Bones
laelaps | May 18, 2010A restoration of Megatherium from H.N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters.
For over a century and a half dinosaurs have been the unofficial symbols and ambassadors of paleontology, but this was not always so. It was fossil mammals, not dinosaurs, which enthralled the public during the turn of the 19th century, and arguably the most famous was the enormous ground sloth Megatherium. It was more than just a natural curiosity. The bones of the "great beast" represented a world which flourished and disappeared in the not-so-distant past, but, as illustrated by Christine Argot in a review of its history…
laelaps | March 29, 2010The 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 which come to rest on the sea bottom, but every now and then the carrion-eaters are presented with a rotting bonanza; a whale fall. Muscle, viscera, blubber, and bone; it all gets broken down, but it takes so long that the whale carcass actually provides a temporary home for a variety of organisms which…
laelaps | February 17, 2010Detail of a Charles R. Knight mural depicting a family a mastodons.Fossils often turn up in unexpected places. As people have dug swimming pools, tilled farms, blasted through mountains, and quarried the land for minerals traces of ancient life sometimes come to the surface, from isolated shark teeth to skeletons of our extinct hominin relatives. Even fossil graveyards are found this way every now and then, like the one found in a southern Pennsylvania quarry a little more than a century ago.
In late April 1907 William Jacob Holland, a paleontologist and director of Pittsburgh's Carnegie…
laelaps | October 26, 2007Just a quick reminder that the next exhibition of The Boneyard will be going up tomorrow at the Hairy Museum of Natural History, so be sure to get all your paleo (or palaeo, if you prefer) oriented links to me or Matt soon! If you need some inspiration check out Matt's fantastic artwork and discussion on phytosaurs, a group that often doesn't get the attention it deserves.
There's some good opportunities for some cross-over posts coming up as well, as the next edition of The Accretionary Wedge is fast approaching, and it's host (Kevin Z of The Other 95%) has asked for submissions about "…
laelaps | October 14, 2007In 1978, a paleoanthropological team including Mary Leakey, Richard Hay, and Tim White made a startling discovery at Laetoli, Tanzania; in a bed of volcanic ash that would later be dated to about 3.5 million years old were the footprints of ancient hominids. The preserved trackway, found to contain the footprints of three individuals of the same species walking in the same direction during a very short period of time (possibly walking together as a group), would become one of the most important and iconic of hominid fossils, the fact that hominids were walking upright 3.5 million years ago…