Visualizing Evolution

Bang Goes the Theory: Evolution Made Simple

2011-08-24T18:08:00.003-05:00

Dr Yan visualizes evolution with a single line! Neat!

Creature Cast - ep. 2

2009-10-28T21:46:00.001-05:00

A claymation demonstration of the evolution of multicellular organisms! No really, look:

CreatureCast Episode 2 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

"I Am a Paleontologist"

2009-09-10T09:13:00.003-05:00

The new They Might Be Giants album, "Here Comes Science," has a song called "I Am a Paleontologist"!

Look for some iconic imagery at 1:30!

"It's so fun to think about how a species has evolved!"

"Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World"

2009-08-28T12:57:00.005-05:00

I just read this article from August 10th's New York Times and thought it was relevant and eye-opening: Reviving the Lost Art of Naming The World <-- click! click!

"The past few decades have seen a stream of studies that show that sorting and naming the natural world is a universal, deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we cannot afford to lose because it is essential to understanding the living world, and our place in it."

I am fascinated by this idea that taxonomy is innate to the way humans see the world, and that there are specific places of the brain evolved specifically to organize levels and groupings of living things. Maybe it helps explain why my own brain has always been obsessed with that sort of thing.

Anyway, the article is adapted from Carol Yoon's new book, "Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science," which I will be reading as soon as I can get my hands on it (someone checked it out of the library, darn it!):
I have to add the obvious, of course, which is that the ability to speak in the language of taxonomy is essential, absolutely essential, to learning and understanding the fundamentals of evolutionary biology.

Linkfest: Hiatus-break!

2009-08-26T20:09:00.007-05:00

It's time to break this blogging hiatus, so I'm going to start with something easy: a Linkfest!

Link 1: Manuel Lima of Visualizing Complexity was kind enough to send me this link to a featured project, a visualization of "The Evolution of the Origin of Species." The diagrams model each edition of the book as a "literary organism," illustrating changes from one edition to the next down to sentence level! The results are highly organic, beautiful, and undeniably reminiscent of complex phylogenies:
Click the link to see how it all works... the morphs from one edition to the next are worth seeing and make the entire thing clearer.

Link 2: From National Geographic.com: Ancient Birds had Iridescent Feathers!
As someone who desperately wants to be a paleo-artist, any hint of evidence about what color fossil organisms may have been just tickles me pink! Or rather tickles me iridescent black! (On the other hand, part of what has always attracted me to paleoart is the relatively high amount of artistic liberty it can offer, but those are selfish, selfish thoughts!)

Link 3: From BBC Earth News: Axolotle verges on wild extinction.
This is truly depressing. I worked with these guys for two years as an undergrad and they are the coolest critters. Amphibian extinctions around the world have to be one of the scariest and saddest environmental problems we currently face.

Website launched!

2009-08-22T20:14:00.002-05:00

I have finally launched my website, after several months of sitting on the unused domain name. Still needs some polishing, but check it out!

HeidiRichter.com

I may or may not eventually add a Visualizing Evolution segment to the site. For now it is simply a gallery of (mostly student) illustrations and artwork.

Making a continuous line of circles in Adobe Illustrator

2009-07-18T14:16:00.016-05:00

This is a bit off-topic, but I discovered this Illustrator trick at work yesterday and thought someone else out there might find it useful!

Have you ever needed to create a smooth line of circles, perhaps to represent some biomolecule or a string of pearls or something? Here's a quick way to do it.

1. Draw a line. Make sure you are happy with the curve because you won't be able to change it later:

2. Make the line weight the diameter of circle you want. Let's say you want your circles to be 20 pts in diameter:

** Make sure you have the round end option selected! **

Here's the line with a 20 pt stroke and round ends.

3. Dash that line! A 0 (zero) point dash will give you perfect circles. Make the gap just slightly wider than the circles, because if they are touching you will not be able to separate them later. I've given them a 20.2 pt gap.

Here's the line of circles!

4. Here's the tricky part. I don't know why this works, but just trust me and go to Object > Flatten Transparency:

And set the Raster/Vector Balance to 100. Click "OK"

Now the circles are separate object, but it is still technically one line, so...

5. Select Object > Compound Path > Release to make the circles separate shapes.

6. And ungroup them. Object > Ungroup

Now the circles can be selected as individual objects and given colors/gradients, etc...

Or broken up to show the process of a protein being dissolved into amino acids, as I had to illustrate yesterday!

Let me know if you found this useful at all. : )

Darwinius masillae

2009-05-20T19:15:00.004-05:00

Did everyone see the Google Homepage today? It's Darwinius masillae!
Clicking on the image brings up a search for "missing link found" which is just asking for a lot of misleading headlines. It is very very cool of Google to do this, but the search really should have been set to "Darwinius masillae."

I'll have more to say about Darwinius masillae once there is a cladogram or some paleoart to show. In the meantime, I'm going to vanish back into my blog hiatus for now.

Snaiad - Life on Another World

2009-04-26T21:06:00.003-05:00

Check out Snaiad!

Amazing art... fantastic imaginative creatures with an obvious evolutionary relationship... at times a bit uncomfortably phallic, though. Don't tell me it's just me.

---
8-28-09 edit: fixed broken link!

Watch this, you monkeys!

2009-04-14T22:15:00.002-05:00

edit: terms of use violation? I guess it does use some copyright movie clips but at the same time it wouldn't surprise me if some creationist complained for them to take it down. It has happened before. Try this instead... you monkeys. : p

Linkfest: Trunked sauropods = no. Feathered sauropods = maybe?

2009-03-23T21:02:00.009-05:00

Link 1: Tetrapod Zoology: Junk in the Trunk: why sauropods did not possess trunks. Too bad though, that would have been awesome.

Robert Bakker

Link 2: A feathered ornithischian dinosaur? No, really!

Tianyulong confuciusi Illustration by Li-Da Xing

The implications of a feathered Ornithischian are that 'feathers,' or rather some sort of fibrous proto-feather, was ancestral to all dinosaurs. What's next, feathered Triceratops? It's too much!

from Zheng X-T, You H-L, Xu X, Dong Z-M (2009)
An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur
with filamentous integumentary structures. Nature 458:333-336.

Link 3: The spiraling shape will make you go insane! Actually, this is the most awesome representation of the geologic time scale I've seen since Prehistoric Zoobooks, which also used a spiraling landscape. Thanks for the link, Nomad!

click here for big

Link 4: Carl Sagan's Cosmos is now available to view on Hulu. Watch it! Watch it over and over and over again!

Link 5: Coldplay.com has a flashy new discography with all the lyrics, cover art, sound clips, and even videos!
It's not really relevant. I just had to tell someone... Watch the Lovers in Japan video if you need a pick-me-up.

edit: Aha, I just thought of a way to justify link #5. If you flip through the cover art you can see the evolution of Coldplay's style over time. See how the cover art changes over time, from that loose photographic style of Parachutes, to the technical 3D renderings of aRoBttH, to the highly restrained coded word art of X&Y, to a very loose painterly style for VLV. And the songs follow these transitions, too! Parachutes is fresh but timid, aRoBttH is confident and experimental, X&Y is over synthesized and at times tries too hard to be grand, and VLV is free, unworried artistic expression that is beautiful and as easy to listen to as the art is to look at!

So, all right then!

Ultimate Ungulate

2009-03-03T11:19:00.007-06:00

I just found the coolest website ever! UltimateUngulate.com!
In addition to being really well designed (every time you refresh you get a new unglate photo in that main circle,) it also has a nice interactive cladogram, in which you can zoom in on say, the Bovids, and then the famliy Hippotraginae...
And look at some oryx pictures, why not!
There's also plenty of information on ecology, behavior, distribution, etc. Check it out if you're a fan of hoofed mammals!

Monday Poetry - Ode to a Microbe

2009-03-02T20:59:00.002-06:00

Poetry? On a Monday again?

Well, this Craig Gosling poem sort of goes along with the youtube link I posted in the last entry.

Ode to a Microbe

Consider the poor little microbe an animal very odd
infecting its way through life with the blessing of God.
Not having to worry about death and if there’s a heaven or hell,
superbly designed to infect, and make sure people don’t live well
It doesn’t care if you are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or Jew.
It doesn’t care if you prayed, any warm body will do.
It doesn’t give a damn if its victims live or they die.
It does what it was designed to do, enough to make anyone cry.
It laughs at pitiful tears flowing from suffering eyes
cause it doesn’t have a conscience and loves to ruin innocent lives.
Consider the poor little microbe, an animal very odd.
Perfectly designed as a killer by a merciful God.

-Craig Gosling

And something I made a couple years ago for the Bozeman AMI student... raffle... thing...

Linkfest: Long-neck Stegosaur

2009-02-26T10:09:00.009-06:00

Link #1: Long-necked Stegosaur discovered in Portugal!

