paleontology
laelaps | December 30, 2009
A restoration of the skull of "Pithecanthropus" erectus by Manonvrier.
"Pithecanthropus" erectus, described by the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois, was an immediate sensation. Known from a skullcap, a femur, and a tooth discovered on the island of Java, it was the first fossil that could be regarded as an "intermediate type" between humans and apes (even if there was some debate about whether all the parts Dubois had found really went together). In later years "Java Man" would become more popularly represented by sculpted busts of our prehistoric relative, but one of the earliest full…
laelaps | December 24, 2009
There was perhaps no Victorian naturalist so well-known and so misunderstood as Richard Owen. He could be warm to friends, but to his scientific peers he was an obstinate autocrat. He was among the first scientists to start publicly considering life in evolutionary terms, yet he never fully demonstrated the mechanism by which his evolutionary visions might be carried out. He crossed swords with theologians who were rankled by the implications evolution, but at the same time Owen fancied himself as a "high priest" of science. Neither here nor there, neither warm nor cold, Owen was seemingly a…
laelaps | December 23, 2009
A sample slide from the Your Inner Fish teaching resources.
Just in time for Christmas, paleontologist Neil Shubin has given us a real treat. Neil has composed PowerPoint slides of the illustrations used in each chapter of Your Inner Fish and made them freely accessible to all. I don't have any plans to deliver any classroom lectures in the near future, but if I ever do go back I will definitely make use of them!
laelaps | December 22, 2009
One of Charles R. Knight's wonderful paintings of woolly mammoths walking through the snow of ancient Europe. On display at the Field Museum in Chicago.
When did the last woolly mammoths die?
There is no easy answer to the question. In its heyday the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was distributed across much of the northern hemisphere, from southern Spain to the eastern United States, and the entire species did not simply lay down and die at one particular moment. Some populations (such as the "dwarf" mammoths of Wrangel Island) survived until about 4,000 years ago, but most of…
milhayser | December 21, 2009
Darren Naish inspects "trace fossils" on Tetrapod Zoology, geologic records of footprints and other indentations left behind by animals. Although these telltale signs can "provide excellent information on behaviour and lifestyle," it can sometimes be hard to tell what kind of creature made them in the first place. Such is the case with a set of mysterious parallel grooves preserved in a Jurassic sandbar, which may have been formed by the snouts of ancient sea monsters trolling for snacks. On Laelaps, Brian Switek reconsiders unilinear assumptions of cetacean evolution, citing "a…
laelaps | December 19, 2009
A Tyrannosaurus rex, photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life in Utah.
laelaps | December 17, 2009
Trailer for Jurassic Fight Club II Clash of the Dinosaurs
This year saw the release of Unscientific America and Don't Be SUCH a Scientist, two books that aimed to take scientists to task for not being media-savvy enough. Whatever "it" is scientists are clearly not "with it", the books argue, and the public's inadequate understanding of science can be traced back to the inability of nerdy scientists to give themselves media-friendly makeovers.
I didn't particularly like either book (and that is putting things a bit mildly), but I have to admit that I am a little biased. Within the field I…
laelaps | December 16, 2009
A comparison of the third molars from three species of Pakicetus as viewed from the back. (From Cooper et al., 2009)
Crack open just about any recent popular overview of evolution (namely Why Evolution is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters) and somewhere inside you will find a string of skeletal whales. Starting with either Indohyus or Pakicetus, the illustration will feature a graded series of forms that connect modern whales with their terrestrial ancestors. A caveat may be included in the text to say that we cannot be absolutely…
laelaps | December 11, 2009
On the way down to the reservoir to see the dinosaur tracks at Red Fleet State Park in Utah. My wife Tracey leads the way.
laelaps | December 4, 2009Much of my forthcoming book is steeped in insights about evolution that have been derived from the new paleobiological synthesis, and in doing a bit a background reading I came across an interesting tidbit.
