mammals
laelaps | June 8, 2009
In the middle of August 2008 Matt Whitton, Rick Dyer, and "professional Bigfoot hunter" Tom Biscardi claimed to have found what so many had sought after: the body of a real Bigfoot. FOX News picked up the story, DNA tests were performed, and a grand unveiling was planned, but, as ever, it all was a hoax. There was still no definitive proof that Sasquatch, Bigfoot, the Skunk Ape, Skookum, or a long lost "missing link" by any other name ever existed.
Last summer's brief frenzy over Bigfoot was hardly unique. As author Joshua Blu Buhs illustrates in his new book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of…
laelaps | June 5, 2009
A pair of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
edyong | June 4, 2009 If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds ("ha" or "hee"). Listen to a recording and you wouldn't identify it as laughter - it's more like a handsaw cutting wood.
But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny. Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they're accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed "play faces". Darwin himself noted the laugh-like…
laelaps | June 4, 2009Not so long ago it seemed that the "Lucy's Legacy" exhibit, which features the world's most famous fossil hominin, was coming to an end. The exhibition failed to bring in the crowds that were expected and there were doubts as to whether it would continue. According to a story about the exceptionally-talented paleo-artist Viktor Deak that appeared in this week's New York Times, however, it looks like Lucy is coming to Manhattan;
[Deak's] 78-foot-long mural showing six million years' worth of the proto-humans whose bony bits have been found in northeast Africa is coming to Manhattan in June as…
laelaps | June 3, 2009
The face of Anoiapithecus. From Moya-Sola et al. (2009).
One of the most controversial aspects of the whole Darwinius kerfuffle has been the primate's proposed status as "the ancestor of us all." The fossil, named "Ida", has been popularly touted as the "missing link" connecting us to all other mammals, but how can we really know if Darwinius fits this role? The truth is that we can't, and it is nearly impossible to parse direct ancestor-descendant relationships among fossil vertebrates, especially when we're talking about a fossil that lived over 40 million years before the first…
laelaps | June 2, 2009
The exceptionally preserved skeleton of Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One.
Last month an international team of paleontologists lifted the veil on one of the most spectacular fossils ever discovered; a 47-million-year-old primate they named Darwinius masillae. It was a major event, but not everything went as planned. This fossil, popularly known as "Ida", immediately sparked a controversy about the relationship between science and the media, the ethics of buying fossils from private collectors, and what our distant primate ancestors were like.
Indeed, the media blitz…
edyong | June 1, 2009Chimps are known to make a variety of tools to aid their quest for food, including fishing sticks to probe for termites, hammers to crack nuts and even spears to impale bushbabies. But a taste for honey has driven one group of chimps in Gabon's Loango National Park to take tool-making to a new level.
To fulfil their sweet tooth, the chimps need to infiltrate and steal from bee nests, either in trees or underground. To do that, they use a toolkit of up to five different implements: thin perforators to probe for the nests; blunt, heavy pounders to break inside; lever-like enlargers to widen…
laelaps | May 31, 2009I just watched the BBC's documentary on "Ida" (Darwinius masillae), "Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor", and to be honest I was not very impressed. Rather than dissect the show second-by-second, though, I will only discuss some of the main points that occurred to me while watching it. Heaven knows I have spent plenty of time on Ida already...
While I surely appreciate the show's efforts (however fleeting) to describe the paleobiology of Ida, the show's real hook is the conclusion that Darwinius is one of our earliest primate ancestors. This is a tantalizing hypothesis, but is it true? The…
laelaps | May 31, 2009
A red fox (Vulpes vulpes), photographed at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge.
I just got back from Delaware a few hours ago, and overall it was a pretty good trip. I did not see the swarms of mating horseshoe crabs I was looking for, but I did see a number of other cool critters. This mangy fox, for instance, came trotting out from behind the dunes right about sunset and appeared to be looking for a few tidbits. My only regret is that I did not have my more powerful flash with me, as most of the fox photos came out a bit blurry. I do like this one, though.
laelaps | May 29, 2009
An Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), photographed at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | May 27, 2009
The "Hesperopithecus" tooth discovered by Harold Cook.
I could see it coming from a mile away. As soon as I heard all the hype surrounding "Ida", the exceptionally preserved specimen of Darwinius announced last week, I knew creationists would soon be citing our old friends "Archeoraptor", "Piltdown Man", and "Nebraska Man" as reasons not to trust evolutionary scientists. Each was a public embarrassment to scientists, that is true, but there is no reason to sweep these mistakes under the rug. Each can tell us something valuable about the way science works and how scientists interact with…
laelaps | May 26, 2009
The skull of a tarsier, from The Descent of Primates.
At the turn of the 20th century evolutionary biologists faced a significant problem. In 1859 Charles Darwin had expounded the mechanism of evolution, and Eugene Dubois' discovery of "Pithecanthropus" (known as Homo erectus today) illustrated that humans had evolved over time, but the broad outline of human evolution was almost entirely a mystery. There was no doubt that we had evolved from some ancient group of primates, but one of the most frustratingly difficult to resolve questions was what our earliest primate ancestors were like.…
laelaps | May 26, 2009I broke the news via my Twitter feed last night, but in case you missed it my op-ed "The dangerous link between science and hype" has been published in today's Times. I will give you one guess as to what it is about.
laelaps | May 25, 2009It has been nearly a week since Darwinius, a 47-million-year-old primate heralded as the "missing link", burst on the public scene. (See some of my previous posts about the fossil here, here, and here.) Nicknamed "Ida", the fossil has already spurred comments from nearly all corners of the science blogohedron, but with documentaries about her airing tonight (USA) and tomorrow (UK) there is still plenty to talk about.
That's why I am organizing a one-time-only blog carnival all about Ida. Whether you want to tackle the media hype, the more technical aspects of her discovery, or something else…
laelaps | May 25, 2009
A pair of calves (Bos primigenius taurus), photographed in suburban New Jersey (close-up).
laelaps | May 24, 2009
A white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed in suburban New Jersey (close-up).
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edyong | May 23, 2009
Two years ago, a group of Ugandan chimps provided a blow to the idea that humans are the only animals that truly behave selflessly to one another. These chimps showed clear signs of true selflessness, helping both human handlers and other unrelated chimps with no desire for reward.
The question of why we help each other, instead of looking out for ourselves, is one of the most compelling in modern biology. Evolutionary and game theory alike predict that selfish behaviour should be the rule with altruism the exception, and animal experiments have largely supported this idea. Nature, 'red in…
laelaps | May 23, 2009
The skeleton of an orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), photographed at the National Museum of Natural History.
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laelaps | May 22, 2009
The exceptionally preserved skeleton of Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One.
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It has been three days now since an international team of paleontologists promised to deliver the change we need change everything, but when I woke up this morning I was pleased to find that things had still not gone "Bizarro World" around here. There is still a lot going on with Darwinius (better known as "Ida"), though, and while I am sure we will still be talking about her for some time to come I wanted to take a moment to step back and answer a few questions that keep cropping up about this…
laelaps | May 22, 2009
The skull of Smilodon, photographed at the AMNH's "Extreme Mammals" exhibit.
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