Miragaia longicollum Photograph courtesy Octavio Mateus/Nova de Lisboa University; illustration courtesy Alam Lam/Nova de Lisboa University (from NationalGeographic.com)

Check out the cladocram... it contains the phylogeny as well as the continents each group is found on and the timescale for each node!

figure from the Proceedings of the Royal Society -- click to embiggen

Link #2: An interactive mass extinction timeline from the Discovery Channel: (Thanks to Harrison for the link!)
Link #3: Atheist now accepts Intelligent Design. Maybe the creationists were right all along! Only a loving God could create something as perfect and useful as a bacterial flagellum:

The Pacific barreleye fish knows what's up

2009-02-25T11:07:00.004-06:00

I think I'm the only blogger who hasn't posted the recent pictures of the Pacific barreleye fish, so here they are! More on the story here.

Sure, God created this on the 5th day. I'll buy that. ; )

Edit: I haven't been checking Google Analytics for this blog for weeks... because it was just too depressing. But I just signed in and,
Man alive!! Look what happened as Darwin's birthday approached! Most visitors ever. Now I really wish I would have done a real post.

I hereby promise to have something really, really good for the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species in November.

More homology for kids...

2009-02-24T22:44:00.005-06:00

This is a passage from Jean Craighead George's children's book Julie, which is the sequel to Julie of the Wolves, my all-time favorite book from my grade school days.

"When Julie and Ellen were alone, Julie came down from the iglek and sat beside her.

Ellen," she said, "our next lesson is about how every beast and plant is dependent on every other beast and plant."

"I understand that," she said. "You have taught me well."

Julie despaired. She had been talking to Ellen since the sun had gone down about cycles and the rise of one animal and the fall of another. She had held up her hands and told her how the Eskimo knew they were related to all the animals because they all had the same bones in one shape or another. She had told her that wolves kept the environment healthy, and that when the environment is healthy, people are healthy.

And still Ellen had told her she would kill a wolf to save the oxen and Kapugen agreed with her.

Monday Poetry - Homology

2009-02-23T14:24:00.005-06:00

Craig Gosling has sent me some more evolution poems! But I forgot about Weekend Poetry yesterday, so here is one a day late:

Homologous Things and Ridiculous Wings

Homologous structures cry out to me
“Ever wonder how we came to be?”
What does a horse, a bird, and a cat
have in common with a boy, frog, and a bat?
All have two limbs in the front and the rear.
All have three bones in those limbs it is clear.
Are these structures related at all?
From same origins seems a good call.
But what about angels, did god make a mistake?
Where did wings come from? I think they’re all fake.
How did they grow, those feathers and bones?
Are they some kind of fairy-tale clones?
I’ll stick to science and homologous things
rather than angels with ridiculous wings.

- Craig Gosling

Homology really is a fantastic way to introduce students to the idea of evolution. Young kids, too! They catch on right away when they see the preserved skeleton of a bat wing and note how hand-like it is. Craig also sent me this coloring sheet he drew for an elementary school teacher, in which the kids are encouraged to color the homologous bones in each animal (humerus, radius, etc) the same color.

Click here to download a full-size .pdf of this coloring sheet.

Darwin Day!

2009-02-12T13:36:00.005-06:00

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin! I had long planned to do something special for VE on this day. But the last few weeks have left me with little time or energy. I feel genuinely guilty about it... like I've forgotten a friend's birthday or something! Don't worry, pal. I'll take you out to Applebee's next week to make up for it. Yes, you can even get the appetizer. Anyway, at least Google is celebrating properly!

Isn't that lovely?

Seed Magazine also has some cool stuff for the day, and click on the Blog for Darwin link on the right to see some blogs that didn't neglect their Darwin Day Duties like this one did.

This here is what it's all about:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

0 for 12

2009-02-04T22:07:00.002-06:00

I've been neglecting Visualizing Evolution, I'm afraid.

But with the new month, I do need to point out that the first of my 2009 predictions has (thankfully) not come true.

"January - Oil prices rise again, causing a sudden spike in gas prices"

See, unlike the 'real' psychics, I point out my misses. ; )

Oh, read this over at Pharyngula if you haven't already. It will make your day.

edit: Looks like February's prediction will be wrong as well:

"February - lawsuits abound as ignorant antenna-TV owners suddenly find their sets to be showing nothing but static."

This is sad...

2009-01-21T19:36:00.002-06:00

Found here, originally published in National Geographic. Click to embiggen, and then sigh sadly while slowly shaking your head.

650 Million Years of Continental Drift

2009-01-19T11:43:00.002-06:00

Neat!

650 Million Years In 1:20 min - Watch more Free Videos

Palaeobet

2009-01-13T10:20:00.005-06:00

Wow... VisuEvo has been getting a lot of hits from people doing web searches for 2009 celebrity predictions. I guess it's time for a disclaimer. I am not psychic! Then again, neither is anyone else. Except for Hank Yarbo, of course:
Wait... guess that's "phycic." Anyway, I have a real post coming up soon, but in the meantime, here's something cool PZ posted on Pharyngula this morning: Palaeobet!

click to embiggen:

Time for a new banner, maybe?