In 1980 numerous authorities on evolutionary science converged in Chicago for a conference on macroevolution. Spurred by the work of paleontologists such as Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and Steven Stanley, the meeting's goal was to assess whether the traditional slow-and-steady model of evolution preferred by geneticists fit what paleontologists saw in the fossil record.…
laelaps | December 3, 2009The December 2009 issue of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach has just been released, and among the new offerings is a paper on "Print Reference Sources about Evolution" by Adam Goldstein. It seems to be a spinoff of Goldstein's paper on evolution blogs published in the same journal earlier this year, and it stresses the importance of print references during a time when online resources are becoming more widely available. While I agree that print references are still very important for anyone who wants to educate themselves about evolution, though, I don't think that Goldstein made…
laelaps | December 1, 2009
The skull of Paranthropus boisei ("Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.).
Louis Leakey had a problem.
During the summer of 1959 he and his wife Mary recovered the skull fragments of an early human scattered about the fossil deposits of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The skull had been deposited among the shattered bones of fossil mammals and a collection stone tools, and this led Louis to conclude that it was one of our early ancestors. Only an ancestor of Homo sapiens could be a toolmaker, Louis thought, but the skull looked nothing like that of our species.
When Mary fit all the pieces…
laelaps | November 25, 2009I'm pleased to announced that paleontologist Scott Sampson, author of the new book Dinosaur Odyssey and host of the children's tv show Dinosaur Train, has just launched a blog. It is called The Whirlpool of Life. Go check it out!
gregladen | November 23, 2009A six-metre croc with three sets of fangs is among the five ancient relatives of modern-day crocodiles found in the Sahara Desert, scientists said Thursday.
Three of the fossils, discovered by researchers led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and Hans Larsson of McGill University, represent newly named species.
The fossil remains were found in a series of expeditions beginning in 2000.
All of the prehistoric crocs lived about 100 million years ago in the southern super-continent known as Gondwana, when the region that is now the Sahara featured dinosaurs and grassy plains criss-…
laelaps | November 20, 2009
A giraffe, photographed at the Bronx zoo.
For me, no visit to the zoo is complete without stopping by to see the giraffes. They are among the most common of zoo animals, certainly, but I still find them fascinating. If giraffes did not actually exist and someone drew an illustration of one as a speculative zoology project the picture would likely be written off as absurd, yet the living animal is more charming than preposterous.
As with many extant large mammals, though, the giraffe is only a vestige of a once more diverse group. Its closest living relative is the okapi, a short-necked and…
laelaps | November 19, 2009
At last long there was solid proof that humans had died in a real Noachian Deluge. That such an event had occurred was widely taken on faith by Christians, and the belief that world's geology had been formed by the Flood was assented to by many naturalists, but in 1725 the Swiss naturalist Jacob Johann Scheuchzer believed that he had discovered a symbol so instantly recognizable that no one could doubt that the biblical catastrophe was real. It was what appeared to be a human skeleton, cleaved nearly in half but nonetheless preserved by the very floodwaters that had killed the sinner.
The…
laelaps | November 17, 2009During the past six million years or so several species of humans have simultaneously inhabited Earth at any one time, but today only one species, ours, remains. How did this come to be? This is the question behind part 3 of the NOVA documentary series "Becoming Human" (see my reviews for parts 1 and 2), and the show does not get off to a strong start.
Though I might be a little more merciful on the producers of this documentary than Greg, he was right to point out that the opening segment of the show is worn old tripe about how our species has fulfilled a kind of evolutionary destiny set in…
milhayser | November 13, 2009
Shakespeare wrote that "past is prologue," but it's not always that easy to read. Brian Switek on Laelaps tells the tale of P. H. Gosse, a man who tried to reconcile the fossil record with the Book of Genesis, at the same time Darwin was writing his Origin of Species. Convincing no one, Gosse estranged even the faithful with his image of God as "a trickster who planted gags to fool geologists." But given the ample evidence that dinosaurs were once alive, the debate continues: were they warm-blooded? On Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong shows us a new study which says yes, based on the "hip…