Vote for Shelley!
The finalists for the CollegeScholarship.com $10,000 scholarship have been announced, and SB’s [I stand corrected, excuse the faux pas] Sb’s own Shelley of Retrospectacle is one of them! Make sure that...
View ArticleUnconventional Evolution: Notes from the "Cliff Jolly Conference"
Category: Anthropology As I mentioned just prior to my move to Sb, I spent this past Saturday at NYU at the “Evolutionary Anthropology at the Interface” conference, which was primarily a celebration of...
View ArticleThis bird has the moves
I can’t say that I’m a fan the music choice, but I have to admit, this bird can dance to the beat better than I can. This is Snowball, “a medium sulphur crested Eleanora cockatoo,” who’s apparently a...
View Article'Aint no cure for the [blogging] blues
Are science writers starting to suffer from blogging burnout? It seems that way. For one reason or another a number of bloggers (including three of my favorites) have seriously pondered the question of...
View ArticleSetting up camp
It has been one hell of a week. Even though I had not been happy at ScienceBlogs.com for quite some time, I had not planned on quitting so abruptly. It was not an easy decision. I had spent about two ...
View ArticleTaung, 2.3 Million Years Ago – Scratched bones and fossil primate teeth as...
On December 23, 1924, the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart chipped away the last bit of rock encasing the skull of a small fossil primate. The specimen had been part of a collection of fossil scraps...
View ArticleThe Bite of the Bear-Dog
Between 23 and 16 million years ago, just outside of where the city of Lisbon, Portugal sits today, there lived a unique mix of mammals which would have seemed both strange and familiar. From bones and...
View ArticleMother Tigers Pass Down Territory to Their Daughters
For female Amur tigers, defending your territory is not just about acquiring enough food to survive; it’s also about passing down real estate to your daughter. As described by a team of scientists led...
View ArticleCreeping Closer to Publication
Things have been a little slow here this week, but for good reason. A few days ago a large package arrived at my door and I opened it up to find… … the galley copies of Written in Stone. These ...
View ArticleRepost – Unique Fossils Record the Dining Habits of Ancient Sharks
Shark attacks are events of speed and violence. When they have locked-on to a prey item, sharks seem to come out of nowhere, and though they can be quite gentle with their jaws (as on occasions when...
View ArticleRepost – Fossil feces from an Indiana sinkhole preserve traces of a...
Time and again I have stressed that every fossil bone tells a story, and, in a different way, so do coprolites. Fossilized feces are small snapshots of the lives of prehistoric organisms, often...
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Claws, Jaws and Spikes: The Science of the Dinosaur Arsenal
<< previous image | next image >> From the playground sandbox to the big screen, we love to imagine dinosaurs tearing into one another. The teeth, horns, claws, and spikes that adorn their...
View ArticleKnow your monsters: Graboid
Monstrous Wildlife from Frank Robnik on Vimeo. I can’t say that all the “science” in the short is sound (Graboids are reptiles? Really?), but it’s a fun look at the stars of the Tremors series.
View ArticleOf Pronghorn and Predators
Capable of reaching speeds exceeding 70 kilometers per hour, the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) is one of the fastest mammals on earth. No large North American carnivore can match it for speed –...
View ArticleThe Usefulness of Dolphin Snot
For years marine biologists have relied on dart biopsies – small portions of tissue obtained by shooting a dart into an animal – to study the genetics of dolphins in the wild. The trouble is that this...
View ArticleIt’s just a little pre-digested; it’s still good, it’s still good.
If you want to know about the life and habitat of a woolly mammoth, there is scarcely a better place to look than in its dung. Found frozen in the permafrost or extracted from the intestines of...
View ArticleDirty Browsers – Determining a menu for North America’s fossil camels
Even with the young politician Jefferson Davis behind their adoption by the military, camels were a hard sell to the U.S. government. Along with other military men, Davis was convinced that camels...
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A Third of ‘Extinct’ Mammals May Still Be Alive
There may be many more “extinct” mammals waiting to be rediscovered than conservation biologists previously thought. Categorizing a mammal species as extinct has rested upon two criteria: It has not...
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