craze was over, but apparently it's just mutated in some disturbing ways. According to CNN, a game launched in Britain called "Miss Bimbo" is causing quite a bit of controversy. Perhaps meant to be satire of the "glamorous" lifestyles of female media stars, the game instructs players to find rich boyfriends for their characters to leech funds from, blow their money on breast implants for their avatars, and throw a few crumbs to their "bimbos" to strike that balance between emaciated and dead.
Oddly enough, the #1 consumers of the game are young girls aged 7…
laelaps | March 28, 2008Brian at Clastic Detritus want to know what you listen to while writing (and ReBecca chimes in, too). My answer, unexciting as it may be, is "The various clicking and whirring of my computer." I occasionally listen to music while writing, but since I don't have much instrumental or classical music, my playlist is usually more distracting than anything else. If I do listen to music I usually put on my headphones to block some other noise out, as it's easier to ignore something familiar than something new and annoying.
If I recall correctly, though, even classical music can send me off-track at…
laelaps | March 28, 2008
The skull of Mosasaurus hoffmani. Lingham-Soliar 1995.
On my first trip to the Inversand marl pit in Sewell, New Jersey, I didn't find the wonderfully preserved Dryptosaurus skeleton I had been dreaming of. I come across a number of bivalve shells and geologically younger sponges, but other than a few scraps of "Chunkosaurus," my excavations didn't yield very much. Before my paleontology class left the site, though, we took a walk by the spoil piles, great green mounds of sediment that had already been mined for glauconite. It had recently rained, and little pillars revealed fragmentary…
laelaps | March 27, 2008I'm really not that worried about Expelled. Sure, it has resulted in a fair amount of posts here on the blogosphere (and I've done my fair share), but from what I can tell most people have never even heard of the film. Set to come out on April 18th, the film hasn't even shown up on the radar of many movie websites, and from what I've heard about test screenings the film is still undergoing some last minute changes before it slithers onto screens. How many screens? I have no idea, but I wouldn't imagine that it will be that many.
It's expensive to go to the movies these days, the cheapest…
laelaps | March 27, 2008
The skull and mandible of Guarinisuchus.
After the end-Cretaceous extinction, an "empty" world was left to fill up. The non-avian dinosaurs were gone, as were the mosasaurs, ammonites, pterosaurs, and other creatures. Indeed, in marine environments the large Mesozoic predators were eliminated in the extinction event, allowing sharks and crocodiles to evolve and diversify now that they were no longer any mosasaurs patrolling the waters. One such crocodylian that moved into open ecological space was Guarinisuchus munizi, just described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Although…
laelaps | March 27, 2008Crappy anime, claymation, and hand puppets? Watch if you dare...
From the series "Kyoryu Tankentai Born Free."
laelaps | March 27, 2008Earlier this month I mentioned an article by Suzan Mazur about a "meeting of the minds" that's going to take place this summer to discuss the state of evolutionary theory. I'll be interested to see what comes out of the symposium, but the 16 invited scientists aren't going to be constructing a new formulation of evolutionary theory by themselves that everyone else will be obliged to accept, and I think the importance of the meeting was played up a bit too much in Mazur's article. Now she has authored a second piece on the upcoming conference, and as PZ recently noted, it's even worse than the…
laelaps | March 27, 2008According to a Daily Mail article released yesterday, a 19 lb. jawbone from an extinct elephant relative was found in an unmarked package in a bus compartment. There isn't much else to the story, except that the mandible was misidentified by the "expert" called to look at photos of the fossil (and hence the error was repeated in the newspaper). According to the report, the jaws were from a Triceratops;
Pablo de la Vera Cruz, an archeologist at the National University in Arequipa, said examined police photos of the fossil. He said: "The jawbone that was found could be from a triceratops, even…
laelaps | March 26, 2008Over the course of my relatively short blogging career, I've had the pleasure of being in contact with a number of working paleontologists, people who are actively contributing to our understanding of ancient life. Although I'm always a little intimidated talking to professionals in paleontology, I've been thinking that I'd like to start up a series of interviews paleontologists active in the field today. What do you think? Is that something you'd like to see? I can't guarantee everyone that I have in mind will respond, but I think it would be a neat feature to run.