Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
laelaps
Posts by this author
There are a number of things I have been meaning to blog about during the past week but for whatever reason they kept slipping my mind. Here's a brief collection of some neat stuff that I should have written about earlier;
Michael Barton, author of the Dispersal of Darwin, was interviewed for the…
A black bear (Ursus americanus), photographed at the Turtleback Zoo.
Everyone knows that 1859 was the year in which Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published, but there was a significant event in September of that same year that is often overlooked. It involved the new understanding that humans and extinct mammals (like…
There are times when it becomes abundantly apparent that I have been spending far too much time on the computer.
Yesterday afternoon I was preparing a "cheat sheet" for my statistics exam (don't fret; we were allowed one page of notes to bring to the test). I decided to write it up with a pencil…
An illustration of the Yale mastodon mount.
While planting corn on his Iowa farm around 1872 a farmer named Peter Mare found a curious carving. It was a smoking pipe in the shape of an elephant, a very odd item indeed, and he used it for its intended purpose until he moved to Kansas in 1878. At…
I have been out and about for most of the day and have not had much time to write. In lieu of a real post, here is a photograph of an Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) I took just this afternoon at the Turtleback Zoo in Essex, New Jersey.
I cannot recall precisely why, but okapis were on my mind this morning. Specifically, I was wondering what had become of the first photograph ever taken of a live okapi, an illustration I had heard about but had been unable to find. I was first put on the trail of the picture when, last September,…
Black crested gibbons (Nomascus concolor), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
Two hundred years ago today, in the little country town of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Charles Robert Darwin was born. No one then could have known that, fifty years and nine months later, Charles would deliver a treatise that would forever change our understanding of our place in nature. That is…
A male gelada (Theropithecus gelada), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
Brought to you by the very talented Scicurious (if you're not reading her posts, you are really missing out). Dare we start an LOLFossil competition?
[And wouldn't you know it, another one of my photographs has wound up in the 'Upcoming' section of icanhascheezburger.com. It is one of my…
There has been an awful lot of hand-wringing going on over Charles Darwin lately. Some have picked up a long-running meme and proclaim "One hundred fifty years without Darwin is too long!" while others declare that we should kill every Darwin we meet. Just as every American president must "Get…
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
A restoration of Dunkleosteus, from Fishes, Living and Fossil.
About 370 million years ago, at a time when creatures like Tiktaalik were wallowing in the muddy shallows of freshwater lakes and rivers, the sea covered much of what is now North America and Europe. These waters were home to a…
A Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
William Buckland, from Reminiscences of Oxford.
In the year 1166 a woman quietly passed away in a cave on Mount Pelligrino, Sicily. It was the end she chose for herself. At the age of twelve she had left home to become a hermit and devote her life to worshiping God, and her remains were left to…
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
Back in November I mentioned that I might possibly follow in Ed's footsteps and put together a "Best of Laelaps" collection. The only problem was that it was difficult to pick out posts I was proud of; I didn't want to put out an embarrassing collection of slapdash essays.
By the beginning of…
Since so many people enjoyed yesterday's photo of a sandpiper poking around a Delaware beach at sunset, here are two more photos of sandpipers I took the same evening.
Now this is pretty cool. Since 2007 the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton AL 288-1, that's "Lucy" to you and me, has been on tour in an exhibit called "Lucy's Legacy - The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia." I don't know if the exhibit is going to come close enough to me to allow me to visit it, but…
A sandpiper, photographed at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, Delaware.
The African lungfish Protopterus, from A Text-Book of Zoology.
Standing before the Linnean Society in 1839, the celebrated British anatomist Richard Owen delivered a detailed description of a strange new creature. Owen called it Lepidosiren annectans, an African relative of an eel-like animal…
The shell of a horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) crawling withe ladybugs (Coccinellidae). Photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
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African penguins (Spheniscus demersus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.