"Psychic" predictions for 2009

2009-01-01T13:48:00.003-06:00

My friend Harrison at Strange Future has made his predictions for 2009, so I guess it's my turn!

~~~ Predictions for 2009: ~~~

January - Oil prices rise again, causing a sudden spike in gas prices.

February - lawsuits abound as ignorant antenna-TV owners suddenly find their sets to be showing nothing but static.

March - scientists come up against a major stumbling block in stem cell research

April - a record-breaking blizzard surprises the northern midwest US, dumping feet of snow and causing power outages in many areas.

May - a celebrity associated with the Harry Potter movies runs up against some legal issues

June - a well-known religious leader is revealed to have been involved in a sex-related scandal.

July - a multi-state thunderstorm system causes travel delays in several airports. Tornadoes rip through small towns and three states are declared disaster areas.

August - American auto-makers tank yet again. The government debates further bail-out packages.

September - unseasonably warm weather causes issues for farmers. Corn prices, and as a result food prices in general, skyrocket.

 October - a relatively well-known, yet extremely old, celebrity dies, causing people around the country to say “That guy was still alive?”

November - Coldplay releases their 5th album, and it is hailed as the ‘best ever!’ by fans. All the Coldplay-haters hang their heads in shame and finally admit just how wrong they’ve been.

December - Jim Davis writes a series of strips in which Jon Arbuckle marries his long-time girlfriend Liz, then finally retires Garfield.

Linkfest: Spider, Orangutan, and a dozen others

2008-12-31T19:29:00.006-06:00

Last entry for the year! Hope everyone enjoys their extra second of 2008! Now some links:

From Science Daily: How the Spider Spun Its Web: Missing Link in Spider Evolution Discovered

Even in this form, spiders creep me out.

From National Geographic News: Whistling Orangutan May Hint at Language Evolution

From Wired Science: 12 Elegant Examples of Evolution

Darwin - Big Idea Big Exhibition

2008-12-30T20:27:00.001-06:00

London's Natural History Museum just opened an exhibition in celebration of Darwin's 200'th birthday in February. Darwin Big Idea Big Exhibition is on display until April 19th, after which I really, really hope it becomes a traveling exhibition. Mainly so I ogle this with my face pressed helplessly against the glass:

*drool*

These photos are from the slide show on the Natural History Museum website, by the way. That first one is of course Darwin's notebook, and the very first cladogram he drew when working out his idea.
And here is a model of the HMS Beagle. I have always wanted a model of the HMS Beagle. Always, always.
These are the mockingbirds Darwin collected on the Galapagos. The birds there inspired Darwin to think about species changing over time.
Is this a first edition of On the Origin of Species? Why yes! Yes it is!

Meanwhile, the National Museum of Australia in Canberra is having a Darwin exhibition of their own until March 29th. And theirs features this Augustus Earle painting!
If you're lucky enough to be close to either of these museums, don't miss out!

Weekend Poetry

2008-12-28T19:57:00.004-06:00

I got an email from Craig Gosling today, and he sent me some more poems! So, Weekend Poetry is back!

Archaeopteryx Nightmare

The Archaeopteryx is fictitious, shall I tell you why?
It doesn’t fit into God's plan; it's just a secular lie.
Fossils found all over the world are not the missing links.
As is said of fishy facts, something in Denmark stinks.

I can't let facts get in the way when I read my bible.
I can't let science confuse me, it's simply secular libel.
How can scales turn into feathers, a beak turn into teeth?
How can legs turn into wings, the concept causes me grief.

As I lay me down to sleep, I hope I don't have dreams
Of flying reptiles with feathers and teeth, animals so extreme.
The Archaeopteryx cannot exist, the bible tells me so.
Fossils are lies and science is wrong, this I truly know.

I'll stick to claims of Iron Age profits with faithful resolution
and ignore all those scientists who do swear by evolution.
Archaeopteryx, you never lived, you're not a missing link;
you don’t fit into God's plan, for those of us who don't think.

- Craig Gosling

Also, I see this has been bumped from the front page yet again... *sigh*
I'll have an actual blog entry sometime this week, once I sort through all the Google Alerts in my inbox I've ignored for the past two weeks. Ciao

AMI Website

2008-12-17T13:18:00.003-06:00

The Association of Medical Illustrators has finally launched their new website, and I am extremely impressed with it (especially considering what we used to have.)

Check it out: www.ami.org

Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish)

2008-12-12T09:10:00.003-06:00

The star of the 2008 Penn Reading Project and everyone's favorite tetrapod, Tiktaalik now has his own music video!

Music by the Indoorfins

Penn Reading Project

And here's a video interview with Tyler Keillor, the artist and fossil preparator who made the Tiktaalik model, which won the 2008 Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize for three-dimensional art.

Cladograms: History, Diversity, and/or Geography

2008-12-11T12:21:00.007-06:00

Cladograms at their most basic level give information on which species or groups of species are most closely related--in other words, which have the most recent common ancestor. Cladograms can also give information on evolutionary history (how long ago the branching events occurred) and diversity (which branches became most 'successful').

Here is one from Nature that does both of these things:
What's more unusual is to have a phylogeny that also includes geographical information. I came across this one yesterday on the blog Living the Scientific Life:
Read the above linked blog for a summary of the article. I'm just here to show you the cladogram! This one combines the traditional phylogeny with history (in this case by color-coding the nodes and including a key) and geography, by ending each branch at the location of the modern species. In this case it seems to have worked out cleanly, with only one case of crossed lines. But, I'd imagine other attempts, perhaps with non island-dwelling species, would be much messier.

What I want to find now is a cladogram that manages to combine all three: evolutionary history, diversity, and geography, in one image. Perhaps in some cases it would even be possible to place the nodes on the geographical location where the common ancestor is thought to have lived!

Evolution of a Tasty Meal

2008-12-09T14:45:00.005-06:00

Someone on SomethingAwful.com, in a thread on wallpapers, shared this awhile back and I forgot to post it! Unfortunately, I don't know where it's from originally. Watermark your digital art, people!

Never mind the fact it shows a dinosaur evolving from a pelycosaur. It's cute!

click for big

Illustrating Turtle Evolution

2008-12-08T10:58:00.008-06:00

New fossils of the earliest-known turtle, Odontochelys semitestacea ("toothed, half-shelled turtle"), have given new, and long searched-for, evidence of how turtle shells evolved. Press release here.

dorsal view

Here you can see the full plastron and the partial shell extensions which grew out to form the partial upper-shell. The take-home messages of this find are:

Odontochelys was likely aquatic
Odontochelys had a plastron (lower shell) but not a full carapace (upper shell)
Odontochelys had teeth! (all modern turtles have toothless beaks)

The challenge to the illustrator is to communicate all of these ideas in one image. Illustrator Marlene Hill Donnelly of the Field Museum in Chicago solved this problem in an efficient way: by drawing two turtles! One from above and one from below.

illustration by Marlene Hill Donnelly - click for big!

What a beautiful and bizarre looking creature! For more on turtle evolution, check out the UCMP Berkeley's page on anapsids here.

extra photo because turtles are awesome

Lego-man March of Progress T-shirt

2008-12-06T21:01:00.005-06:00

Here's yet another take on the March of Progress illustration, this time from a really cool design and T-shirt place called Glennz.com. Clever stuff! I might have to own that rocking horse shirt...

edit: and while I'm posting evolution T-shirts, here's another awesome one from BustedTees:

My Royal Ontario Museum visit

2008-12-05T22:01:00.019-06:00

I'm back! Just as I predicted, there weren't many VE posts in November. Over the week of Thanksgiving, I visited Toronto, Ontario, where I went to graduate school and lived for two years. I spent an entire day at the ROM (the Royal Ontario Museum) taking photos. Tons of photos. Maybe some will even be useful as references for scientific illustrations in the future. Here are a few of them now:

It was my first time seeing the inside of the Crystal, and the reopened Dinosaur Hall. I think I noticed the Oviraptor first:
The coolest dinosaur. The new exhibit had a couple of features I really liked. For one, the displays included these nice illustrated cards which showed in color which parts of the fossil were real and which were casts.
... so that when you look at the actual fossil, you know what's actually original! Which is something fossil nuts appreciate.
In addition to lots of impressive dinosaur mounts, which I won't show all of here, the dinosaur hall also had some more humble displays prominently featured, such as this one comparing living and fossil pine cones:
Sometimes the surprising thing about evolution is how organisms don't change over time! Similar to this was a display of fossil insects, with live--er--recently killed... extant? insect specimens for comparison:
Nice cricket!
Tucked away in a side room, I almost missed Plateosaurus, a critter I'm all-too familiar with due to its similarity to Massospondylus.
He's right by the bathroom. Seems pretty disrepsectful for the most famous of prosauropods... And this Pachycephalosaurus was just too : D for words:
: D

There was a mom there with a couple of young kids, a boy and a girl. We were the only ones in the dino hall, and I was just terribly impressed with them. They were going through very slowly, not just looking and saying "oh cool!" but reading the descriptions, watching the videos, and she would ask them questions, like "so is a chicken a dinosaur?" to which they'd give an enthusiastic "yeah!"

I bumped into the kids at the Bambiraptor, where I informed them that Bambiraptor was like a tiny, feathered Velociraptor and probably the cutest thing that has ever lived on the planet.
The Bambiraptor display also included a few other feathered dinosaurs such as Caudipteryx and several panels about the bird-dinosaur relation, including this illustration showing skeletal morphology comparison. Or, for the kids, look at how the dinosaur and the bird have lots of bones the same!
Tucked away in the corner of the 2nd floor of what used to be the building's main entrance, they have a neglected collection of Burgess Shale fossils. It's such a dissapointment that these don't have a better location. They're not even properly lit back there in the dark. And they should be on display someplace obvious... too many people will miss them! And they have an Anomalocaris!
