Jurassic Fight Club Open ThreadJuly 29, 2008 – Tonight the first episode of the History channel program Jurassic Fight Club will air (I reviewed it here) and I definitely want to know what you think about it. Have at it in the comments.
What Killed Europe’s Hyenas?September 24, 2010 – Mass extinctions are often typified by the catastrophic loss of charismatic animals. Even though ammonites, pterosaurs, many forms of marine reptiles, and even some lineages of mammals all succumbed during the great dying at the end of the Cretaceous, that event will always be cast as the unexpected curtain-fall on the Age of the Dinosaurs. […]
StegosaurusFebruary 17, 2008 – “Here’s my science tattoo.”–Vincent Iadevaia Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
A Fossil Emblem [Science Tattoo]July 18, 2010 – Maria, a paleontologist, writes, “Archaeopteryx, to me, represents a beautiful example of a transition fossil and of evolution in general, showing characters that both dinosaurs and birds share.” You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Scientist tries to communicate with public, gets quote-mined insteadDecember 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 […]
What Is A Bird (a k a Euornithine Ornithothoracine Pygostylian…etc.)?February 26, 2010 – My post on birds and dinosaurs yesterday led to a little debate on Facebook, including this, from paleontologist Thomas Holtz: All living birds share a common ancestor that would also be considered a bird, so they are a monophyletic group. Nevertheless, that group is deeply nested among euornithine ornithothoracine pygostylian avialian eumaniraptoran paravian metornithine maniraptoran […]
Hello Boston: Coming to the Museum of Science, April 17April 05, 2010 – I’ll be giving a talk at the Museum of Science in Boston on Saturday, April 17. It’s the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Academy of Science. I’m going to talk about spangled dinosaurs, how scientists are splashing colors all over the history of life, and what all that color can tell […]
Prehistoric sea dragons kept themselves warmJune 10, 2010 – When dinosaurs ruled the land, other groups of prehistoric reptiles dominated the waters. Their bones have also fossilised and they reveal much about how these ‘sea dragons’ lived. They tell us about the shape of their bodies, the things they ate and even how they determined their sex. And according to Aurélien Bernard from the […]
Prehistoric meat-eating fungus snared microscopic wormsMay 04, 2010 – Cowboys have been lassoing cattle for several centuries, but it turns out that fungi developed the same trick 100 million years ago when dinosaurs still walked the Earth. Alexander Schmidt and colleagues from the Humboldt University of Berlin found evidence of this ancient Wild West scene in a beautiful chunk of French amber. The amber […]
T. rex TroubleAugust 25, 2008 – A couple weeks ago I blogged on a debate over the discovery of soft tissue in a dinosaur. Over at Nature, Rex Dalton has a spicy article about a fresh assault on the findings. I wrote about how the alleged blood vessels and cells in a T. rex fossil might be bacterial biofilms. The scientists […]
So long! (For now…)August 13, 2009 – Alright folks, I’ve got a few more things to pack and some last-minute blog posts to finish, but otherwise I’m all set for the big trip to Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Fossil Butte, Dinosaur National Monument, Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Park, Craters of the Moon… it’s going to be one hell of a vacation. At […]
Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksFebruary 16, 2010 – Contingency has been on my mind quite often these days. What would life look like today if the ancestors of the first land-dwelling vertebrates had two legs instead of four? How would non-avian dinosaurs continue to have evolved if they had not been wiped out 65 million years ago? What if, like many other prehistoric […]
A wee little elephantimorph from EritreaJuly 06, 2009 – A restoration of Eritreum compared to the larger Gomphotherium. From Shoshani et al. (2009). Before I loved dinosaurs, I loved elephants. I would run around the backyard with my little pith helmet on, firing my “elephant mover” to herd the imaginary pachyderms. (At the time I did not understand what guns did. When they went […]