laelaps | March 26, 2008
Puzzles, a 27 year old female giraffe that was a favorite at the Philadelphia zoo (see above), was euthanized last week. Puzzles was most easily identified by the mysterious growth on her neck, something that zoo officials said did not contribute to her declining health although no one ever seemed quite certain why the growth formed.
Unfortunately the zoo may euthanize another 28 year old giraffe named Twigga in the near future as well. The other giraffe being kept, Stella, is only 7, and the zoo staff is asking around to obtain another giraffe so Stella will not be left all alone.
The story…
laelaps | March 26, 2008Among the phrases that are most likely to make my hackles rise, "missing link" has to be among the most irritating. There is no good reason to continue to use it, the idea that evolution is a "chain" of progress being closely associated with the terminology, but this seems to be of little concern to some journalists. Even if we put accuracy aside, the phrase "missing link" is terrible because it has a sort of "half-joking" connotation to it, often being associated with bigfoot and cartoons rather than the remains of ancient humans.
Maybe they feel like they're trying to help by creating a "…
laelaps | March 26, 2008
The mount of Brontotherium on display at the AMNH. Notice the healed rib.
During the field season of 1892, J.L. Wortman found the front half of an absolutely monstrous mammal. Entombed in the South Dakota sediment was the exquisitely preserved front half of a Titanotherium (now called Brontotherium, as far as I've been able to tell), an odd-toed ungulate that looked something like a rhino despite its closer affinity to horses. Much to the disappointment of Wortman and his assistant O.A. Peterson, however, the hips, hind limbs, and tail of the creature seemed to be eroded away, and a…
laelaps | March 26, 2008
The view off the back of "Sedge Island" in Barnegat Bay. If you hurried, you could run from one side of the tiny island to the other in less than a minute, but it's where I spent a few days several years ago for an ecology field camp course. Interestingly, nearby power plants warmed the water in the bay enough that some species of fish that normally prefer more tropical waters were caught when our class went out with a seine net.
laelaps | March 25, 2008Anyone else remember this one?
To young-earth creationists, that's practically a documentary.
laelaps | March 25, 2008Presently there are few words as divisive among science bloggers as "framing," and at this point it appears that the concept of framing itself has been "mis-framed." The concept has always been a bit nebulous to me, but I'm definitely concerned by the recent formulation of framing being proposed by Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet. Over the past two weeks a series of posts and articles have been generated by the pair advocating that scientists (and other figures in the public associated with science) stop picking at creationism, global climate change denialism, etc. Now hot off the heels of the…
laelaps | March 25, 2008As some of you know, I take in an extra cat that needs a foster home from time to time, rotating them out as they are adopted or go to the pet store so people can see them. Here's a quick run-down of how the cats my wife and I have fostered (each in turn) have been doing;
Beatrice: Bea was the first cat my wife and I took in last year, and she still hasn't found a home. She's been back and forth to a few places, but it's been difficult finding her a home. She's happy here for now, although she'll probably go back to the adoption center soon in the hopes that someone will find her charming…
laelaps | March 25, 2008The study of the evolution of avian dinosaurs is one of the most active and exciting areas of paleontology (if not science in general) today, and I've been fortunate enough to see a revolution in this field during my own lifetime. When I was first learning about dinosaurs as a child, a few documentaries and books mentioned that dinosaurs and birds were probably related to each other, the overall tone being very cautious, but now there is little doubt that ornithology is really "extant dinosaur biology." Still, some old hypotheses die hard, and even though I greatly appreciate the beauty and…
laelaps | March 24, 2008There are times when I'm not entirely sure what to write. Like many other bloggers, I was certainly frustrated by Matt Nisbet's latest piece about who is allowed to "speak for science," but whatever useful discussion there might have been essentially was dead at the start. I wrote something up earlier today on how the present argument over framing has degenerated into name-calling and demands for apologies, but I ultimately decided to trash it; I didn't see it adding much, things being as they are.
Still, the arguments presently being aired did remind me of something Blake asked not too long…
laelaps | March 24, 2008
"An Iguanodon proper," as it appears "on the dexter side" of the Maidstone coat of arms, added in 1949.