This is one of my favorite critters of all time. And I had to use the flash on my camera to even get a photo.
Move the Burgess Shale display, ROM! Please put it somewhere better or at least put some lights over it!

I arrived at the Rom at about noon on Tuesday, photographed everything in the dino and mammal halls, then had some lunch, wandered the bird room and bat cave, went upstairs to the archaeology/history sections, and finally saw the special exhibit on diamonds, where no photos were allowed and arm guards were everywhere. I got about 6 inches from the Incomparable Diamond which was... well... you know what? It's a rock. I just couldn't get excited about it.

I guess it is kind of pretty, though.
It was pretty dark by the time I left...
After buying this most excellent book at the gift shop, I left the ROM and met a couple of Asian women for Korean food and then ice cream. Or Yogurt...? I think it was some sort of ice-yogurt hybrid. It was delicious.
It was a good day.

YYZ

2008-11-21T13:24:00.004-06:00

Well, as of Saturday, I am an American tourist in Canada for the entire week! I'm not sure how my internet connection will be while I'm there, so this blog may sit neglected until December, but I do plan to visit the Royal Ontario Museum at least once, to see what kinds of new displays they have that visualize evolution (surprise, surprise).

I'm also looking forward to finally seeing what's inside of that weird crystal they built over the course of the two years I actually lived there:
I guess I have a love-hate relationship with it from the outside. I reserve judgment until I see the interior. The dinosaur exhibition should be awesome, though.

In addition to touristy stuff like museums and the CN tower and all that, I also plan to use this time away from my regular life and responsibilities to type my NaNoWriMo book. As of today, I'm exactly on schedule. I mean, to-the-word (33,333 as of Friday). I want to clear 50,000 by Thursday night so I can board my plane the next morning feeling good about having a relaxing weekend. My stats graph may not reflect that depending on internet availability though:

Therapsid Evolution

2008-11-12T09:33:00.005-06:00

I spotted this fantastic illustration of therapsid evolution by Carl Buell ("Olduvai George") over at Paleoblog. It's from the Donald R. Prothero book Evolution: What the Fossils say and Why it Matters, which has been in my Amazon 'wish list' for months. With illustrations like this, I pretty much have to click that "check out" button, now.

click for big!

It's similar to other line-of-descent drawings we've already looked at, but he's obviously done a few things here to make his version very dynamic. It reads from bottom-to-top instead of the standard left-to-right, and the pose changes from left to right-facing. Looking at this piece you can't help but see it as an animation, with the animal morphing as it roars and turns its head. Perhaps you even hear the sound of its vocalization change as it becomes more mammalian. How does it sound?

I don't even think he needed that motion blur to get the effect. In fact, if I wasn't as busy as I am, I'd take this thing into Photoshop and erase out the motion blur to prove it!

The Simpsons visualize evolution

2008-11-10T15:26:00.004-06:00

I'm a bit busy with NaNoWriMo: and I'm leaving for Kansas City to see COLDPLAY on Thursday, so there won't be an update here for awhile. So here's that great and surprisingly accurate Simpsons evolution intro. I don't think I've posted this yet... Enjoy!

"M&Ms prove Darwin was right"

2008-11-03T18:26:00.002-06:00

Mmmmm!
This is from Roger Ebert's blog--something someone sent to him. It's amazing:

"I received this message on the blog, but it obviously fits no known topic. The author is something of a mystery: "R. Crutch," no city, no e-mail. But I felt it necessary to share with you. RE
From R. Crutch:

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them breaks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one."

One fun and engaging way to teach the foundations of natural selection to kids is to lay out large pieces of colored construction paper, representing different 'environments'-- red, green, blue, yellow, and brown--then spread out some M&M's, dim the lights, and let the kids simulate predation and go wild eating for a few minutes.

Then flip on the lights and have them count how many of each color are left in each environment. Bam! Natural selection!

Spore as a visualization of evolution... almost.

2008-11-02T14:03:00.004-06:00

I was going to do an entry on the dumbification of Spore, but PZ Myers has already covered it better than I ever could,

"What I was looking for in Spore was for someone to take a look with a gamer's eyes at the process of science and extract from it the puzzle-solving essence and make it approachable and entertaining; instead, they seem to have given up on the science and instead created animated plush dolls for amusement's sake."

so head over to Pharyngula and become as depressed as I am about what Spore could have been.

Also, the blog entries this month are going to be few and far between, as I've become caught up in the excitement of NaNoWriMo, which is bound to take up what little writing energy I have left at the end of the work day. Not sure if I'll make the 50,000 words by November 30th, but... so far, so good:
I actually have 3460, but for some reason the widget won't update.
(edit: Hey, look at that! The widget updated! Neat!)

Yes, the book has strong themes about evolution! Yes, I might even finish it in a month, but it won't be easy. In fact, the first person who replies to this post with some short words of encouragement for me gets a character in the book named after them--and you can even decide if he or she gets killed off or not!

Illustrating sauropod hands

2008-10-30T15:36:00.005-05:00

From his archives, there's yet another useful post for paleoartists from Tetrapod Zoology:

The hands of sauropods: horseshoes, spiky columns, stumps and banana shapes

It's a great reference and synopsis, and he explains the reasons for the anatomy of the sauropod wrist in context of its evolution from bipedal ancestors (the prosauropods, of which I am painfully familiar).

(from Milàn, J., Christiansen, P. & Mateus, O. 2005. A three-dimensionally preserved sauropod manus impression from the Upper Jurassic of Portugal: implications for sauropod manus shape and locomotor mechanics. Kaupia 14, 47-52.)

I wonder how the wrist structure of the ceratopsians and stegosaurs differ from that of sauropods, given that they also evolved their quadrupedalism separately.

And to the author Darren Naish...

"I also want to note that in no way is it the 'fault' of the artists concerned, given that (1) they've mostly based what they've done on the published work of those who have gone before them, and (2) while many of them have a history of working with palaeontologists, none of the experts they've been advised by before have bothered to tell them what they've been getting wrong."

...I must say thank you! This is so true about science art in any topic, but you could also add that (3) publishers often care more about having a quick deadline than accuracy which forces artists to trust the accuracy of whatever source material and information is given to us.

Now I'm hoping I'll get to do some sauropod work eventually so I can use this good information. The prosauropods I drew for my masters project (See Anatomy: Pages 4 & 5) were bipedal and didn't walk on their hands as adults.

Linkfest: Sexy Plumage

2008-10-23T13:33:00.008-05:00

First, "ask and ye shall receive"! Thanks to everyone who offered and/or sent me a pdf of the nature article in my last post. The pictures look much clearer since I was able to grab them directly from the source! And I promise I'm actually going to read the entire article once I have the time!

Now a couple of links.

Science Crimes: How the Democrats Tried to Destroy Dinosaur Art - you can't make this stuff up. Politicians certainly weren't subtle back in the day.

"Work on the paleozoic museum caught the attention of William 'Boss' Tweed, the notorious figurehead of the city's corrupt Democratic political machine, who denounced the project (there was no apparent graft that could be had from an institution built around collecting fossils). Hawkins, a Londoner raised to believe in the virtue of making public declarations at Hyde Park Corner, held a demonstration in support of the museum during which he openly denounced Tweed. That evening, Tweed's henchmen entered Hawkins's studio and destroyed the dinosaur sculptures."

Early Dinosaur's Feathers Were for Show, Not Flight - A good example for demonstrating that evolution is not goal-oriented. The Jurassic Epidexipteryx couldn't fly, but sported fancy feathers which, like those of a modern peacock, could be used to entice the ladies.

"How YOU doin'?"

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death - Slightly off-topic maybe, but I found this Scientific American article too mind-blowing to not share.

"...the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?"

Er... and uh, finally, I just noticed that my lovely Coldplay evolution photo has been bumped from the front page, so here it is again, color-balanced to match my blog layout! (Oh god, someone help me!!)

Ubiquity of Branching Structures

2008-10-17T10:49:00.012-05:00

These are from an old Nature article The Phenogenetic Logic of Life, Figure 3: Ubiquity of branching structures in living organisms. (Nature Reviews Genetics 6, 36-45 (January 2005))

I can't talk about the actual article because I'm no longer a student with access to the online periodicals, and don't really want to pay the $35 to download the pdf. I'm also going to now resist the very strong temptation to digress into a rant about the cost of online journals and get on to the images. At least I have the captions!

"Multiple applications of branching logic show the logical symmetry of evolution among organisms and development within them."

In other words... visual trees can be used to demonstrate the evolution of organisms, the diversification of cells within an organism, and the resulting anatomical structures of development.

First, two on evolution and speciation:

a. "Charles Darwin's attempt to reconstruct Ernst von Baer's idea that embryos of contemporary similar species, such as vertebrates, have diverged from a common early-embryonic form."

b. "Darwin's sketch of his idea of divergence of species from a common ancestor."

See the original here. I definitely prefer to look at the aged inky version in Darwin's own pen strokes.

The next two are not about evolution, but rather the divergence of cells within a single organism. The patterns that emerge as cell types diversify are similar to those of species diversification:

c. "Divergence of the sequence of a single gene, or members of a gene family, from a common ancestor (the example of photoreceptors and olfactory receptors is shown)."
