laelaps | March 2, 2008I've decided to keep something of a running summary of the progress I've made on my book, my thought being that if I am able to keep a tab of what I've done I'll be more likely to work on it and better organize my ideas. Today marks the first day I'll be doing this, and I hope to update it every Sunday around this time when I have finished writing for the evening. Listed below is what I've got so far in terms of chapters/sections where I have a strong direction and organizing focus (I'm not counting the pages of more abstract rambles and notes that have accumulated to date). I've decided to…
laelaps | March 2, 2008
During most of my visits to the Bronx Zoo, the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is usually sleeping or too hot to move around much, but yesterday she was in a much more playful mood. While they certainly are powerful predators, polar bears can be quite playful, and during the winter adult males sometimes play with dogs in the wild. Very little seems to be known about why polar bears and dogs get along during this time of the year, but for whatever reason there is little tension in what otherwise might be an antagonistic confrontation.
laelaps | March 1, 2008A few days ago I mentioned that paleontologist Terry Gates was going to appear on Bill O'Reilly's show to speak on the subject of whether global warming killed the dinosaurs. As we all know, FOX News = Fake News, and I don't understand why Gates agreed to be on the show. It was the absolute worst interview I've ever seen, and basically consisted of a lot of clips of dinosaurs killing each other interspersed with a few questions that made it seem like scientists don't know what the hell they're talking about when it comes to the K/T extinction (which, of course, marked the extinction of groups…
laelaps | March 1, 2008
I got a lot of great shots today at the Bronx Zoo (including, believe it or not, a gibbon grooming a tapir), and although I plan on spacing them out over the next few weeks I thought I would put up one right away. This is one of the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) twins born at the zoo, now a bit grown up, and she just woke up from a nap she was taking with her sister and her mother on a large rock. It looks like the zoo is trying to breed another pair of these big cats, too, so more likely than not there will be more snow leopard cubs born there in the near future.
laelaps | March 1, 2008
I took this photograph about one year ago at the Bronx Zoo (coincidentally I'm returning there today), but I don't know what species of bird this is. If you do, please feel free to identify it in the comments.
Update: Thanks to everyone who replied in the comments. It indeed seems to be a Guira (Guira guira), and I appreciate those of you who took the time to respond! I didn't get to walk through the "World of Birds" this weekend to try and get another look at this bird, but perhaps next time.
laelaps | February 29, 2008It looks like more bad news for my bank account; a few days again Gov. Corzine proposed what he called "a very tough budget" that would cut state aid to New Jersey colleges and universities by about $76,000,000 according to the New York Times. Whether the proposed cuts end up as part of the final budget will only be known as the proposal is finalized, but things aren't looking good for state college.
What does this mean for Rutgers specifically? In an e-mail sent by the president of the university, Richard McCormick, it was noted that we cannot be certain how the proposed cuts will affect…
laelaps | February 29, 2008Whenever there's a documentary about shark attacks on the Discovery Channel or a popular press article involving the supposed "alarming rise" in shark attacks, the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) is usually mentioned. This project is primarily concerned with data-gathering and statistics, and this focus has led to some amount of criticism from other researchers concerned with shark attacks. The director of this project is George Burgess, who was quoted as saying the following in a LiveScience article likely spurred by the recent death of an Australian tourist who was bitten while…
laelaps | February 29, 2008Today got off to a pretty bad start, so I'm experiencing a bit of blogger's block. In lieu of anything original, I liked Janet's questions about science blogs so much that I've decided to steal them and put up my own answers. John has done the same, and I expect others to soon follow suit. (Abel has now joined in, as has Greg.)
1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog?
I didn't initially set out with the goal of creating a science blog; it emerged as an outpouring of what I've been learning about and trying to understand about evolution. Some of what I write involves new papers,…
laelaps | February 29, 2008I'm always fascinated to see how rapidly the paleo-blogosphere has grown and diversified, and over at The World We Don't Live In there's a wonderful post about one of my favorite fossil phenomena, "Devil's Corkscrews." That's one for The Boneyard, which, by the way, will be right here at Laelaps on March 8th.
laelaps | February 29, 2008
There are a number of large carnivores in Africa, but each obtains prey by different methods. Cheetahs, for instance, make a mad dash after their prey but can only keep up a high-speed chase for a short time, while wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are endurance hunters. Much like wolves, a pack can chase prey over long distances and they are among the most successful predators out of the large African carnivores.
laelaps | February 28, 2008Paleo-blogger Nimravid has put up an excellent summary of (surprise!) nimravids. It definitely outshines my earlier, feeble attempts to write about this extinct group of carnivores, and I highly suggest that you give it a look!
laelaps | February 28, 2008The other day I mentioned that I was thinking of putting up a new banner for this blog, and although a number of you have said you thought Knight's painting should stay up, I still felt the need to shake things up a bit. Paleo-artist Mike Skrepnick has kindly let me crop his painting of some Deinonychus catching a group of Tenontosaurus by surprise, and I like the new effect. The old banner isn't going way though; as soon as I figure out how to make the banners rotate I'll bring it back (along with some other new ones based upon some old paleontological artwork). Thanks, Mike!
laelaps | February 28, 2008
A clip form the 1993 PBS documentary The Dinosaurs!