Although the teeth of Iguanodon were discovered in 1822, more definitive skeletal remains of the dinosaur did not appear until 1834, which were discovered in Maidstone, Kent in England. These remains, as well as others from the same locality and elsewhere, allowed for skeletal reconstructions to be made of this animal, although the similarity of the teeth of Iguanodon to a living iguana seemed to dominate artistic depictions until the famous Belgium fossils were discovered. Over a…
laelaps | March 24, 2008Spring break is over, which means that in addition to heading back to class, I'm going to try to confront the RU administration one more time in a sort of "last stand" to try and work things out. I doubt that I'll be successful, but I know that if I don't at least try I'm just going to be aggravated and upset if I find out there's something else I could have done. The sentiment expressed in the Motion City Soundtrack song "Can't Finish What You Started" probably best stands up my present feelings about the situation, though;
I thought of all the things I'd like to say
Cramped up and couldn't…
laelaps | March 24, 2008
I have little sympathy for human-like "dinosauroids," but apparently they're more popular than even I originally thought. Darren, master of "things that make you go 'Huh?!', has a summary of some "anthroposaurus"-related literature, including details of the nuclear Cretaceous apocalypse.
The latest edition of the Accretionary Wedge is now up, featuring plenty of excellent posts about geology in the movies. Pop some corn and check it out.
The way our species gives birth is a bit frightening in itself, but I have to say I am glad that human babies aren't born like this.…
laelaps | March 24, 2008The origin of bipedalism, one of the classic traits popularly cited to separate humans from other primates, has long been a controversial area of research. A number of hypotheses have been floated over the years, but now that more fossil material from the time around the chimpanzee/human split has been uncovered researchers have been able to get a better idea of just how old bipedalism is. In a new paper published in Science, Brian Richmond and William Jungers suggest that the remains of the 6 million year old Orrorin tugenensis provide the earliest known postcranial evidence of hominin…
laelaps | March 24, 2008
An African civet (Civetticus civetta) that had been rescued and found a home at the Popcorn Park Zoo. I don't know the history of this particular animal, but civets are often "farmed" for civetone, an ingredient used in expensive perfumes that is found in a substance secreted from a gland near their anus (the civets aren't killed; a spoon is used in the process). Civetone can be created synthetically, but some companies still prefer the natural stuff, and strangely enough some wildlife biologists have found perfumes containing civetone to be useful to their research. Jaguars seem especially…
laelaps | March 23, 2008Where there's one, there's the other. The pair behind the infamous "framing" concept are back, and this time they're telling scientists to shut up, perhaps taking up the axiom of "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were nice?" More specifically, in a recent blog post Matt Nisbet admonished PZ and Richard Dawkins for their particular views about the conflict between science & religion as they appear in the creationist propaganda piece Expelled. Quote Nisbet;
As long as Dawkins and PZ continue to be the representative voices from the pro-science side in this debate, it is really bad for those…
laelaps | March 23, 2008I usually tread lightly on theological issues here (outside of conflicts between monotheistic dogma & evolution), but the other day I heard an interview on NPR with John Dominic Crossan about the historicity of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Crossan does not believe in a bodily resurrection of the dead, and while this departure is going to irk a number of people who feel that Jesus "rising from the dead" is central to Christianity, Crossan brings up a number of problems with the conflicting accounts of what happened after the crucifixion in the four gospels. It's not anything you're…
laelaps | March 23, 2008Will has got it up over at The Dragon's Tales. Greg Laden will host it next on April 6th.
laelaps | March 22, 2008
In nearly any film that involves dinosaurs, the main problem facing the people making the movie is determining how to get humans and dinosaurs together in the first place. Some films have opted for genetic experiments, others hidden refugia, and still others nuclear tests (although these films usually feature mutated dinosaurs rather than the animals themselves), but a solution is usually found through time travel, the existence of the lost world, or (more recently) fiddling around with DNA. Once the monsters have been securely brought into contact with humans, though, a hero needs to…