laelaps

A comparison of three-dimensional scans of hominin footprints. Top) A footprint made by an experimental subject using a normal, "extended" gait. Middle) A footprint made by an experimental subject using a "bent-knee, bent-hip" gait. Bottom) A Laetoli footprints. From Raichlen et al., 2010.…

The skull of Mosasaurus maximus, photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.

Last Friday I posted an open-thread in an attempt to gauge what readers might be getting from the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series (Parts 1, 2, and 3), and I was quite pleased by the response. I was glad to hear so many of you have found it useful (or intend to go back to it when you…

The mount of a musk ox (Ovibos moschatus), photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.

The Brazilian pygmy gecko is mind-bogglingly small. As this clip from the recent BBC documentary Life illustrates, it is so minuscule that it is effectively watertight and can rest effortlessly on the surface of the water. It still amazes me that vertebrates can be that tiny. LIFE will air…

A jar full of dogfish, photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.

The skeleton of an elk-moose (Cervalces scotti), photographed at the New Jersey State Museum.

At almost every aquarium I have ever visited with a seahorse exhibit, the plaque in front of the tank says the same thing: in seahorses and their relatives, males, not females, carry the babies. It is always interesting to watch the reactions of visitors to this curious fact. Adult men, for…

Earlier this week David Williams (Stories in Stone), Michael Welland (Sand), and I started a blog series about the details of publishing a popular science book (Parts 1, 2, and 3), but I have been a bit underwhelmed by the response. I had been hoping for some input from other published authors,…

The preserved head of a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), dissected and dyed to show some of the glands inside the head. From the collections of the New Jersey State Museum (originally from the College of New Jersey).

A photograph and line drawing (left side) of the fossil dolphin Astadelphis gastaldii. The crescent-shaped line in the line drawing represents the bite of a large shark, with the red portions representing damage done directly to the bone. From Bianucci et al, 2010. Shark attacks are events of…

An ebony langur (Trachypithecus auratus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

Earlier this week I discussed how to find a publisher for your book and how blogs can be useful tools in that process, but what about the effort that goes into completing a manuscript? As Michael has pointed out in his latest blog-length contribution to our conversation, every writer is different…

Small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinerea) anxiously await a fishcicle treat. Photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

Blogs, as Carl Zimmer astutely noted at this year's ScienceOnline conference, are software. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether science bloggers can or should replace science journalists the fact of the matter is that science blogs are the independent expressions of a variety of writers…

A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

Writing a popular science book has simultaneously been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my writing career so far. It was not so much something that I wanted to do as a task that I needed to do, and without that sense of resolve Written in Stone would probably be a half-finished…

A California sea lion pup (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

I love the work that Larry Witmer and his students do at Ohio University. Not only is it cutting-edge anatomical research that helps us better understand prehistoric organisms, but the Witmer lab is constantly sharing parts of their work via the web. They even have their own YouTube feed with lots…

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

When it comes to aliens, Hollywood really does not have much imagination. Most extraterrestrials that have appeared on the big screen look very much like us, or are at least some kind of four-to-six-limbed vertebrate, and this says more about out own vanity than anything else. It would be far more…

A rock squirrel (Spermophilus variegatus), photographed at Dinosaur National Monument, Utah.

I couldn't say why, but I have never been very interested in stories about vampires. I have never read Dracula, I have no interest in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or True Blood, and I think Twilight is some of the worst literary and movie cheese to come out in a while, but despite my general apathy…

A milu (Elaphurus davidianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

A muskox (Ovibos moschatus), photographed in Alaska. From Flickr user drurydrama. Of all the mass extinctions that have occurred during earth's history, among the most hotly debated is the one which wiped out mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and the other peculiar members of…

Charlotte yawns before washing herself, although, on the other hand, she does look like she could be laughing. Lol.

A simplified evolutionary tree of primate relationships showing the placement of Darwinius in relationship to other groups. From Williams et al., 2010. The study of human origins can be a paradoxical thing. We know that we evolved from ancestral apes (and, in fact, are just one peculiar kind of…

A sunflower, photographed in Cape May, New Jersey.

Long-time readers of this blog know that "Laelaps" is not so much a stand-alone repository of my thoughts and opinions as an active writing lab; from the very beginning I have had bigger things in mind. One of those projects, my book Written in Stone, will be published later this year, and every…

During the 1920's, poisons could be found in abundance in almost any New York apartment. Cyanide, arsenic, lead, carbon monoxide, radium, mercury, methyl alcohol and more; these materials were part of everyday life, especially bootlegged alcohol in the "dry" era when the only stiff drinks commonly…