laelaps

Check out Brian's new review of A History of Paleontology Illustration (Life of the Past) by Jane Davidson, in Palaeontologia Electronica: It is rare for fossils to be featured in fine art, but in the 15th century painting A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly Saint Eligius by the Flemish master Petrus Christus there is, if you look carefully, a fossil shark tooth among the objects scattered on the shop's table. The fossil plays a nearly insignificant role in the painting, but it reflects the general interpretation of such natural curiosities at the time. From this modest starting point,…
Many of you have been asking about the RSS feed over the past few days, and if you have I've got some good news for you; it looks like everything is up and running now. Why not get a little bit of Laelaps delivered straight to you, every day?
It seems that I'm down with the memes again, for as I was searching for some Thoughts in a Haystack I managed to once again become infected. Indeed, John has asked me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to throwing around words like "pseudoextinction" in reference to my blog, and hence here's a fitting meme about the "evolution" of Laelaps; In order to understand from whence Laelaps sprang, we need to travel backwards through the mists of time to the tumultuous year 2006. On October 18th, 2006 I wrote my first "real" science-oriented blog post about the lack of understanding about…