laelaps | March 12, 2008A few weeks ago I picked up a slew of old anthropology books, many of which were at least minimally concerned with figuring out what makes our species human (or what defines "Man," to put things in their historical context). Bipedalism, making tools, and language were the classic examples of features that separate us from the "beasts,"* but prior to any of these books Charles Darwin noticed that it would be practically impossible to point to any one point in our evolutionary history and claim that specific point as the time that our ancestors became human. Even in a time when transitional…
laelaps | March 11, 2008
An itchy Malayan tapir.
As was the case with many other animals I learned about when I was younger, I believed that there was only one kind of animal called a tapir. Most popular books aimed at children don't spend much (if any) time on taxonomy or diversity, so there was no need for the authors of such books to explain that presently there exist four species of tapir in the tropical regions of the world; Baird's tapir (Tapirus bairdii), the mountain tapir (Tapirus pinchaque), and the Brazilian tapir (Tapirus terrestris) in South & Central America and the Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus…
laelaps | March 11, 2008You know documentaries have fallen into a sorry state of existence when their primary draw is the destruction of expensive objects just to fill up a few minutes (or even seconds) or airtime. I haven't seen the whole documentary, but the first installment of the BBC's The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs thought it would be fun to crunch up a car;
Of course, that clip is essentially a rip-off of a scene from the second Jurassic Park film, The Lost World;
The worst representations of the "destructive documentary," however, can be found in the Discovery Channel's "Animal Face Off" series. In…
laelaps | March 11, 2008We're starting a new program here at Sb where specially-selected readers have the ability to pick out the best of what's appearing in the whole of the community. It works like this; I get to pick two readers who then get the ability to tag three posts per week that will go into an RSS feed that will appear on the Sb frontpage (According to the information I was sent, "All of this will be run using a shared del.icio.us account, where you install bookmarking buttons in your browser that make tagging posts quite simple. Should you accept, we'll send you detailed instructions later on how to set…
laelaps | March 10, 2008This weekend I had a chance to get through a few shorter anthropology books that I purchased a few weeks ago, including Our Face From Fish to Man, The Leopard's Spots, and Adventures With the Missing Link. The last book, by Raymond Dart, is part autobiography and part popular science book, and the reaction of the public to his famous "Taung child" described within is quite interesting. Some hailed the discovery, others criticized or marginalized it, but for a time it entered the public consciousness as a representation of something ugly and brutish, yet inextricably connected to ourselves.…
laelaps | March 10, 2008
When I think of kangaroos, the image of large macropods bounding across the Australian outback most readily comes to mind. Oddly enough, though, some kangaroos became adapted to life in the trees and belong to the genus Dendrolagus. Previously I thought there was only one species of tree kangaroo, but apparently there are many, although some of the distinctions between species and subspecies are still contested.
laelaps | March 9, 2008Today I didn't get completed nearly as much as I would have liked. That's always the case, but this evening it's particularly true. The main reason for my lack of productivity is because the cat that I'm now fostering, a polydactyl named Little Foot, decided to walk on the keyboard and rip out the E, R, and T keys when I got up to get some reheated pork-fried rice from the microwave. Try as I might, I couldn't get them back on, and it served to remind me that I need to purchase a new computer (but can't afford one). For now I'll just work with the buttons under the keys and try to see if I…
laelaps | March 9, 2008There's Icons and Evolution, and then there's Icons of Evolution. The first one I (unfortunately) became acquainted with shortly after my interest in evolution was sparked and the second was just released this past December (although I knew nothing about it until Greg mentioned it), but I doubt that the newer book is going to have any lasting effect. Outside of it seeming like a collection of more technical essays, the sticker price on the 2-volume set is $175.00 (the cheapest copy on amazon.com being $145.00), and I know I wouldn't pay that much money for a book that contains information…
laelaps | March 9, 2008Against my better judgment, I went out to catch a matinée showing of 10,000 BC yesterday, and the only good thing that came of the outing was that I found a $20 bill in the parking lot. The movie is one of the stinkiest pieces of movie cheese I've encountered. At least Dragon Wars was so bad it was funny; 10,000 BC was trite and boring.
There was one mistake present throughout much of the film that continually made me chuckle though. The super-sized mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) in the film were twice incited to charge, and rather than run like modern elephants do, they galloped like…
laelaps | March 8, 2008
Smilodon
It's been two weeks since the last Boneyard weathered out of the blogosphere. Here's a look at what present excavations have revealed over the past two weeks;
Carnivorous mammals have evolved saber-teeth many times in the past, but just how they used their teeth to kill prey has been more difficult to ascertain. Nimravid presents a short review of how creatures so equipped may have caught and killed their prey.
Paleontology isn't only focused on nightmarish creatures that ripped other extinct animals to shreds; the Ethical Palaeontologist reports on an amazing fossil of a…
laelaps | March 8, 2008I'll be putting up the next edition of The Boneyard this afternoon, so you've still got until about 4PM (eastern time) to get your posts in. Any submissions can be left in the comments or sent to me directly at evogeek AT gmail DOT com.
laelaps | March 8, 2008
The small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) is the smallest otter species presently known. They derive their name from their relatively short claws that do no extend past the fleshy pads on their feet, which actually allows them an increased amount of dexterity when handling their food.
laelaps | March 7, 2008There must be some unwritten rule that if you're going to face off against a prehistoric predator, you'd better make sure there's some heavy machinery nearby to even the odds [from an episode of Primeval];
The first time such a confrontation between "monster" and machine on film (that I know of, anyway) was in the film Dinosaurus!;
More recently the low-budget gore-fest Carnosaur pulled the same trick;
Of course, nothing says cheesy b-movie like recycling action sequences; Carnosaur 2 rehashed the climax of the first film using a forklift (Beware: Clip contains gratuitous gore near…
laelaps | March 7, 2008
As promised, here's a photo to make up for the somewhat blurry picture from this morning, only this time I decided to use another shot from the polar bear sequence.
laelaps | March 7, 2008
One of Gerhard Heilmann's color illustrations of Archaeopteryx that graced his classic book The Origin of Birds. For more of Heilmann's excellent artwork, see this website.
Birds are extant dinosaurs; it's a phrase that (while initially quite stimulating) has been expressed so often that it borders on being trite. There are dozens of technical papers, popular books, collections of scholarly essays, and feathered dinosaur toys to drive the point home, but I've often been led to wonder what ornithologists make of all this. Paleontologists have been the main architects that have strengthened…
laelaps | March 7, 2008[Update; I've now received all the papers (thank you all!), but I'll leave the list up here just in case anyone else is interested in tracking these down for their own interests.]
In the process of writing a chapter on the evolution of birds (and, therefore, dinosaurs) I've found that there is a much larger body of literature on the topic than I had previously accounted for. I've got a few books on the topic and have downloaded dozens of papers, but some of the most important papers to my vision for the chapter are beyond my grasp. Many of these are older papers by Richard Owen and T.H.…