And similarly:

d. " The divergence of tissues from a single cell within an organism."

Now let's get organismal (is that a word?) and look at branching patterns found in anatomy:
e. "Schematic representation of the fractal-like mammalian bronchial (lung) tree."

And one from the world of botany:

f. "The source of the metaphor — real branches."

$35 ... seriously.

Alligator Genetics and the Development of Bird "Thumbs"

2008-10-06T09:56:00.016-05:00

Here is a new article from open-access journal PLoS One: "The Evolution of HoxD-11 Expression in the Bird Wing: Insights from Alligator mississippiensis," (link) which uses color illustrations to explain the genetics and development of the finger digits in birds and alligators. Read the summary on Palaeoblog for a good explanation on the study. Basically, it's a study on Hox genes and how although developmentally birds seem to have digits 2, 3, and 4 from the ancestral 5, this is a result of a "hometic frameshift," causing HoxD-11 expression to move, so ancestrally, their digits are 1, 2, and 3, which is consistent with the fossil evidence such as Archaeopteryx as well as genetic evidence seen in their closest living relatives, the crocodilians.

It's satisfying when evidence adds up in such a neat way.

Anyway, on to the drawings!

Figure 1: Three levels to the avian digit homology problem: embryology, gene expression, and morphology
First of all, the illustrations in this article are just fantastic. Full of information, but designed in a clear way that is in no way overwhelming. There is a didactic use of color, which allows the viewer to follow each of the 5 digits across both development and evolution. The next example includes a more complex clade as well as specific fossil and extant examples.

Figure 2: The evolution of digit morphology
This drawing makes it so easy to compare across the cladogram. You can watch as the digits disappear one by one. I have seen similar illustrations used to show the gradual loss of toes in the evolution of the horse. Janel? You out there? This illustration on Wikipedia is awful! I know there are better ones out there.

And here are the more technical illustrations...

Figure 3: Identification of the alligator HoxD-11 exon 1 sequence.
Figure 4:The expression of HoxD-11 in alligator and chicken limbs.
I have to admit I often I roll my eyes at the use of photos in lieu of illustrations, but in this case they work amazingly well in tandem. Development is shown in similar stages in alligators and birds, both limbs, and you can trace the development to see where they diverge, and where and which fingers are lost in the bird.

How long could YOU survive?

2008-09-21T11:34:00.004-05:00

54 seconds
===EDIT===

For more information about Velociraptors and Velociraptor safety, please visit the American Society for Velociraptor Attack Prevention at www.velociraptors.info. Know the enemy! Stay safe, people!

Evolution Tattoos

2008-09-17T11:33:00.008-05:00

This was linked on Skepchick this morning: The Science Tattoo Emporium. Check out the 18 pages of amazing science-themed body art. Here are some of the evolution ones.

"Origin of an Epidemic" illustrates the owner's graduate research on the evolutionary history of the HIV virus. This is definitely my favorite of the bunch.

Darwin's finches, based on Darwin's first published drawings.

"Five Kingdoms" is a cladogram depicting the five major groupings of living organisms: Monera, Protista, Plantae, Fungi, and Animalia. The sea dragon is especially beautiful.

The very first phylogenetic tree, from Darwin's notebook.

And another Tree of Life, based on the drawing by Ernst Haeckel.

Evolution Time!

2008-09-09T12:01:00.002-05:00

Found on Pharyngula (originally from MyConfinedSpace).
I would so buy this watch. Although, for it to be accurate, if our evolution from single cell to human was to be compressed to 12 hours, we'd still be fish at 11:00!

Dromaeosaur tails...

2008-09-04T14:06:00.004-05:00

Were the tails of dromaeosaur dinosaurs (raptors) completely stiff or did they exhibit some amount of an S-curve? This is the question posed in a post last week on the blog Tetrapod Zoology (see sidebar), "What the hell is going on with dromaeosaur tails?" This new evidence has major implications for paleoartists!

Tsaagan mangas

It looks strange to me, but just because you're used to seeing something one way doesn't mean it's correct!

Why don't art and science mix? (this time, anyway)

2008-09-03T10:26:00.004-05:00

Hey cool, someone agrees with me! Jonathan Jones of the Guardian posted this article, "Why don't art and science mix?" yesterday about the Darwin's Canopy art competition I blogged about last June. His thoughts on the various entries were the same as mine, if not expressed much more strongly:

"The Darwin's Canopy commission was a chance for artists to engage with science. What a shame they turned their backs on this challenge... This commission was a great chance for artists to engage with the most important idea of the last two centuries, to find ways of illustrating - and championing - the theory of evolution at a time when irrational religious forces menace Darwin's common sense revolution. What a chance for art to show it can engage with science, and also wade into a fierce debate! The artists have run a mile from any such challenge. Few address evolution at all."

So very true! I also agreed that of all the entries, the NHM thankfully picked one of the non-abstract proposals. Jones says:

"The proposal chosen, by Kovats, is a respectful homage to Darwin's own drawing of the tree of evolution. But the exhibition is a dismal insight into the total lack of interest in science displayed by most contemporary British artists."

Of course, going back to the title of his article, I would have to say that art and science do mix, quite easily! But in this case, yes, most of the artists dropped the ball. They should have commissioned some scientific illustrators instead of 'fine artists,' perhaps.

and my Coldplay obsession reaches epic levels...

2008-08-29T23:10:00.004-05:00

Weekend Art: a Painting Bear..?

2008-08-24T13:27:00.004-05:00

As time goes on and I get more distance from my undergraduate art training, I find myself losing more and more respect for 'modern art.'

Now, a bear has won 2nd place in an art contest in Rapid City, SD. The judges didn't know the artist was a bear:

A piece of artwork at a South Dakota fair is now sporting a second place ribbon after it was judged for its color, composition and uninhibited expression.
However, it wasn't submitted by a descendant of Van Gogh, it was painted by a bear.
The bear is named Kobe.
The judges had no idea who the painting was done by as they were voting - they just saw it as a work of art.
An artist and volunteer at Bear Country USA submitted the painting.

And here it is!
All I can do is feel sorry for artist who received 3rd place.

Venn Diagrams as Cladograms

2008-08-19T09:56:00.009-05:00

For whatever reason, this morning I was remembering back to 10th grade Biology class, and the frustration I felt when trying to correct a classmate who said "well, bees aren't animals, right? They're insects!" I tried in vain to explain how different groups fit within the group called "animals," but I believe the moment I gave up was when she said that "well, not all mammals are animals, because humans are mammals but we're not animals." *sigh*

Perhaps I should have whipped out some paper and sketched an evolutionary tree. But trees are confusing to people who are new to the idea of cladistics. However, there is another option, and that is the Venn Diagram.

Now, Venn Diagrams are usually reserved for data sets that intersect. With cladistics there are no intersections (unless you get into hybridization, which I'm not going to do), but rather, data sets embedded within other data sets. They're also not the most efficient way to show clades, especially if you want to include a lot of groupings, but they can be excellent in introducing the idea of grouping.

Case in point, here's one by Ray Troll explaining why we are fish:
This view is also rather humbling, to see our group "Hominids" so tiny and so deeply embedded within so many stacking groups. Primates to mammals to amniotes to tetrapods to lobe finned fish to bony fish to vertebrates to chordates. We are all those things because we are grouped within them.

So how does a Venn clade compare to a normal branching one? Here's an example found here, at the website for the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid:
And here another example from an entry on Clades from the blog Evolving Thoughts comparing a branching clade to a Venn diagram.

These two illustrations also demonstrate a couple of important ideas in cladistics. The first is the idea of a paraphyletic group, represented here by both "Invertebrata" and "Reptilia." The other is a polyphyletic group, represented by "Homothermia" and "Crossopterygii."

And since 1. I'm already on the topic of Venn diagrams, and 2. I don't make fun of intelligent design nearly enough on this blog, and 3. I've been on a roll lately making trouble with people, I leave you with this!:

Linkfest: All Hail The Great Asteroid!

2008-08-18T09:37:00.007-05:00

Yes, it's been quiet around here for awhile. But the week of demotivation is finally over. So, to kick-start the new week, here are some links I've been saving up!

Cartophilia: A neat visual blog about maps.

Art in the Science of Medicine: An article on teaching visual literacy. "The research, headed by Dr Joel Katz from the HMS Medicine Education Office, revealed that undergraduate medical students taking a class in fine art had a 38% improvement in their ability to make accurate clinical observations."

Big-Brained Animals Evolve Faster: From Science Daily

Wolf is to Thylacine as Crayfish is to What? The answer is Palæmon, a type of freshwater prawns. Convergent evolution rocks.

Artist gives 'life' to remains of prehistoric animals: Keny Marshall has a really cool job putting together dinosaur skeletons for exhibits.

Illustrating the Unknown: An art exhibit by Adrian Hatfield. I wish I had this man's color sense.

“What I really have tried to focus on was the visual language science uses to convey information ... And also how creative decisions and aesthetics fill in so many of the gaps that we don’t know … But for example, if a scientific illustrator is doing an illustration of a dinosaur, he has a very limited amount of knowledge. So everything else—their color, whether they had head feathers are if they didn’t have feathers—a lot of the aspects of it are just made up by the artist.” - Adrian Hatfield

And finally, from ShortMinds Webcomic:

Weekend Poetry: Coelacanth

2008-08-09T16:47:00.002-05:00

Coelacanth

So, what's new coelacanth?
What have you done that we can't?
Four hundred million years ago you swam
before dinosaurs walked on land.

You had limbs that would be legs
before reptiles hatched from eggs.
If you had just one free wish
would you be a lobed-fin fish?

Not long ago you were unknown
except from fossils cast in stone.
We thought that you were long extinct,
