paleontology
laelaps | November 13, 2009
If anything, the 19th century English paleontologist Gideon Mantell is known for his contributions to our understanding of dinosaurs. His most famous accomplishment was the description of Iguanodon, but Mantell has another legacy that is not as well-known. It was his last contribution to science, though it was not made willingly.
Like many other early paleontologists Mantell had to carve out his own career, and he studied fossils when not busy with his duties as a surgeon in the Lewes countryside. As Mantell began to gain recognition for his work on fossils, though, his passion for…
laelaps | November 11, 2009
The "Dinosauroid", the human-like product of a thought experiment about what the descendants of the dinosaur Troodon would look like today if the theropod had survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, is back. This time it has been invoked as an "I'm just sayin'..." defense by Richard Dawkins in a discussion about what life might be like on other planets. The article itself is here, but be sure to check out Darren's excellent take-down.
My own thoughts on the Dinosauroid will be featured in the conclusion of my forthcoming book Written in Stone.
laelaps | November 10, 2009A mammoth as restored in Gosse's Omphalos. In Gosse's view of history, however, such a scene never actually existed. The bones of the mammoth existed in the earth from the time of Creation and had never given form to a living animal.Without a doubt, Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos is one of the strangest books I have ever read. Published in 1857, two years before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species would cause the public and academics alike to take evolution more seriously, Gosse's book was an attempt to rescue Creation itself from the perceived threat of science denuded of Christian…
laelaps | November 9, 2009A very lion-like Smilodon, from Ernest Ingersoll's The Life of Animals (1907).
For decades after its discovery the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis was depicted as little more than a lion with a short tail and long fangs. Given its size and habits as a large carnivore the connection appeared to make sense, but recent studies have suggested that Smilodon was quite different from the "king of the beasts." Not only did Smilodon have a face that probably would have looked a bit saggy when compared to modern lions, but a new study published in the Journal of Zoology suggests that male and female…
laelaps | November 5, 2009
Almost every time I get into a discussion about woolly mammoths with someone the conversation eventually steers towards the topic of cloning a mammoth. "Wouldn't it be fascinating?", they often say. And with a little extra genetic engineering, many of my friends hope, maybe someone could create a breed of domesticated mini-mammoths that would definitely be in the running for the title of "Cutest Pet Ever" (at least until they left a mess on the carpet).
The possibility of housebroken mammoths, or at least mammoths in public zoos, seemed within reach in the spring of 1984. It was at that time…
laelaps | November 5, 2009The skeleton of a giant bison (Bison latifrons), photographed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.
laelaps | November 4, 2009A restoration of the crocodyliform Goniopholis scavenging a stegosaur carcass. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | November 1, 2009A slab containing many specimens of the Jurassic ammonite Dactylioceras. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 31, 2009Dinosaur National Monument, Utah. The glass building houses the famous fossil wall and will soon be replaced with a new permanent visitor center.
laelaps | October 30, 2009
Whenever I sit down to write an entry for this blog I remind myself that I might not always speak the same language as the people I am trying to reach. A statement that might be technically accurate, such as "Mammuthus primigenius was a Late Pleistocene proboscidean with a Holarctic distribution", will likely cause nonspecialist readers to go cross-eyed and vow never to visit this blog again. Instead I have to remember what it was like when I began to teach myself about paleontology and evolution. What do those words mean? And how can I quickly and accurately define them without sacrificing…
laelaps | October 30, 2009A reconstruction of the skull of Torvosaurus based upon the few parts of skull material that have been recovered so far. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 29, 2009
As strange as it might seem, the living African and Asian elephants are only the remnants of what was once a very diverse array of proboscideans. In the not-too-distant past elephants and their closest relatives occupied Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, Central America, and South America, but almost all of them had perished by about 10,000 years ago.* Of these recently-extinct forms the most iconic was the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, which was covered in long coats of shaggy hair. They were cold-weather mammoths, inhabiting chillier regions than their North American cousin the…
laelaps | October 28, 2009A restoration of Utahraptor in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 27, 2009A restoration of Archelon in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 26, 2009Last week I reviewed part 1 of the upcoming NOVA miniseries, "Becoming Human." It was a fair introduction to early human origins even if it was marred by persistent references to an illusory onward-and-upward march of human progress. Where the first episode primarily concerned itself with australopithecines, however, Homo erectus is the star of part 2.
The first part of this episode recapitulates what was covered in the last installment. Viewers are brought back to the African rift valley, the place where the "huge evolutionary step" between apes and humans took place. This is a bit of a…
laelaps | October 26, 2009A cast of Dimetrodon in the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 23, 2009The stench emanating from the putrefying mammoth carcass carried for miles.
Though kept out of the sun by the long shadows of the surrounding pine trees, the corpse reeked as the flesh, sinew, and bone of the mammoth's body were slowly parceled out into the ecosystem by scavengers. The woolly elephant's eyes had been pecked out long ago, and the intricate musculature of its trunk lay in tatters, but there was still plenty of meat to go around.
The grisly death site buzzed with activity as less magisterial creatures went about their dirty work. Black birds jostled for the best access to blood-…
laelaps | October 21, 2009The restored lower jaw of Afradapis. From the Nature paper.
This past May a 47 million year old fossil primate named Darwinius masillae, better known as "Ida", burst onto the public scene. The lemur-like creature was proclaimed to be the "missing link" and the "ancestor of us all", but the actual science behind Ida was drowned by a tide of media sensationalism. Press releases and documentaries proclaimed that Ida would "CHANGE EVERYTHING", but despite such promises the sky remained blue, my cats continued to wake me up at 5:30 AM, and the primate evolutionary tree did not suddenly restructure…