For everyone who missed it (or wanted to see it again), the NOVA documentary on Microraptor is available for viewing online here. I started watching it, but there were so many little things that irked me that I couldn't keep my trap shut. My primary gripe is that documentaries are still using Deinonychus and large dromeosaurs as the model for the bird ancestor, especially since birds like Confuciusornis were already flying by the time the larger, terrestrial predators were on the scene.
Further, while the trees-down/ground-up issue…
laelaps | February 28, 2008
Large zoos have a number of different methods for presenting animals (large carnivores, especially) to the public, but the "pit" set-up is perhaps my least favorite. The lion (Panthera leo) exhibit at the National Zoo, for instance, is a a huge, deep pit with several tiers on it, the edge of the island being separated from the pit wall by a moat. The lions can't get out, but there isn't much preventing anyone from falling in, an event that isn't likely to occur but will definitely be dangerous if it does. Likewise, the pits put the animals further away from visitors than could be achieved in…
laelaps | February 28, 2008Well, if you consider shipwrecks, buried forests, and some previously covered geologic formations to be treasure, that is. Due to the action of some powerful storms around the northern tip of the Oregon coast, parts of the shore underwent massive erosion, revealing the previously entombed oddities. Indeed, you never know what large storms might turn up along the shore; mastodon teeth have been found along one New Jersey beach as storms sometimes cast remains from a near-shore deposit onto the sand.
laelaps | February 27, 2008
A bear skeleton illustrated in William Cheselden's Osteographia.
Yeah, I've been on a bit of a "science meets art" bent lately (I don't want to encroach on Bioephemera's territory too much now...), but what's one more link into the mix? Neil has told me that the latest issue of the magazine Cabinet features one of my favorite illustrations of Cheselden's Osteographia as well as articles about Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the whale of a trial that is the focus of Trying Leviathan, and much more about bones.
laelaps | February 27, 2008
It is often accepted that science and the humanities have long been in conflict with each other, science providing a cold, objective look at the world while having read the entire works of Shakespeare (or similar equivalent) represents the true hallmark of a cultivated mind in the humanities. This disjunction was identified in 1959 by C.P. Snow in his book The Two Cultures, and in a 1963 follow-up he described the idea of a "third culture" in which science and the humanities could support each other and no longer be seen as entirely opposing forces. The development of a Snow's idea of a…
laelaps | February 27, 2008I've had a thin-section of Charles R. Knight's Laelaps up for a while (essentially over a year if you count my old blog) and now I feel like it's time for a change. I was originally thinking of making a banner from one of my photographs, but that didn't seem to be a good solution (too familiar and a bit bland if I'm going to keep doing PotD). What I'm thinking of, then, is commissioning someone to make a new banner for Laelaps.
The new banner would have to be 756 pixels long by 93 pixels high (the banner I'm now using can be found here if you need stand-alone comparison), so unfortunately…
laelaps | February 27, 2008Chad's got an excellent post called "You Are What You Appear to Have Read," although I have to say that I violate most of the prime directives of book-shelving no matter what system you think best. I don't have any photographs of the present arrangement, but being that I'm living in an apartment space is at a premium. There are three main bookshelves that just barely hold all the books my wife and I had acquired up until about last week (we've even doubled up with the paperbacks to fit more in), but a recent trip to the Cranbury Bookworm means that there are now about 30 new (old?) books…
laelaps | February 27, 2008A post up at Bayblab is causing a bit of a stir; ScienceBlogs.com is singled out as an incestuous conclave of hacks* where bloggers are paid substantial sums to turn out tabloid-quality science writing. Alright, maybe such a summary isn't entirely accurate, but the post by "Anonymous Coward" paints an unfavorable caricature of ScienceBlogs, making it seem like my colleagues and I care more about popularity than about science.
[*Using "hacks" to refer to popular science writers who are looked down upon for not writing how members of the scientific community want them to write.]
AC starts off…