your portrait drawn in books with ink.

And then on that fateful day
you were caught and put on display
for all the world to see and wonder,
to be dissected and pulled asunder.

There's much that's new since you were born.
Now there're creatures in human form.
I don't know how long they'll last,
but you'll be here when they've passed.

- Craig Gosling

Visual DNA

2008-08-06T13:47:00.002-05:00

V isual DNA !
There's more where that came from. I have nothing to add--the site's not in English, but the images sure are neat looking.

ACGT!

MST3K

2008-08-05T16:46:00.002-05:00

Reading Darwin can be dangerous...

Thanks for the link, Ku'mah!

XVIVO lawsuit update

2008-08-04T13:58:00.003-05:00

Finally, an update on the XVIVO plagiarism case against the makers of the 'documentary' Expelled from back in April. It seems they've reached an agreement in which "Premise Media documentary does not infringe on any of XVIVO's intellectual property rights."

I'm not sure why XVIVO decided to not pursue it further. From what I saw it seemed they had a rock-solid case of plagiarism on their hands. However, I have not seen the "Expelled" video in its entirety, and I also have no legal knowledge beyond what I've learned from Judge Judy, so instead of getting all nasty about it, I'm going to hold my opinion for now.

Just do me a favor and read this next part while I sarcastically play this sad violin:

'John Sullivan, Executive Producer of EXPELLED, said, "EXPELLED is an important movie with an important message. Even before the movie was released, various parties were trying to silence us. They will continue to be unsuccessful. This walk away agreement is another indication that we have done nothing wrong. Our message will carry on both in theaters throughout the summer and with our DVD roll out this October."'

Ugh, these people lie and steal and still have such a persecution complex. It's become so ridiculous that it's not even amusing anymore. It just makes me sick.

You can see the original XVIVO animation here, on their animation page.

Related, here's another very nice animation by Hybrid Medical Animation. Beautiful stuff, but a bit too much of the wave/ripple filter. Made me a bit seasick. Though I still may be reeling from that article on the lawsuit.

Weekend Art: Tuft of Grass

2008-08-02T20:18:00.003-05:00

My photography skills could use some improvement, but I saw this little tuft of grass growing out on my back patio this morning and was instantly reminded of one of my favorite George Carlin quotes.

click for big

Weekend Poetry: Devonian Blues

2008-08-02T08:58:00.004-05:00

This week's evolution poem is actually a song called "Devonian Blues," written and performed by paleoartist Ray Troll. Click here to listen!

Devonian Blues

Thinking 'bout my momma and I'm thinking 'bout you
Got those Sarcopterygian Devonian Blues, yeah

My momma told me something few people know
We were all a bunch of fishes a long time ago

So wave your fins in the air it's plain to see
You are a wayward fish, and it will set you free

Out of the ooze and we were born to cruise
For burgers in cars with nothin' to lose, yeah

I can't really say if it was part of a plan
But it took millions of years to go from fish to man

Did we lose our way when we left that pool?
Well, sometimes I think so when we act like fools
(That's why I'm gonna tell you )

Yeah your momma oh she was a lobefinned fish
Oh my momma, she was a lobefinned fish

Every single girl and every little boy
Was born from the clan of the wayward Dipnoi

Don't let the preacher man spoil all the fun
But it took a lot more than six days to get this job done

Amphibians and reptiles, birds, mammals and man
All belong to the fish tribe, doncha' understand?

Yeah your momma, oh she was a lobefinned fish
Oh my momma, oh she was a lobefinned fish

It's all there, locked in the stone
The truth is told in fossilized bone, yeah

Fish had fingers, and fish had arms
Crawling onto land like a charm

Changing the world, the rocks revealing
On and on and on in the chain of being

Oh your momma, oh she was a lobefinned fish
Oh my momma, oh she was a lobefinned fish
(that's right)

Changing the world, the rocks revealing
On and on in the chain of being

- Ray Troll

Paleontology in 3D

2008-07-29T13:48:00.001-05:00

This is kind of an old story from the BBC (link), on a new method of visualizing organisms fossilized in amber. In the past, only insects in transparent amber could be studied, but these fossils exist in pieces of opaque amber from 100 million years ago.

Using highly accurate X-ray techniques, scientists can now see inside pieces of amber which once held their secrets in the dark:
What's even better is, once the data are collected (in extraordinary detail), 3-D printers can then be used to create larger-than-life models for study:

"In some ways it is better than having the real animal...If you think about it, the real wasp is 4mm and to see it you would need a microscope; and if it's in opaque amber you need a synchrotron. Once it's done as a plastic print, you can see what you want." - Dr Paul Tafforeau

A couple of months ago I attended a talk at the local chapter of the GNSI, where the presenter was demonstrating various methods of casting and molding. She showed, and I wish I had a picture of it, a large 3D printing made of an Emerald Ash Borer beetle, which is a parasite of some concern in this region. From this very detailed plastic model (which I think was about a foot and a half long), they had made multiple plaster copies which were painted and made into educational displays.

3D printing also has other useful applications in paleontology. As demonstrated by the University of Texas High-ResolutionX-ray CT Facility (link), printouts can not only be made of the actual bones:
But also endocasts, that show the form of the interior of the bone. In the case of the cranium this gives an impression of the shape of the brain.
The 3D Museum, a site maintained by the Vertebrate Paleobiology Lab of the University of California, Davis, contains interactive models of fossils that the viewer can rotate and zoom in on.

Their fossil models were created using a high-speed, high-accuracy laser scanner. Their library may be small, but I have hopes that this sort of interactive 3D reference will become more common. (Also see the Virtual Reality Brain Project, an especially useful reference for medical artists stuck with yet another neurology assignment).

The implications of 3D viewing and printing for scientific illustrators are very intriguing. I look forward to the day when 3D printing is common and affordable to the point where I can print out my own reference models to view and light from whatever angle. I think there is value in the tactile qualities of an object; to be able to hold it in your hands and turn it and get a sense of it in a way you never could with an on-screen interactive model. Although I do somewhat fear the day when the 3D printers start printing copies of themselves, evolving, and eventually trying to take over the world.

Weekend Art: Mattis Park

2008-07-27T17:02:00.003-05:00

This is a bit off-topic, but I finally bought myself an easel yesterday, so I took it to Mattis Park a couple hours ago and did a quick landscape:
I can barely remember the last time I used actual paint! It was nice to get away from the Wacom tablet and Photoshop for a change.

Weekend Poetry: "Missing Link"

2008-07-26T15:12:00.002-05:00

I'm going to start something new here. Every weekend I'll post a poem about evolution. Most of them will probably come from Darwin is My Hero: Poems about Science and Superstition by Craig Gosling (who I mentioned in a previous entry), but I'll try to dig up others. Or if you readers know of any, send them my way!

So here we go!

Missing Link

When looking for the missing link,
it's never where we usually think.
I'm told it looks something like me
and something like a chimpanzee.

I've heard it often has been found
by paleontologists, in the ground.
But, when its missing place is filled,
those who found it still are grilled
about the links before and after
that still are missing. What disaster!

Tracing far back our family tree
a primate lived who gave rise to me.
She lived so many years ago,
her true birthday we'll never know.

But, I'm so glad that she stayed alive,
to begat enough that did survive,
so I could arrive upon the scene,
a hundred percent human-being.

- Craig Gosling

Dinosaur Supertree

2008-07-23T13:05:00.005-05:00

I think this is my first time posting twice in one day, but I simply couldn't wait until tomorrow to share the dinosaur evolutionary tree that was just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (The "B" is for "Biological Sciences").

click for really, really big

In the New Scientist article, paleontologist Graeme Lloyd of the University of Bristol explains how they used existing dinosaur cladograms from the literature to compile 440 of the 600 known species into a single diagram, in order to look for larger patterns of diversification.

What they concluded was that dinosaur diversity did not expand as actively as previously thought and that the main bursts of diversification happened in the first fifty million years of dinosaur evolution. Unfortunately, the diagram itself doesn't include an intersecting timeline to show when each of the diversification events occurred--I suppose either to save space or perhaps due to conflicting or missing information within the clades that were gathered to build this one.

The height of each major branch is dependent not on the relative time in which it branched off, but rather the number of branching events within the branch itself. (Did I say "branch" enough there? *sigh*) So although it's an awesome tree, and probably totally useful as a reference, I'm not sure how it shows the patterns of diversification they report to see. But perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps I'm simply still mesmerized by the pretty colors. So pretty...

edit: I swapped the .jpg-artifact-riddled image from the news report with a cleaner one I made from the original pdf file. If you want the full version (to print out or whatever), I've uploaded the pdf here. Which I originally found here, on Physorg.com's article.

Linkfest

2008-07-23T10:19:00.004-05:00

Good news for those of you who had trouble viewing Julian's animation on Microevolution--it is now being hosted on the U of T Biomedical Communications' site. He updated the original post with the new link, but since not everyone's going to be hanging out in my archives, I figured I'd let you all know with a new post. Unless you are hanging out in my archives... why would you do that?

Also, if you like beetles, and who the hell doesn't, here is an amazing collection of beetle photographs by Poul Beckmann called Living Jewels. I wish I knew how he got them all so perfect; they don't even have pins through them! (Found the site through Bug Girl's Blog a while back).

And finally, since three is a nice round number, here's an older article from NewScientist on Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals. They are: culture, mind reading (deception), tool use, morality, emotions, and personality.

