mammals
laelaps | March 3, 2010
The exceptionally preserved skeleton of Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One.
Almost ten months ago an international team of researchers introduced the world to an exquisitely-preserved primate from the 47 million year old oil shales of Messel, Germany. Dubbed Darwinius masillae, and nicknamed "Ida" and "The Link", the fossil was touted as one of our earliest primate ancestors in a massive media campaign worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. Yet the trouble was that there was no solid evidence that Darwinius was one of our ancestors. Despite the marketing blitz promoting the…
laelaps | March 2, 2010
A young Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | March 2, 2010
Here's another sneak-peek at Life (this time with David Attenborough's narration) featuring one of my most favorite canids, the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis). Enjoy!
Not Exactly Pocket Science - panic aboard the Titanic, the rise of polar bears and emasculated frogs
edyong | March 2, 2010I'm trying something new. Right from the start, I've always tried to write fairly long and detailed write-ups of new papers but this means that on any given week, there are always more stories than time and my desktop gets littered with PDFs awaiting interpretation.
So, I'm going to start doing shorter write-ups of papers that don't make the cut, linking to more detailed treatments on other quality news sources. This is something that I hope science journalists will do more of. It stems from a Twitter conversation where I asked if I should (a) write up short versions of these stories, (b)…
laelaps | March 1, 2010
An adult chimpanzee in Bossou, Guinea uses hammer and anvil stones to crack nuts as younger individuals look on. From Haslam et al., 2009.
Before 1859 the idea that humans lived alongside the mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats of the not-too-distant past was almost heretical. Not only was there no irrefutable evidence that our species stretched so far back in time, but the very notion that we could have survived alongside such imposing Pleistocene mammals strained credulity. Contrary to what might be immediately expected, however, it was not Darwin's famous abstract On the…
laelaps | February 27, 2010
Male (right) and female (left, with infant) friends in a population of Chacma baboons. (From Palombit, 2009).
Among other things, friends are people you count on to come to your aid when you need help. If you were at a bar and a stranger started acting aggressively towards you, for example, you would expect your friends to rush over to help you rather than just stand there, mojito in hand. Contrary to our feelings of human exceptionalism, however, ours is not the only species of primate to create and maintain friendships.
For years primatologists have been puzzling over "friendship" in…
laelaps | February 25, 2010
When it comes to nature documentaries the BBC's natural history unit is the best of the best. Over and over again they have produced top-notch programming, and their new multi-part series Life is perhaps the best I have ever seen. The series contains some familiar moments, such as a sengi running down its carefully-groomed pathways, but the bulk of the series consists of vignettes that I have never seen on screen before. One of the most compelling is the story of the slow death of a water buffalo at the jaws of a horde of patient Komodo dragons, a portion of which I have posted above.
I…
edyong | February 24, 2010This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
We humans aren't used to having our intelligence challenged. Among the animal kingdom, we hold no records for speed, strength or size but our vaunted mental abilities are unparalleled. But research from Kyoto University shows that some chimps have a photographic memory that puts humans to shame.
In 2007, Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa found that young chimps have an ability to memorise details of complex images that is literally super-human. Boffin chimp Ayumu, outperformed university students in…
edyong | February 22, 2010An assortment of tree-living mammals
In The Descent of Man, Darwin talked about the benefits of life among the treetops, citing the "power of quickly climbing trees, so as to escape from enemies". Around 140 years later, these benefits have been confirmed by Milena Shattuck and Scott Williams from the University of Illinois.
By looking at 776 species of mammals, they have found that on average, tree-dwellers live longer than their similarly sized land-lubbing counterparts. Animals that spend only part of their time in trees have lifespans that either lie somewhere between the two extremes or…
laelaps | February 21, 2010
A Coquerel's sifaka (Propithecus coquereli), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | February 18, 2010
An engraving of Koch's "Hydrarchos", from the American Phrenological Journal. (Pardon the smudges)
In July of 1845 the amateur fossil hunter Albert Koch brought his sea monster to New York City. A cousin of the serpentine creatures that so many had claimed to see off the coast of New England, the 114-foot-long skeleton looked to be the bones of the Leviathan itself, and crowds flocked to see the its ghastly form. It was called "Hydrarchos" by Koch, and it was was the ruler of the ancient seas.
It was also a monstrous hoax. The Hydrarchos skeleton did not belong to any one animal but to…
laelaps | February 17, 2010
A stuffed coyote (Canis latrans), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History.
laelaps | February 17, 2010
Detail of a Charles R. Knight mural depicting a family a mastodons.
Fossils often turn up in unexpected places. As people have dug swimming pools, tilled farms, blasted through mountains, and quarried the land for minerals traces of ancient life sometimes come to the surface, from isolated shark teeth to skeletons of our extinct hominin relatives. Even fossil graveyards are found this way every now and then, like the one found in a southern Pennsylvania quarry a little more than a century ago.
In late April 1907 William Jacob Holland, a paleontologist and director of Pittsburgh's Carnegie…
laelaps | February 15, 2010
A reconstruction of Smilodon, photographed at the American Museum of Natural History.
When it comes to animals, encyclopedias often present us with generalized descriptions. Where a creature lives, what color it is, what it eats, and other tidbits of information are listed to distinguish one species from another, but what is lost is an appreciation of variation. Be they genetic, anatomical, or behavioral, variations are grist for natural selection's mill, and if you study any species in detail it becomes apparent that individuals differ considerably over space and through time.
This was…
laelaps | February 14, 2010
A grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | February 11, 2010
A reconstruction of Smilodon, photographed at the American Museum of Natural History.
laelaps | February 10, 2010As the snow continues to pile up outside, I can't help but think of polar predators. There are animals that live and hunt in the conditions that are keeping me inside today, and one of my favorites is the leopard seal. An apex predator in its Antarctic home, the leopard seal is an enormous pinniped that specializes in hunting penguins and other seals. Getting into the water with one is not something to be done on a whim, but as described by photographer Paul Nicklen, particularly friendly predators can be among the most frightening: