Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
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Posts by this author
April 30, 2010
A male pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), resting in the tall grass. Photographed on Antelope Island, Utah.
April 29, 2010
Utah may seem like an odd place to search for primates, but you can find them if you know where to look. Although scrubby and arid today, between 46-42 million years ago what is now the northeastern part of the state was a lush forest which was home to a variety of peculiar fossil primates. Called…
April 28, 2010
A bison (Bison bison), photographed on Antelope Island, Utah.
April 28, 2010
UPDATE: Due to ongoing deliberations over the future of the New Jersey State Museum I have decided that it is in the best interest of the museum to remove this post, but I will continue to write about this story as more knowledge becomes publicly available. And, just so there is no misunderstanding…
April 27, 2010
Fossil fish from the Eocene age Green River Formation in Colorado. From Wikipedia.
I am pretty tired of Richard Dawkins putting down paleontology. In his 2004 tome The Ancestor's Tale, as well as in his latest book The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins felt compelled to cast the fossil record as…
April 26, 2010
An nyala (Tragelaphus angasii), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
April 26, 2010
Check out my article on the atmosphere and evolution, "The History of Air", over at Smithsonian.
The Raleigh News & Observer has a brief interview with me (conducted by DeLene Beeland) on paleontology, evolution, and my forthcoming book Written in Stone. (Check out the comments, too - I…
April 25, 2010
A family of North American river otters (Lontra canadensis), photographed in Yellowstone National Park.
April 24, 2010
A grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
April 23, 2010
For at least 30 million years, bone-eating worms have been making their homes in the bodies of decomposing whales on the seabottom, but the rotting cetacean carcasses are not just food sources for the polychaetes.
The term "worm" immediately conjures up images of the red, squiggly things which…
April 22, 2010
A lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
April 22, 2010
A Madagascar sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita).
In the tropical forests of Madagascar, there lives a very peculiar kind of bat. While most bats roost by hanging upside-down from cave ceilings or tree branches, the Madagascar sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita) holds itself head-up thanks to a…
April 21, 2010
In a clip from the recent BBC program Museum of Life, visitors to London's Natural History Museum try to identify what kind of animal Megatherium was. Paleo fans will know it as one of the largest ground sloths to have ever lived (as well as one of the first to be described), but if I didn't…
April 21, 2010
A Wolf's guenon (Cercopithecus wolfi), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
April 20, 2010
For much of the past 130 million years South America was an island continent, and on it organisms evolved in "splendid isolation." Mammals, especially, evolved into forms not seen anywhere else, and while some mammalian immigrants made their way to South America during the past 30 million years it…
April 19, 2010
Two giant anteaters fight it out. On the left, the individuals lash out at each other with their enormous claws, and on the right they posture at each other (with the dominant animal, with the upright and puffed-out tail, on the right). From Kruetz et al 2009.
In the northern state of Roraima…
April 19, 2010
Ask a Biologist is back! Go check it out at the new website.
There's a new T. rex in town, plus other cool science news. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
Cobra rib muscles were co-opted to flare their hoods (ht @friendsofdarwin)
Julia got an awesome Camarasaurus tattoo. Check it out!
An…
April 17, 2010
What kind of social-insect-eating mammal is stranger than a numbat? Well, a pangolin, for one. From The Life of Mammals.
For more on the pangolin's prey, check out one of the newest additions to the ScienceBlogs family, Myrmecos.
April 15, 2010
Top of the encrusted surface of a brachiopod shell, showing the "war" between an edrioasteroid (star-shaped organism at center) and a fast-growing bryozoan colony. From Sprinkle and Rodgers 2010.
Back in the early days of paleontology, when the meaning and origin of fossils was still in doubt,…
April 14, 2010
Off the top of your head, how many female paleontologists can you name?
Hopefully, thanks to the recent publication of The Fossil Hunter and Remarkable Creatures, the brilliant 19th century fossil collector Mary Anning should spring to mind, but it seems to me that women are underrepresented in…
April 13, 2010
A red panda (Ailurus fulgens, left, photographed at the Bronx Zoo) and a giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca, right, photographed at the National Zoo).
As the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould observed in one of his most famous essays, the thumbs of giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are…
April 13, 2010
A sloth bear (Melursus ursinus), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington DC.
April 12, 2010
An African wild dog (Lycaon pictus, left) compared to a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta, right). Both photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
It never fails. Whenever I visit a zoo's African wild dog exhibit someone inevitably asks "Are those hyenas?", and when I visit spotted hyena enclosures I often…
April 12, 2010
Caterpillars must walk before they can anally scrape (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
Twitter taphonomy conversation reminded me of one of my favorite books, Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and Their Paleobiological Implications by Johannes Weigelt
Deep-sea scavengers risk low-oxygen levels to have…
April 11, 2010
If you're going to have termites for lunch, you'll need the right kind of equipment. From The Life of Mammals.
April 10, 2010
For deep sea scavengers, a dead tuna is an exquisite feast. For more on what happens to bodies which come to rest on the seafloor, see my post on bone-eating worms and this video of a whale fall.
April 10, 2010
An eastern painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), photographed in suburban New Jersey.
April 9, 2010
Now that the details about Australopithecus sediba have been published, I am faced with an important question - how am I going to fit the new hominin into Written in Stone?
When I started composing Written in Stone I was determined to make it as up-to-date as possible. This was not only out of a…
April 8, 2010
A diagram of how the skeletons of Australopithecus sediba came to be preserved in the Malapa cave deposit. From Dirks et al, 2010.
A little less than two million years ago, in what is now South Africa, a torrential downpour washed the bodies of two humans into the deep recesses of a cave. Just…