Amazing Dinosaur Puppetry

2008-07-22T13:09:00.000-05:00

My new dream job is working in the studio for "Walking With Dinosaurs Live:"

'Massospondylus' by Andrew Swift

2008-07-21T16:20:00.004-05:00

Last year as part of my graduate program I went to the student exchange at the Johns Hopkins program in Baltimore. There I presented my master's project on the ontogeny and locomotion of the dinosaur Massospondylus (look for it in the sidebar). Later, at another talk, I noticed Andrew Swift (from the Medical College of Georgia's Dept. of Medical Illustration) doing a lovely sketch of my second favorite dino:
Either I forgot to email him about it, or he sent it and it got lost in my junk box, because I never got it and then I kind of forgot all about it. But when I saw him at AMI last week I remembered and asked him to send it to me again, not realizing he had completed a full color version:Click for big. Isn't that awesome? My favorite part about Andrew Swift's work is the amazing textures he's able to pull out of Photoshop. So thanks, Andrew... Also, how in the heck did you get that amazing skin texture? Is that a filter? I must know.

AMI Meeting: Days 3 and 4

2008-07-20T15:39:00.009-05:00

Well, so much for nightly reports. Friday night was alumni night, so that was shot, and then after getting home last night I was way too tired to update. So I'm going to very briefly summarize the last two days of the convention.

On Friday I took the exam to become a CMI (Certified Medical Illustrator). The exam was in three parts: anatomy (labeling and multiple choice), business questions, and a drawing section. Once I get my results, assuming I passed, I'll submit a portfolio in order to get those three letters after my name!

I finished the exam after four hours (five were allotted) and had time to go to the silent auction.
There I picked up an illustrated book of poems called Darwin is my Hero by Craig Gosling, who is my new hero. I met the man, he signed my book, and we had a nice (albeit short) chat about medical illustrators, atheism, and the Center for Inquiry. A thought occurred to me and I asked if he knew who was portraying Darwin on the following morning and he cryptically said he shouldn't say.

Friday night was also alumni night, and I joined the University of Toronto staff, alumni, and current students at a downtown bar. It's interesting how the dynamics change when you're no longer a students. My old profs are way cooler than I remembered.

I've missed tall buildings...

Day 4: Saturday

I missed the first talk on Saturday, and instead checked out of the hotel and dragged all of my stuff down to the parking garage, ate a couple donuts (with the stress of the exam gone my appetite suddenly seemed to quadruple), and waited for the 9:45 talk, "A Conversation with Charles Darwin." And it was indeed Craig Gosling, in full-character!
He seemed a bit confused a bit by the laser pointer. 'Darwin' talked about his voyage on the Beagle and the two illustrators he had known then, Augustus Earle and Conrad Martins. Earle was an American and a humanist, concerned over the plight of those under British colonial rule. His view of the world had a huge influence on Darwin. Darwin also emphasized the importance of thinking scientifically and skeptically, especially in our field of science illustration. He said that an illustrator must always search for truth, even if they don't like what they find, and be accurate in their representations, otherwise all they are left with is what he called "graphic fiction" or "illustrative myth."
Elizabeth and John Gould were other artists Darwin considered especially important, for the bird illustrations they produced of Darwin's ornithological collections from his travels.

After that was the Futures Forum, where each year a panel discusses the future of the field of medical illustration. Hot points right now include down-pricing of stock art and selling over the internet, as well as the Orphan Works act and the whole mess with changes to copyright policy. Then we had another fantastic lunch at the Bistro. All of the food the entire week was just fantastic. I felt terribly spoiled.

Next, the Vesalius Trust winners gave their presentations. They made the wise choice of making it a plenary this year instead of a concurrent talk, so that everyone could attend. My classmate Diana Kryski presented her master's research project. Then two of my former professors had a talk on designing information for healthcare, and I went to a very informative and rather entertaining one on anatomical mistakes in anatomy atlases. Not many audiences would erupt into laughter when an incorrect illustration of the human heart appears on the projected screen. I love the AMI.

I decided to skip the BBQ and the talks on Sunday and head home before it got dark. It was only a two hour drive but it absolutely exhausted me. Or maybe it was the four days of so much activity and very little sleep.

This has gotten a bit long, but I have a lot more to say about Gosling's book and presentation, but those I'll save for another post.

AMI Meeting: Day 2

2008-07-17T20:43:00.007-05:00

This was the view outside my window after I finished blogging last night. What a moon!
And here is the view from this morning. I love cityscapes!

Day two was long, and a lot happened. I'll have to go into more detail tomorrow about the presentations, including the HEART-THEMED MOTORCYCLE!
(Sorry it's blurry.) This was designed by Keith Kasnot (seen above) and Craig Foster and built by Paul Yaffe for the Arizona Heart Institute's Founder Dr. Edward B. Dietrich. It has some amazing details. Better photos, and lots of them, on Yaffe's website. Check out the tiny veins painted into the details, and look for the stent! More on that and the other presentations later...

For now, I just need to extend congratulations to Yona Gellert, who won a couple awards for her Paleo flash project "Brains, Bones & Behavior," and to Julian Kirk-Elleker who won for "Antibody Affinity Maturation." Both these projects (in addiction to their new media awards) were also awarded with the brand new category of "New Media Best in Show." Congrats guys! A few of the other 2nd years also won awards for their 2-D pieces, but I regretfully didn't take good enough notes. I will try to get a complete list of the U of T winners up here eventually to make up for that.

Another full day tomorrow. Up bright and early for a talk on molecular illustration. Charles Darwin speaks Saturday at 9:45 a.m. I am so looking forward to seeing what that will be like.

AMI Meeting: Day 1

2008-07-16T20:22:00.006-05:00

Well I'm here: Indianapolis.
What a good looking town! Streets are a bit narrow, though. Got a bit lost, and also forgot about the time change until the last minute (Thanks, Janet), so I missed registration by 8 minutes. Luckily they didn't check name-tags for access to the buffet food, and I munched on some goodies while checking out the salon entries:
I haven't had the chance to see them all, but I intend to go through them specifically for pieces demonstrating evolutionary ideas (of course). I did find two animations focusing on paleo and evolution, though. The media room has entries in the interactive categories which include a Flash dinosaur diorama by fellow U of T student Yona Gellert, as well as Julian's animation on Microevolution. The awards banquet for the salon is tomorrow night.

Then I met up with my friend Crista, who graduated from the Toronto program in '06:
Getting up bright and early to do registration and go to a talk on diagnostic scanner datasets. There's a short talk on Saturday called "A Conversation with Charles Darwin" which may have relevance to this blog!

Books!

2008-07-15T20:13:00.005-05:00

They came!
I've checked out Paleoimagery many times before, and now I own my own copy. Very thorough book on the topic, but the reproductions are low-quality and in black and white only. But look! A History of Paleontology Illustration has colored panels in the center!Drool-worthy, isn't it? I will share more about these books in the future, but the rest of this week I will be in Indianapolis, IN for the Association of Medical Illustrators conference. I'll try to do nightly reports from there. Except for Friday night, as I'll likely be unwinding at the bar with my old classmate after our excruciating 5-hour-long certification exam. Wish me luck!

Also, next week I'm going to be doing a post about evolution books for kids. I've found three really good ones, but if anyone out there knows of others, please let me know!

"The Fly"

2008-07-07T14:44:00.010-05:00

I just stumbled across this illustration quite by accident on the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA website, while doing an unrelated Google Image Search, and thought it was too beautiful not to post. Plenty of other neat illustrations on that page, but this one is the tops.

"This image represents the total view of modern biology (ca. 1989) including a model organism (Drosophila), cells (the photoreceptor), molecules (visual pigments; and the membrane protein rhodopsin in its native environment) and recombinant DNA technology (the expression vector). It was painted by Ruben Di Anda, a San Diego artist, based on a design by David Meyer (MBI member)."

A History of Paleontology Illustration

2008-07-02T13:35:00.004-05:00

This is definitely one for my collection: A History of Paleontology Illustration! It's the new book out by Jane P. Davidson, Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno. And it's available on Amazon.

The book covers depictions of fossils, restorations of plants and animals, and ecological restorations in painting, drawing, sculpture, and in display restorations such as dioramas. Although the main subject of the book is scientific illustration, it also delves into "popular" illustrations such as those found in children's textbooks, popular introductions to paleontology and geology, museum and other public displays, and film.

Very intriguing! I will let you know when my copy gets here.

Microraptor: The Four-Winged Dinosaur

2008-06-30T15:59:00.007-05:00

Last Friday my old classmate Julian shared his master's research project, a 3D animation depicting microevolution in the process of antibody affinity maturation. I've already said this in a comment, but I'd like to restate that the animated simulation of evolution in the movie is absolutely stellar, so do give it a look!

I'd also like to point out that the biomedical communications company Julian works for did some animations for a Nova special last February on a feathered dinosaur called Microraptor. The full episode is available on Nova's website, here.

The scenes they animated were the flight tests of the model dinosaur in a wind tunnel,
this CG feather,and a really dynamic 3-D evolutionary tree:
As an illustrator trapped in the 2nd Dimension, I admit to getting Maya envy occasionally, especially when I see stuff like this. In the future I'd like to explore some of the uses for 3D software in visualizing evolution--functional uses beyond simply making things dynamic-looking (not to undermine the importance of making things look dynamic, of course!).

