mammals
laelaps | February 16, 2009
An illustration of the Yale mastodon mount.
While planting corn on his Iowa farm around 1872 a farmer named Peter Mare found a curious carving. It was a smoking pipe in the shape of an elephant, a very odd item indeed, and he used it for its intended purpose until he moved to Kansas in 1878. At that time he gave it to his brother-in-law, but soon after a Reverend Gass came calling. Gass, an amateur archaeologist, wanted to purchase it, but the pipe was not for sale. Even so, the owner of the pipe allowed Gass to photograph it and make some casts, which he shared with the members of the…
grrlscientist | February 15, 2009tags: NYC, New York City, Bob Levy, image of the day
In the Spotlight
Central Park Grey Squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis.
Image: Bob Levy, author of Club George [larger view].
The photographer writes;
The sunlight fortuitously fell on this Gray Squirrel as it chomped through a peanut shell on a fair winter's day. I confess I did not give that peanut to the squirrel nor have I given them to any other squirrels. Oh, there was a time when I might have. When I started birding it was not unusual for me to give them an occasional snack but that all changed when these animal got a little too bold…
laelaps | February 14, 2009
I have been out and about for most of the day and have not had much time to write. In lieu of a real post, here is a photograph of an Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) I took just this afternoon at the Turtleback Zoo in Essex, New Jersey.
laelaps | February 13, 2009I cannot recall precisely why, but okapis were on my mind this morning. Specifically, I was wondering what had become of the first photograph ever taken of a live okapi, an illustration I had heard about but had been unable to find. I was first put on the trail of the picture when, last September, the Zoological Society of London declared that they had the first photographs ever taken of an okapi in its natural habitat.
I was immediately skeptical of this claim. Had no one ever photographed an okapi in the wild? In my efforts to find an answer to this question I stumbled across references to…
laelaps | February 13, 2009
Black crested gibbons (Nomascus concolor), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
edyong | February 11, 2009This is the sixth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial.
Physically, we are incredibly different from our ape cousins but genetically, it's a different story. We famously share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Our proteins are virtually identical and our chromosomes have more or less the same structure. At the level of the nucleotide (the "letters" that build strands of DNA), little has happened during ape evolution. These letters have been changing at a considerably slower rate than in our relatives than in other…
laelaps | February 10, 2009
A Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | February 9, 2009
William Buckland, from Reminiscences of Oxford.
In the year 1166 a woman quietly passed away in a cave on Mount Pelligrino, Sicily. It was the end she chose for herself. At the age of twelve she had left home to become a hermit and devote her life to worshiping God, and her remains were left to rot in the isolated cave that was her home. Her name was Rosalia.
Then, in 1624, a deadly epidemic spread through Palermo. It was at this time that a sick woman claimed to have seen a vision of Rosalia, and for the plague to be ended, the apparition instructed, Rosalia's bones would have to be…
laelaps | February 9, 2009
A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | February 4, 2009
California sea lions (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | February 3, 2009
The extinct whale Dorudon, from the new PLoS One paper.
When the English anatomist William H. Flower proposed that whales had evolved from terrestrial ungulates in 1883 he cast doubt upon the notion that the direct ancestors of early whales chiefly used their limbs for swimming. If they did, Flower reasoned, whales would not have evolved their distinctive method of aquatic locomotion, typified by vertical oscillations of their fluked tails. Instead Flower suggested that the stock that gave rise to whales would have had broad, flat tails that paved the way for cetacean locomotion as we know…
edyong | February 3, 2009Nine years ago, a team of fossil-hunters led by Philip Gingerich from the University of Michigan uncovered something amazing - the petrified remains of an ancient whale, but one unlike any that had been found before. Within the creature's abdomen lay a collection of similar but much smaller bones. They were the fossilised remains of a foetal whale, perfectly preserved within the belly of its mother. Gingerich says, "This is the 'Lucy' of whale evolution."
The creatures are new to science and Gingerich have called them Maiacetus inuus. The genus name is an amalgamation of the Greek words "…
grrlscientist | February 3, 2009tags: Luna the orca, Orcinus orca, orca, killer whale, wildlife, streaming video
This video is from my other home. This is footage of Luna, an orca ("killer whale") Orcinus orca, who was a southern resident (fish eating) whale who tragically died 10 March 2006 when she was hit by a large tugboat in British Columbia's Nookta Sound. Luna lived a solitary life after she found herself alone hundreds of miles away from her feeding grounds. Luna was lonely. She was very affectionate and social, making friends with boats, humans and other animals during her short and sad life [2:38].
laelaps | February 3, 2009
A North American river otter (Lontra canadensis), photographed at the North Carolina Zoo.
laelaps | February 2, 2009
The right hip of Basilosaurus as seen in Lucas' 1900 description.
If you were a 19th century American paleontologist and you wanted a Basilosaurus skeleton there was only one place to look; Alabama. Even though fossils of the ancient whale had been found elsewhere their bones were most abundant in Alabama, and S.B. Buckley, Albert Koch, and others exhumed multiple specimens of the extinct whale from the southern state. Unfortunately, however, most of the skeletons were fragmentary. Even though long chains of vertebrae were often found intact other parts of the skeleton, most notably the…