Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
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Posts by this author
April 7, 2010
A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia.
When a leopard eats a baboon, what is left behind? This question is not only relevant to primatologists and zoologists. Even though instances of predation on humans is relatively rare, big cats still kill and consume people, and when they do they…
April 7, 2010
An eastern painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
April 7, 2010
Want the dirt on the new species of fossil human which will be described in Science this week? Tune in to the BBC World Service "Science in Action" program this Friday to hear me discuss the discovery with host Jon Stewart. The program should be available on the web sometime after it airs, as well.
April 6, 2010
A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia.
SK-54 is a curious fossil. The 1.5 million year old skullcap represents a juvenile Paranthropus robustus, one of the heavy-jawed hominins which lived in prehistoric South Africa, but there is something that makes this skull fragment particularly…
April 6, 2010
An eastern painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
April 6, 2010
A few weeks ago, during the last part of the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series, I briefly mentioned the idea of creating a series of mini-documentaries which would help promote my forthcoming book Written in Stone. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, but I have a bit of a…
April 5, 2010
According to multiple reports released yesterday, scientists will announce the discovery of a new species of two-million-year-old hominin this week. Do you know what that means? That's right; writers are breaking out the pop-sci boilerplate to tell us all about the new "missing link." To paraphrase…
April 4, 2010
A short-billed dowitcher (Limnodromus griseus), photographed in Cape May, New Jersey.
April 2, 2010
A gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
April 2, 2010
A margay (Leopardus wiedii). From Wikipedia.
Even if they spend years in the field, researchers rarely witness predation on primates. Cats, birds, and other hunters regularly feed on primate species, but what we know about the habits of primate-hunters often comes from bones and fingernails picked…
April 1, 2010
American avocets (Recurvirostra americana), photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.
April 1, 2010
The partial faces of Anoiapithecus (left), Pierolapithecus (center), and Dryopithecus (right). (Images not to scale)
Our species is just one branch of a withering part of the evolutionary tree, the great apes. Along with the handful of species of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are all…
March 31, 2010
A gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
March 31, 2010
The latest edition of the open-access paleontology journal Palaeontologia Electronica was recently published, and I am happy to say that it contains my review of The Paleobiological Revolution. If you are interested in the history of science and how paleontology has changed during the past four…
March 31, 2010
A grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus). Image from Wikipedia.
Charles Darwin's visit to the Galapagos Archipelago has been celebrated time and again for its influence on his evolutionary thoughts, but I have to wonder what would have happened if the Beagle skipped the Galapagos and visited…
March 30, 2010
A spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
March 30, 2010
Spotted hyenas giggling over an antelope spine. Courtesy BMC Ecology.
For spotted hyenas, a laugh can speak volumes about an individual.
Despite being portrayed as stupid scavengers who rely on the leftovers of lion prides, hyenas are highly intelligent and social predators. They communicate with…
March 29, 2010
As I mentioned in today's post, dead whales provide food and homes for a variety of marine organisms, and this video (uploaded by Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News) shows how whale fall communities change over time. It was produced by the laboratory of Dr. Craig Smith, University of Hawaii.The bone-…
March 29, 2010
The skeletons of an adult and a juvenile manatee (Trichechus manatus), on display at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
March 29, 2010
The fail whale comes to rest; the decomposing body of a gray whale is host to a diverse array of scavengers and other deep sea organisms. From Goffredi et al., 2004.
In the deep sea, no carcass goes to waste. Platoons of crabs, fish, and other scavengers make short work of most of the bodies which…
March 28, 2010
A stuffed polar bear (Ursus maritimus), on display at the New Jersey State Museum.
March 27, 2010
A stuffed North American river otter (Lontra canadensis), in the collection at the New Jersey State Museum.
March 26, 2010
A partially dissected head of an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), showing some of the internal anatomy, in the collection at the New Jersey State Museum. (And here is a similar preserved sea lion head in the same collection.)
March 26, 2010
The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book?
Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will…
March 25, 2010
Raccoon tracks, photographed along a trail northern New Jersey.
March 25, 2010
I'll be the first to admit it; the specimen was not much to look at. Seventy years after being dug out of the ground much of it had crumbled into four-foot-long Y, and the curved teeth that once stood upright in that jaw had slumped out of their sockets into the sulfur-smelling debris. All the…
March 24, 2010
Our temporary houseguest, Rusty, playing in a stream in northern New Jersey.
March 24, 2010
Megarachne, (changed to Mesothelae for broadcast) restored as an enormous spider in the series Before the Dinosaurs: Walking With Monsters.
Imagine that you are are standing in a massive junkyard with the remains of cars strewn all about you. A few are relatively complete, but most of the heap is…
March 23, 2010
A stuffed cougar (Puma concolor), photographed in natural history collection at the New Jersey State Museum.