laelaps

A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia. When a leopard eats a baboon, what is left behind? This question is not only relevant to primatologists and zoologists. Even though instances of predation on humans is relatively rare, big cats still kill and consume people, and when they do…

An eastern painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), photographed in suburban New Jersey.

Want the dirt on the new species of fossil human which will be described in Science this week? Tune in to the BBC World Service "Science in Action" program this Friday to hear me discuss the discovery with host Jon Stewart. The program should be available on the web sometime after it airs, as well.

A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia. SK-54 is a curious fossil. The 1.5 million year old skullcap represents a juvenile Paranthropus robustus, one of the heavy-jawed hominins which lived in prehistoric South Africa, but there is something that makes this skull fragment…

An eastern painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), photographed in suburban New Jersey.

A few weeks ago, during the last part of the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series, I briefly mentioned the idea of creating a series of mini-documentaries which would help promote my forthcoming book Written in Stone. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, but I have a bit of a…

According to multiple reports released yesterday, scientists will announce the discovery of a new species of two-million-year-old hominin this week. Do you know what that means? That's right; writers are breaking out the pop-sci boilerplate to tell us all about the new "missing link." To paraphrase…

A short-billed dowitcher (Limnodromus griseus), photographed in Cape May, New Jersey.

A millipede (Apheloria), photographed in New York.

A gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

A margay (Leopardus wiedii). From Wikipedia. Even if they spend years in the field, researchers rarely witness predation on primates. Cats, birds, and other hunters regularly feed on primate species, but what we know about the habits of primate-hunters often comes from bones and fingernails…

American avocets (Recurvirostra americana), photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.

The partial faces of Anoiapithecus (left), Pierolapithecus (center), and Dryopithecus (right). (Images not to scale) Our species is just one branch of a withering part of the evolutionary tree, the great apes. Along with the handful of species of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are…

A gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

The latest edition of the open-access paleontology journal Palaeontologia Electronica was recently published, and I am happy to say that it contains my review of The Paleobiological Revolution. If you are interested in the history of science and how paleontology has changed during the past four…

A grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus). Image from Wikipedia. Charles Darwin's visit to the Galapagos Archipelago has been celebrated time and again for its influence on his evolutionary thoughts, but I have to wonder what would have happened if the Beagle skipped the Galapagos and visited…

A spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

Spotted hyenas giggling over an antelope spine. Courtesy BMC Ecology. For spotted hyenas, a laugh can speak volumes about an individual. Despite being portrayed as stupid scavengers who rely on the leftovers of lion prides, hyenas are highly intelligent and social predators. They communicate…

As I mentioned in today's post, dead whales provide food and homes for a variety of marine organisms, and this video (uploaded by Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News) shows how whale fall communities change over time. It was produced by the laboratory of Dr. Craig Smith, University of Hawaii.The bone-…

The skeletons of an adult and a juvenile manatee (Trichechus manatus), on display at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

The fail whale comes to rest; the decomposing body of a gray whale is host to a diverse array of scavengers and other deep sea organisms. From Goffredi et al., 2004. In the deep sea, no carcass goes to waste. Platoons of crabs, fish, and other scavengers make short work of most of the bodies…

A stuffed polar bear (Ursus maritimus), on display at the New Jersey State Museum.

A stuffed North American river otter (Lontra canadensis), in the collection at the New Jersey State Museum.

A partially dissected head of an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), showing some of the internal anatomy, in the collection at the New Jersey State Museum. (And here is a similar preserved sea lion head in the same collection.)

The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book? Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will…

Raccoon tracks, photographed along a trail northern New Jersey.

I'll be the first to admit it; the specimen was not much to look at. Seventy years after being dug out of the ground much of it had crumbled into four-foot-long Y, and the curved teeth that once stood upright in that jaw had slumped out of their sockets into the sulfur-smelling debris. All the…

Our temporary houseguest, Rusty, playing in a stream in northern New Jersey.

Megarachne, (changed to Mesothelae for broadcast) restored as an enormous spider in the series Before the Dinosaurs: Walking With Monsters. Imagine that you are are standing in a massive junkyard with the remains of cars strewn all about you. A few are relatively complete, but most of the heap…

A stuffed cougar (Puma concolor), photographed in natural history collection at the New Jersey State Museum.