Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
laelaps
Posts by this author
February 28, 2008
Paleo-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!
February 28, 2008
The 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…
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…
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…
February 28, 2008
Well, 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…
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…
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.…
February 27, 2008
I'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…
February 27, 2008
Chad'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…
February 27, 2008
A 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…
February 27, 2008
By now most of you are probably familiar that this blog takes its name from a tyrannosauroid dinosaur originally named Laelaps by E.D. Cope but changed to Dryptosaurus by O.C. Marsh when it was discovered that the name Laelaps was preoccupied by a kind of mite. According to a taxonomic note in the…
February 27, 2008
Update: You can get a look at some fossils and diagrams from the University of Oslo team here.
In 2006 the BBC ran an article about a team of scientists from the University of Oslo that uncovered a "treasure trove" of Jurassic ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pliosaurs, including an extremely large…
February 27, 2008
The UC Berkley hyena colony is facing a funding crisis; after being sustained for 22 years by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, the organization has decided not to renew funding for the studies undertaken at the institution. An emergency grant from the NSF will keep the colony going for…
February 27, 2008
Even though it has a blurry spot, this is one of my favorite photographs of the orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) at the Philadelphia Zoo. The enclosure for the animals wasn't a very good proxy for their native habitat, but it's possible (even likely) that the orangutan will become extinct within my…
February 26, 2008
I hope someone records this and puts it up on YouTube; tonight Bill O'Reilly is going to have a special "Factor Investigation" report asking "Did global warming kill the dinosaurs?" Who they hell did they get to do this "investigation"? I know I shouldn't watch (I don't have the brain cells to…
February 26, 2008
You may recall how I blogged about Norman Silberling's inappropriate comments involving Aetogate the other day, specifically his tacit charge that there's a conspiracy of young paleontologists who are out to get Spencer Lucas for some unknown reason. If you're one of those wretched un- or under-…
February 26, 2008
It's times like this I wish I still had television; tonight the PBS show NOVA will have a special called "The Four-Winged Dinosaur" all about Microraptor. You can see a few brief clips from the show and some behind-the-scenes shots in this promotional video;
As with any show involving puppets,…
February 26, 2008
Say hello to the newest member of the ScienceBlogs family, Not Exactly Rocket Science.
February 26, 2008
Today marks the 25th anniversary of my birth, and even though this particular day isn't especially extraordinary I figured that I should at least write a few thoughts about hitting the quarter century mark.
As regular readers know, I've been a bit frustrated with my academic career up to this…
February 26, 2008
Back in elementary school, I was told the great dividing line between tortoises and turtles was that turtles are aquatic and tortoises are terrestrial. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule to greater or lesser degrees, but the first time I saw a Galapagos tortoise (Geochelone elephantopus)…
February 25, 2008
On June 30, 1860, T.H. ("Darwin's Bulldog") Huxley and Samuel ("Soapy Sam") Wilberforce met at Oxford to debate the concepts put forward in Charles Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, an encounter that is often celebrated even though the details of…
February 25, 2008
Amanda's got the latest edition of The Boneyard up over at her blog; check it out, and remember that the next iteration will be right here at Laelaps on March 8. (Given that the film 10,000 B.C. will be out that weekend, it would be cool if we could have a Pleistocene theme.)
Elsewhere in the…
February 25, 2008
Last month I met up with hordes of bloggers & journalists at the 2nd annual Science Blogging Conference, but it seems that readers of Sb are increasingly organizing their own meetings. Rather than turn away in a huff muttering "Well I guess you just don't need us anymore," many of us Sciblings…
February 25, 2008
Most of the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) photos I post here are of an older female named Zeff at the Bronx zoo, but during my earlier visits I often saw another of the several individuals rotated through the public viewing enclosures. The tiger pictured above is named Sasha, a relatively…
February 24, 2008
It can be a dangerous thing to let me loose in a used book store. The Cranbury Bookworm is having a "spring cleaning" sale in which everything in the store is half-off, and even though I was limited to $50 I returned with a dizzying amount of books. Here's a list of today's haul;
Our Face From Fish…
February 24, 2008
A baby giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) peers over a fence. The species name of the giraffe comes from a mixing of "camel" and "leopard," giraffes exhibiting a body shape similar to a camel but the spots of a leopard. This sort of nomenclature also has its root in older, long discarded beliefs…
February 24, 2008
When I was younger, there always seemed to be some show about science on television. Outside of the documentaries on PBS, the Discovery Channel, or even A&E, there was a whole slew of science shows for kids that generally have become extinct without replacement (although some still live on in…
February 23, 2008
Henry de la Beche's "Duria Antiquior," an image of the carnage that must have taken place on the shores of the ancient Dorset.
Years ago, when touring dino-mation exhibits were all the rage, my parents took me to "see the dinosaurs" at the Morris Museum. I was terrified. I had seen dinosaur…
February 23, 2008
Last month I blogged about the ongoing ethics case in which paleontologist Spencer Lucas and several of his colleagues were accused of claim-jumping research from a number of individuals and institutions involving ancient archosaurs called aetosaurs. Mike Taylor has been keeping track and all the…