Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
laelaps
Posts by this author
January 8, 2008
In the year I was born the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal delivered a highly popular and influential book about the chimpanzees of Arnhem Zoo, the Netherland facility housing the largest captive population of the apes in the world. At first such a book might not have seemed so exciting, the…
January 8, 2008
I'll admit it; I've been a slacker about putting up the Boneyard in a timely fashion. Zach, however, has graciously offered to start things up again with a brand-new edition coming this Saturday, so get your posts to me or to him soon! I also need some volunteers for hosting for the 26th of January…
January 8, 2008
From De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543) by Andreas Vesalius.
For everyone who loves old books (and old books about bones, at that) as much as I do, check out this website, which contains William Cheselden's Osteographia. Andreas Vesalius' De corporis humani fabrica libri septem is up…
January 8, 2008
The Buzz on Sb today has to do with Matt Nisbet's endorsement of Francis Collins to be the science adviser to the next presidential administration, and everyone seems to be piling on. (I had originally written a post about this topic but foolishly deleted it because I thought no one would really…
January 8, 2008
I'm not going to make the error of mistaking a local weather change as an indication of global climate trends, but I have to say that the weather here in New Jersey has thrown me off a little. So far the winter has been pretty mild, and today the temperature was already 59 degrees Fahrenheit by the…
January 8, 2008
I'm not enough of an entomologist to know what species of insect this is, but I do know that it is a katydid (Family Tettigoniidae), although I used to refer to them as grasshoppers when I was little. Given that there are about 6,400 species worldwide and about 255 in North America, though, it'll…
January 7, 2008
"It is the just complaint of serious men in this age of ours, which is so much more refined in letters and manners than the coarse ages of the past, that men are to be found who so heartily detest all fine literature that they would have only those arts and sciences endowed and accepted in our…
January 7, 2008
"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the…
January 7, 2008
It may not be a new paper, but this afternoon I came across an article by Mark Hafner published in the Journal of Mammalogy called "Field Research in Mammalogy: An Enterprise in Peril" that definitely struck a chord with me. When I decided to enter into the ecology & evolution major at Rutgers…
January 7, 2008
From De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543) by Andreas Vesalius
In 1646, the first edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica (or Vulgar Errors) first went into print, Browne's volume being an attempt to refute many of the erroneous "received tenets and commonly presumed truths"…
January 7, 2008
Greg Laden has got the latest edition of Linnaeus' Legacy. Be sure to check it out!
January 7, 2008
Today's beautiful picture of Sturt's Desert Pea (Swainsona formosa) was sent to me by one of my Australian readers, Peter. You can read all about this interesting plant at the Australian National Botanic Gardens website.
January 6, 2008
Sorry for the lack of updates, everyone. I caught a pretty nasty cold over the weekend that knocked me on my butt and kept my updates to a minimum (plus I've been petsitting and not actually home since Christmas, so computer access has been a little spotty). I've also been working very hard on an…
January 5, 2008
Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) are, as the name would suggest, the largest living otters and the largest representatives of the Mustelidae. As anyone who has seen these animals in captivity or the wild can attest, they are also among the most gregarious of all mustelids and emit ear-piercing…
January 4, 2008
It's interesting where my name or photographs end up. As I vainly searched google to make sure no one was talking smack about me on the 'net, I saw that one of my photos of an Amur leopard (pictured above) ended up in the November 2007 edition of AppleSauce by the South Australian Apple Users'…
January 4, 2008
Say hello to the newest member of the Sb family, A Good Poop!
[I thought about changing the name of this blog to "A Decent Scat," but I figured that was just too close... Just kidding ;)]
January 4, 2008
While they are often not the sort of films to win Oscars, science fiction movies have been around for nearly as long as there have been moving pictures, and Hollywood continues to pump out tales about time-traveling cyborgs, alien encounters, and man-made disasters. Sidney Perkowitz's new book,…
January 4, 2008
Some of the biggest misunderstandings about the evolution of life on earth surround the "Cambrian Explosion," the popular impression often being that complex multicellular life sprung up out of nowhere in an instant. While it does appear that there was an "explosion" and that new body plans…
January 4, 2008
Non Sequitur replays the evolutionary tape with interesting results...
[Hat-Tip to Michael]
January 4, 2008
Giant pandas might get most of the media attention, but red pandas (Ailurus fulgens) are in just as much trouble from a conservation standpoint. Habitat fragmentation is the greatest threat (as it is with many species), outside pressures from humans worsening the situation for these animals as…
January 3, 2008
Sometimes I feel like I'm watching scientists concerned with the end-Cretaceous extinction (the one that killed off all those nifty non-avian dinosaurs and other animals) engage in a more formal version of the Monty Python "Argument Clinic" Sketch. Some that favor the impact of a comet or meteor of…
January 3, 2008
The brown bear (Ursus arctos) is the second largest living bear (the largest being the polar bear, Ursus maritimus), but depending on where you are in the world it can go by many names and vary in appearance. At present there seems to be a glut of possible brown bear subspecies that scream for…
January 2, 2008
Throughout most of the world humans have exterminated carnivores in order to keep their places of habitation safe, and while large carnivores still exist in patches we have a sort of "You keep to your side, I'll keep to my side," sort of attitude towards them. The problem, however, is that we keep…
January 2, 2008
I am extremely pleased to announce that one of my posts has been selected for the 2nd edition of The Open Laboratory! When I heard that the winners had been picked I started pacing the house, nervous that I wouldn't make it in, but one of the posts that helped give me the boost onto ScienceBlogs…
January 2, 2008
In the latest issue of the Journal of Mammalogy, a resolution by the American Society of Mammalogists was published (resulting from the 87th annual conference held in June 2007) calling upon the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to get off its butt and do something about jaguar (Panthera onca)…
January 2, 2008
A few months ago I reported on the delightful time I had at a Science Communication Consortium discussion held in New York (where I also got to meet Kate of the sadly departed Anterior Commissure), but for those of you in the area there's going to be another meeting coming up on January 31st. The…
January 2, 2008
I got some good news last night that I'd love to share, but I think I'm going to keep my lips sealed for until the official announcement is up elsewhere. It was definitely something good to hear on the first day of 2008, and hopefully I'll soon be able to tell you a bit more about it.
January 2, 2008
The family of birds known as the Paradisaeidae contain 13 genera of brilliantly colored birds, but the genus Paradisaea is perhaps the most famous of all. This genus contains the Greater Bird of Paradise (Paradisaea apoda), the species name being attributable to the practice of cutting off the…
January 1, 2008
If you visit zoos often enough, you'll probably eventually see at least one pair of animals mating with each other. While I didn't actually see the two gerenuk (Litocranius walleri) in flagrante delicto, the male chased the female around a bit with that intention. Much like a cat in heat, the…