Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
laelaps
Posts by this author
December 5, 2008
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
December 4, 2008
Inca terns (Larosterna inca), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
December 3, 2008
Last week I wrote about the brief life and death of John Daniel, the "civilized gorilla." I wanted to know more about him, chiefly whether I could still see him at the AMNH or not, so I sent a query to the museum. Here's the information I got back;
Gorilla gorilla gorilla
From: Barnum and Bailey…
December 3, 2008
The Boneyard #26 is now up for your viewing pleasure. It's a really good one, and my only regret is that I didn't have the time to write up an entry for it!
December 3, 2008
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) and trainer, photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
December 2, 2008
I was hoping someone would tag me for the "5-56" meme that has just started going around. (Thanks, Bora!)
The rules are that you have to pick 10 books (of whatever genre, chosen any way you see fit) and transcribe the 5th sentence on page 56 of each book. If you're slick you can use Google Books to…
December 2, 2008
This past October, many ScienceBlogs readers and SEED teamed up to donate over $33,000 to science classrooms around the United States. Continuing this generous trend, SEED is now offering a reduced-rate subscription price of $14.95 to anyone who donates a subscription of the magazine to a science…
December 2, 2008
There has been a slight hold-up in getting the next edition of The Boneyard ready for exhibition, so you have an extra day to get your posts together. Any paleo-posts are fair game, but remember that Traumador wanted to make this a special edition all about your favorite museum;
So my thinking…
December 2, 2008
An American bison (Bison bison), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
December 1, 2008
During the past week I've been tracking down information about various performing primates and famous apes like "Consul" and John Daniel, but as I did so something kept bothering me. Didn't the Bronx Zoo, sometime early in the 20th century, display a person from Africa in the Monkey House?…
December 1, 2008
A flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 30, 2008
A fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 29, 2008
It wasn't so long ago that, if the price was right, you could buy an ape. Plucked from Africa and sent to Europe and America, apes often changed hands several times for large sums of money before expiring after only a few weeks, months, or years. Writing of the attempts of the Bronx Zoo to keep…
November 29, 2008
An Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 28, 2008
When the topic of "animal rights" comes up here on Sb, it is often in the unfortunate context of a recent terrorist attack on a lab or researcher's home. These events are deplorable, but we should take care to remember that it was not that long ago that cruelty to animals, in the colleges and in…
November 28, 2008
An Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 27, 2008
more animals
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope you all get to enjoy the holiday, and if you are looking for something to do while you're waiting for the roast dinosaur to make it to the table, check out my latest post about T.H. Huxley and birds at Dinosaur Tracking.
November 27, 2008
An ebony langur (Trachypithecus auratus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 26, 2008
"Fighting the Mammoth," from The Rise of Man.
In efforts to understand evolution, identification of transitional forms has been extremely important. Presently the fossil record offers ample evidence of how one type of organism was modified into something distinct, but has not always been so. In…
November 26, 2008
I only just noticed that Janet tagged me with the 5 Things meme. Here we go...
5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago:
Absolutely despising high school
Taekwondo (2nd degree black belt)
Being an emo kid before I even knew what that was
Learning how to drive
Playing DOOM
5 Things On My To-Do List Today…
November 26, 2008
A pair of black-crested gibbons (Nomascus concolor), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 25, 2008
When I last visited Sea World in Orlando, Florida, I saw the Shamu show. It didn't matter that the original Shamu died in 1971; she was so iconic that the biggest of orcas at each theme park is still presented under her name. (The individual I saw was actually called Tilikum.)
This kind of…
November 25, 2008
A black leopard (Panthera pardus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 24, 2008
149 years ago today, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was released to the public. It was instantly sold out. For a "secret" formulation of a mechanism by which evolution could occur, there certainly was a lot of excitement about it, even if On the Origin was…
November 24, 2008
The results for the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship are in, and, I'm sad to say, I did not win. I came in 5th, and the winners were The Burnt Orange Report, USS Mariner, and American Papist.
I must admit that I am little disappointed, but as I have said before, I wasn't expecting to win. It's not…
November 24, 2008
A pair of giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 23, 2008
A group of female nyala (Tragelaphus angasii), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
November 22, 2008
During the opening act of the propaganda film Expelled, Cornell historian of science Will Provine summed up intelligent design as "utterly boring." The same could be said of Expelled, a film steeped in the controversy over the brand of creationism known as intelligent design. An hour and a half…
November 22, 2008
A California sea lion pup (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.