Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
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Posts by this author
December 20, 2007
Deer are not the sort of animal you would normally expect to have fangs, but some of them actually do. Well, the males do, anyway. The Common Muntjac (Muntiacus muntjak, pictured above) is one such minuscule cervid, although the genus Muntiacus contains about ten species and many subspecies within…
December 19, 2007
A beautiful artistic reconstruction of Indohyus by Carl Buell.The study of the origin of whales has undergone so much change during my own lifetime that it's sometimes hard to keep up. When I was very young, Basilosaurus was the fossil whale representative, but being that it was already a whale it…
December 19, 2007
Barbary Macaques (an adult male and an infant). Via Wikipedia.Part of the experience of living in an apartment involves occasionally being subjected to the sounds of members of our own species mating. While the torrid love affairs of our neighbors might keep us up at night, though, there's a good…
December 19, 2007
Awful Changes.Man found only in a fossil state -- Reappearance of Ichthyosauri.
A Lecture. -- "You will at once perceive," continued Professor Ichthyosaurus, "that the skull before us belonged to some of the Lower order of animals the teeth are very insignificant the power of the jaw trifling, and…
December 19, 2007
The Pygmy Marmoset (Callithrix (Cebuella) pygmaea) is an interesting little primate. While it is often said on documentaries or zoo enclosure descriptions that they are among the most "primitive" of primates, marmosets actually have a number of derived features. On their hands, for instance, they…
December 18, 2007
When I started blogging about science a little less than a year ago I had two main goals; to make it to ScienceBlogs.com and to have a post published in the 2007 edition of The Open Laboratory. It's obvious that I've achieved one, but I'd love to get into the Open Lab, too, and if you haven't…
December 18, 2007
PrefaceI originally wrote this post during the late summer of this year, a piece that was fraught with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and an overall cumbersome attribute that made me admire anyone who was able to get through the whole thing. I have revised and edited the text starting with…
December 18, 2007
Nearly everyone has a book out about environmental crises these days, from scientist E.O. Wilson (The Creation) to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (A Contract With the Earth), but in many cases the conciliatory volumes aren't very good. Everyone has something to say about pollution and…
December 18, 2007
The Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) is a creature that I am at least somewhat familiar with; I see them every day on my drive to work. Whether they're just circling overhead or picking on a deer carcass, turkey vultures don't seem to have any problem inhabiting the landscape with people and are…
December 17, 2007
When the topic of persecution of scientists by religious authorities comes up, Galileo is typically mentioned most often, Giordano Bruno every once in a while, and Hypatia of Alexandria not at all. A longer list of figures who entered "warfare... with theology in Christendom" could be conjured up…
December 17, 2007
As suggested by Blake Stacey, here is a list of the 10 most horrible books I've read this past year. Some are widely recognized as being atrocious, but others were either disappointing or served up a side of "woo" without question, which definitely puts the book on shaky ground. So, without further…
December 17, 2007
A beautiful Barosaurus lentus by Michael Skrepnick. Click the image to see it full size.A little over a month ago I shared a beautiful black & white drawing paleo-artist Michael Skrepnick created for the unveiling of "Gordo," a long-lost Barosaurus lentus that has now gone on display at the…
December 17, 2007
I apologize, dear readers, for the lack of posts. It's final exam time, yet again, and I've been repeatedly given the famous RU Screw in a number of ways altogether unpleasant and aggravating. I just have one more final to go (Living Primates), but I still have to fight the Man about changing…
December 17, 2007
Here's a shot of a Black Rat Snake (Elaphe obsoleta) my wife and I (almost quite literally) stumbled across during a hike in New York this past fall. It wasn't too happy with me taking pictures, but I was able to get some decent ones. As you can see from the photo, though, it's a rather plain…
December 16, 2007
Camarasaurus is a bit of an under-appreciated sauropod, not being nearly as famous as Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, or a number of others. Still, during a recent visit to the AMNH I was struck by something about its skull that I hadn't noticed before; it has some very big holes. While it…
December 15, 2007
I've read more books than I think I can remember during 2007; the new bookshelves I obtained this past fall are now buckling underneath the weight of the accumulated mass and the volumes that keep are seemingly without a home. Some books I've been meaning to get to for some time and haven't read,…
December 15, 2007
Everyone knows that "A" is for "Aardvark" (unless you'd prefer the scientific name Orycteropus afer, in which case "O" is for "Orycteropus"), but that's all most people seem to know about this animal. It almost looks like two people were having a fight over a pig, pulling at both ends in some sort…
December 14, 2007
It makes sense I think; anyone who's been following this blog for a while knows my affinity for big cats. If you want to see what your Daemon would look like, visit The Golden Compass website.
December 14, 2007
I'm sure that there are cases all over the world every day like this one that are generally ignored, but case of a creationist who killed a biomedical scientist during an argument over evolution has made a few of my fellow bloggers take notice. While it might be tempting to point at creationists…
December 14, 2007
Michael Lemonick hates science bloggers, or actually is maybe just a little jealous of how awesome we are. In the past, great popular science communicators like Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan brought science to the public in an understandable (and perhaps more importantly, enjoyable) way, but…
December 14, 2007
If you see an Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) at a zoo, they'll probably be carrying around a large piece of cardboard or a blanket like the one from the Philadelphia Zoo pictured above. The reason for this seems to be that orangs normally live in a forested, enclosed habitat and prefer to have…
December 13, 2007
Over the past two decades there has been an explosion in the number of large theropods that have been discovered (or as we shall see, rediscovered) in Africa and South America, the predatory dinosaurs of what was once Gondwana being just as large and terrifying as their more famous Northern…
December 13, 2007
As I promised the other day, here's the instructions for how to make one of my favorite meals, lime chicken & shrimp. It's just about the only thing that I can make that tastes halfway decent, although I unfortunately have no written down the exact proportion so if you try this it'll have to be…
December 13, 2007
I've already written something up about the infamous "Dinosauroid" previously, but it is funny how we're told that if the non-avian dinosaurs didn't become extinct 65 million years ago (preventing mammals as we know them from evolving, the clip says) humans would still have been around to take…
December 13, 2007
As of yesterday the fall semester came to an end, although I still have a bit of work set out before me. Aside from the final exams, I have on term paper due tomorrow for my African Prehistory seminar involving a topic of my choice, and my subject involves what the Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia)…
December 12, 2007
You know when you're out of touch when your own wife starts up a blog and you have to find out from sitemeter! I'm sure I would have heard about it soon anyway, but I sensed a disturbance in the interwebs and had to check it out. It's called The Olive Tree, and she's got her first post up here. She…
December 12, 2007
Update: I was able to get a copy of the Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis paper, I just need to school myself on allosaurids a little bit before I pot something about it.
So many fossils, so little time. For those of you with Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology subscriptions, there's a new paper out…
December 12, 2007
The Sloth Bear (Melursus ursinus) is quite unusual, indeed; up until two years ago I had never even heard of this nocturnal bear from India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. It is a bit mysterious why this bear is called the "Sloth Bear," however, although it does resemble anteaters (another member of the…
December 11, 2007
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