Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
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Posts by this author
A group of silvered leaf monkeys (Trachypithecus cristatus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
If anything, the 19th century English paleontologist Gideon Mantell is known for his contributions to our understanding of dinosaurs. His most famous accomplishment was the description of Iguanodon, but Mantell has another legacy that is not as well-known. It was his last contribution to science,…
A black-and-white colobus monkey (Colobus guereza), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
The "Dinosauroid", the human-like product of a thought experiment about what the descendants of the dinosaur Troodon would look like today if the theropod had survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, is back. This time it has been invoked as an "I'm just sayin'..." defense by Richard Dawkins…
A mammoth as restored in Gosse's Omphalos. In Gosse's view of history, however, such a scene never actually existed. The bones of the mammoth existed in the earth from the time of Creation and had never given form to a living animal.
Without a doubt, Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos is one of the…
North American river otters (Lontra canadensis), photographed in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park.
A very lion-like Smilodon, from Ernest Ingersoll's The Life of Animals (1907).
For decades after its discovery the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis was depicted as little more than a lion with a short tail and long fangs. Given its size and habits as a large carnivore the connection appeared…
Sand flies (black bits) and brine shrimp (pink bits) at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.
A rock squirrel (Spermophilus variegatus), photographed at Dinosaur National Monument, Utah.
American avocets (Recurvirostra americana), photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.
The skeleton of a dire wolf (Canis dirus), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.
Almost every time I get into a discussion about woolly mammoths with someone the conversation eventually steers towards the topic of cloning a mammoth. "Wouldn't it be fascinating?", they often say. And with a little extra genetic engineering, many of my friends hope, maybe someone could create a…
The skeleton of a giant bison (Bison latifrons), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.
A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress."
The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as…
A restoration of the crocodyliform Goniopholis scavenging a stegosaur carcass. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
A stand of dead trees near Artists Paint Pots in Yellowstone National Park.
It has been a little more than a month since I announced my forthcoming book on paleontology and evolution, Written in Stone, and I have been hard at work on the manuscript. As it stands now the book is about 3/4 complete. Provided everything stays on schedule I should have a first draft of the…
A slab containing many specimens of the Jurassic ammonite Dactylioceras. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
Dinosaur National Monument, Utah. The glass building houses the famous fossil wall and will soon be replaced with a new permanent visitor center.
Whenever I sit down to write an entry for this blog I remind myself that I might not always speak the same language as the people I am trying to reach. A statement that might be technically accurate, such as "Mammuthus primigenius was a Late Pleistocene proboscidean with a Holarctic distribution…
A reconstruction of the skull of Torvosaurus based upon the few parts of skull material that have been recovered so far. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
As strange as it might seem, the living African and Asian elephants are only the remnants of what was once a very diverse array of proboscideans. In the not-too-distant past elephants and their closest relatives occupied Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, Central America, and South America, but…
The sun peeks through the clouds of a passing storm. Photographed from the Strawberry Bay campground in Utah.
Skeletons of the early horse-relative Eohippus (left) and modern Equus (right). From Animals of the Past by Lucas.
During the early 20th century many biologists were considering a variety of mechanisms other than natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change. The trouble was that…
A restoration of Utahraptor in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
An American mastodon, Mammut americanum, from F.A. Lucas' Animals Before Man in North America.
Throughout high school and college I was taught the same thing about the history of science. Young earth creationists had a stranglehold on explanations for life's origins until the fateful year of…
A restoration of Archelon in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.