Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
laelaps
Posts by this author
September 9, 2008
In celebration of hitting 1,000,000 comments here on ScienceBlogs, various bloggers all over the world will be throwing parties to commemorate the occasion. To see if there's one in your area, check out the listing of events over on Page 3.14.
No one knows when we'll reach 1,000,000 comments or…
September 9, 2008
A Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
September 8, 2008
For some damn-fool reason I decided to reorganize the living room the other day, a project that (two days later) is still not fully completed. Moving the furniture wasn't the problem; it was finding a home for the ever-growing library that threatens to overtake the entire apartment. I only have to…
September 8, 2008
"Look! It's a double E! Pile in!"
It shouldn't be a hassle to get between classes, but somehow Rutgers has made it so. The university has again increased the number of students without enough changes to accommodate the swollen body of undergraduates. Some have to stay in hotels because the…
September 8, 2008
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
September 7, 2008
I loved all the Gary Owens & Eric Boardman dinosaur documentaries (see here, here, and here) when I was a kid, but I think my most favorite was their special on prehistoric mammals. Called "Prehistoric World," the show took a look at the Page Museum in LA and even featured a bit on Dougal Dixon…
September 7, 2008
A flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) on a nest, photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
September 6, 2008
When we last left Gary Owens he had been turned into a mustachioed dinosaur. The good news is that he apparently found a cure and again teamed up with Eric Boardman for another dinosaur documentary. (It's not like being eaten by a dinosaur stopped them before or anything.) It's called "Son of…
September 6, 2008
An Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
September 5, 2008
Those of you who are regular readers know that I have been yammering about my book-in-progress for quite some time now (at least since March, if not before). I am pleased to say, though, that as the weeks and months have rolled by I have attracted some new readers, but some of them have expressed…
September 5, 2008
According to the highly reputable and fact-oriented periodical The Onion, a stain resembling Charles Darwin has appeared on the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. You may recall that Dayton was the site of the famous 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" (no, it did not involve the evolution of mint…
September 5, 2008
Last week I wrote about Cobb & Coyne's assertion that "the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism," which appeared in the correspondence section of Nature. This week there is yet another letter on the science v. religion debate, this time by Jonathan Cowie.…
September 5, 2008
For those of you in the New York City area, paleo artist Ray Troll and paleobotanist Kirk Johnson will be presenting a lecture on their wonderful book Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway (see my review here, pick it up here) on October 21 at the AMNH. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, and I'm going to…
September 5, 2008
By way of checking up on this blog's traffic the other day, I came across the "Dawn of Time" web comic, which features a cavewoman and a friendly Triceratops (the first strip is here). Some of the scenes seem a little Edenic and humans never lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs, of course, but it is…
September 5, 2008
Two Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
September 4, 2008
It always amuses me how irritatingly dull school mascots often are. How many schools have the cougars, knights, bears, or some other cliched mascot? (A notable exception is the University of California Santa Cruz, home of the fighting Banana Slugs.) Given that, I was certainly glad to hear that…
September 4, 2008
The John West mascot really gets into his work (featuring a guest appearance from one of the shark puppets from Deep Blue Sea).
September 4, 2008
A Galapagos tortoise (Geochelone nigra), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
September 3, 2008
It was slow going, but I was able to write the first three pages of the new iteration of the dinosaur/birds chapter. (It is called, for good reason, "Footprints (and Feathers) in the Sands of Time." At least for now, anyway.) Although it contains some of the same points as my previous attempt, I…
September 3, 2008
Fun with stock footage and a blue screen, from Shark Attack 3.
After watching the first episode of Jurassic Fight Club I felt that the show deserved some amount of praise, but I was utterly flabbergasted by the latest episode ("Deep Sea Killers"). (You can see the full episodes yourself, for a…
September 3, 2008
I have been meaning to post this quote for quite a while now, for no other reason than I found it amusing. It is from R.M. Ballantyne's novel The Gorilla Hunters;
"And in the first place-"
"O Ralph, I entreat you," interrupted Peterkin, "do not begin with a 'first place.' When men begin a discourse…
September 3, 2008
Zach has got the latest edition of the paleo-carnival The Boneyard up at When Pigs Fly Returns.
September 3, 2008
An Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
September 2, 2008
A few months back I remember first hearing about an absolutely crazy idea proposed by Sb's Dave Munger; a website devoted to blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Ok, maybe it wasn't that out of the vein, but the concept has really taken off, and today the latest iteration of ResearchBlogging…
September 2, 2008
It is amazing what a little perspective can do. For most of August I was hard at work on the chapter on whales, ignoring nearly every other section. This allowed me to focus on what I wanted for one of the most important chapters of the book, but now that I have gone back to some of my earlier…
September 2, 2008
Well it's back to classes for me today, but I just can't get this song out of my head;
In a related note, Fresno State trounced Rutgers 24 to 7 during last night's football game. It looks like all those millions funneled to the pigskin crowd have been well worth it...
Update: Many thanks to Mike…
September 2, 2008
A grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
September 1, 2008
The next edition of The Boneyard is due to be unveiled tomorrow at When Pigs Fly Returns, so gather up your best paleo posts from the last month and get them to me or Zach soon!
September 1, 2008
When do you think that the following passage was first published?
John Doe guesses that evolution is true, but he rather wishes it were not. ... John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be…