Visualizing Microevolution (link updated)

2008-06-27T16:52:00.005-05:00

Hello,

A bit about me, since I'm the new guy:

I'm a former classmate of Heidi's from Biomedical Communications at U of T. At BMC, I focused on biomedical animation, and now work at a medical animation studio in Toronto. I share Heidi's interest in evolution and visualization (and visualizing evolution). I thought I'd share my master's research project animation, and talk about my approach.

My animation dealt with evolution, but not on the level of the organism, as we often think of (and visualize) the process. The goal was to visualize evolution on the cellular level -- microevolution -- in the process of antibody affinity maturation.

In my animation, I wanted to show some of the cellular and molecular details involved in the process, but more importantly, I wanted to try to visualize the evolutionary changes at the population level (in this case, the change in affinity in the population of centrocytes). To visualize this population-level view of microevolution, I needed to show the distribution of affinity within the variable population, directional change, and the vital role of time in the process. To try to show all this, I created a virtual population of cells, and used scripting and dynamics in Maya (the 3D software) to simulate evolution in this population. The results of the simulation are shown in a cartoony graph.

The first few minutes provide an outline of the process, and then the simulation part starts about two and a half minutes in.
Here's a (new) link:

Antibody-Affinity Maturation

Therizinosaur: Mystery of the Sickle-Claw Dinosaur

2008-06-27T15:24:00.004-05:00

I just wanted to share a link to a recent Flagstaff Live article about an exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona on the dinosaur Therizinosaur which contains a lot of cool-looking paleoart:

Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk

Leshyk blends a strong fine arts background with studies in anatomy, physical science and natural history. As the current scientific illustrator at the Bilby Research Center at Northern Arizona University, and an educational background in both science and fine arts, he is well versed in detailed drawings by hand, computer-based images, and clay and wire models, all of which were involved in the Therizinosaur exhibit.

Check out those claws. I just love this guy's art. He even has a piece on convergent evolution (it's not part of this particular exhibition but by gosh, I had to show it):

Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk

Nice! So I guess if you live in the Flagstaff, AZ area, go check it out. Me, I'm too far away. : (

Ventastega curonica

2008-06-26T13:18:00.011-05:00

From Science News, a newly described fossil gives evidence of the transition from fish to land-dwelling tetrapods. This is Ventastega curonica, from the late Devonian (365 million years ago) of Latvia, in a recent article in the journal Nature. It's the most primitive Devonian tetrapod, and is intermediate transitional form between Tiktaalik (our favorite early tetrapod) and the later Devonian tetrapods like Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. So I guess it's a fishomander, of sorts?

Alas! One more missing link means two more gaps in the fossil record!

Anyway, to stay on topic, here is the illustration being shown on all the news sites:

Illustration by Philip Renne - click for big

He looks so happy! I had to piece this together since most of the news sites are showing a cropped version sans the bottom-dwelling Bothriolepis in the background, and the only full-version I could find has poor resolution. And Philip Renne doesn't seem to have a website, unless all the media sites are mispelling his name, in which case, Philip, I appologize for my lack of link.

Anyway, I like the painting itself. It's colorful, has a nice balance, looks like it may have been designed for a book cover. But we're missing the most important part of the animal. The innovations of Ventastega are in its legs, and all we get to see here is the big smiley head! Man, that reflection on the eyeball is nice, though. And the angle is so dynamic; I feel like I'm right there in the water with him!

Here's an illustration from Devonian Times showing the nearly complete braincase, shoulder girdle, and partial pelvis:

Illustration by Dennis C. Murphy

Maybe the reason the illustrations don't show details of the foot is we don't have them represented by fossils.

I'd never browsed Devonian Times before; their illustrations have a lovely consistency: black sillouette with red bones. Check out the pages for Tiktaalik, Ventastega, Ichthyostega, and Acanthostega. The site makes it really easy to compare fossil forms. Though I would have put them in chronological and not alphabetical order.

I'm going to try to track down the full Nature article at the library this weekend, so hopefully another update on Ventastega will follow.

Darwin's Canopy: Update

2008-06-25T11:55:00.002-05:00

The results are in on the Darwin's Canopy art installation, and London's Natural History Museum has chosen Tania Kovat's "Tree":

From the New Scientist: Tania Kovats' TREE has been chosen. It will consist of a cross-section of a 200-year-old oak tree, cut lengthways and running along the full length of the ceiling. It was inspired by Darwin's "tree of life" diagram.

Awesome! That was one of my picks! I'm just relieved they didn't go with one of the more abstract entries. The judges were unanimous in this decision and according to the NHM site, work has already begun on the installation, which is to be unveiled on February 12th, 2009, Darwin's 200th birthday.

More on the artist from NHM:

Tania Kovats is a British artist who works primarily in sculpture and in the exploration of landscape. She is currently exploring Darwin’s voyage while in South America.

'The starting point for this proposal, known as Tree, was Darwin’s iconic branching tree drawing, the first representation of his theory of evolution.'

Tania Kovat’s recent work includes the Museum of the White Horse. Visit the Museum of the White Horse website.

Apple Evolution

2008-06-24T12:45:00.009-05:00

Related to my post on automotive evolution, here is an image depicting 30 years of evolution of Apple products from designer Edwin Tofslie (who has a lot of neat design work in addition to this):

You'll want to click for big. A lot of familiar machines are depicted here. I was just thinking about our old Apple IIGS the other day from when I was a kid. And there's the bulbous blue iMac we used in undergrad... and there are the Macs we used in graduate school... and there's the G5 I'm using right now! Ah, nostalgia attacks again!

Except for this:

I'm glad this is extinct.

Anyway, look it over, keeping in mind how evolution of technology relates to biological evolution. Look for overall trends and think about the selective pressures (or 'mutations' or 'genetic drift') that drove those adaptations. And perhaps try to imagine what the future Apple will look like.

And here are a couple more computer-related examples. I have no idea what's going on in either of these but what's interesting is the fact that they're represented as cladistic trees!

More Calvin and Hobbes

2008-06-21T14:00:00.007-05:00

Last week's entry in which I included a Calvin and Hobbes comic made me feel nostalgic. And then curious to see if the boy and his tiger had anything to say on the subject of evolution. I found these three online: (And now I am seriously considering picking up a copy of the printed anthology, for a number of reasons!)

Scientists Fix Bugs in Our Understanding of Evolution

2008-06-20T14:58:00.003-05:00

From the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an article about a tool which allows a more accurate insight into evolution of DNA and protein sequences.

In the current issue of Science [EMBL researchers] uncover systematic errors in existing methods that compare genetic sequences of different species to learn about their evolutionary relationships. They present a new computational tool that avoids these errors and provides accurate insights into the evolution of DNA and protein sequences. The results challenge our understanding of how evolution happens and suggest that sequence turnover is much more common than assumed.

Wish I could provide more commentary than that, but I'm too tired, so here's a nice visualization from the press release:

Darwin's Canopy: Art inspired by evolution

2008-06-15T11:47:00.007-05:00

The Natural History Museum of London has announced the 10 finalists on the short list for a permanent display called Darwin's Canopy, which will be unveiled on Feb 12th, 2009, Darwin's 200th birthday. You can see a slide-show of the proposals at the New Scientist, here.

I found the majority of the ideas a bit strange and abstract for my taste (can I say "artsy-fartsy"?), but here are three that I really like.

The first is by Tania Kovats, which features the classic branching tree as a representation of natural selection causing speciation.
It appears from the sketch as though it will take up the entirety of the hall's ceiling, and thus have a good impact on those museum visitors who take the time to look up. And the tree is an iconic enough image that I think most viewers would know what it is intended to represent.

This next installation, proposed by Alison Turnbull, is really the only in in my opinion which properly conveys Darwin's idea about natural selection, though I wonder how visible it would be if they used actual moths on ceilings that look rather high, at least in the photographs I've seen of the hall.

'This work, Biston betularia aka The Peppered Moth, was prompted by the numerous and precise references to colour in Darwin's account of the voyage of the Beagle.'

Lastly, I like this idea by Rachel Witeread, a sculptor who has the idea of having a series of panels with the imprinted footprints of humans and animals.
This one is nice because the human element is included in a naturally fair way, as just another set of footprints among those of the other animals.

Personally, I hope they go with the moths. Some of the other ideas are just too artistically abstract. For example, Richard Wentworth's proposal involves mounting lots of small round mirrors of different sizes to the ceiling:

'The ceiling is dedicated in equal measure to Darwin’s peripheral vision, his capacity for negotiating distractions and his ability to make his own luck.'

Mirrors? This one bothers me, because I find it impossible to imagine the average visitor of the museum looking up, seeing lots of little round mirrors, and instantly being reminded of Darwin's peripheral vision and capacity for negotiating distraction. I also happen to have an extremely strong aversion to snooty-sounding artist statements. Sorry, Richard Wentworth.

Another, and I have to say rather creepy, idea is by Christine Borland and is a sculptural piece of a large tree based on Darwin's original tree of life sketch, but with the addition of human limbs with coin slots, (coin slots?):

'The public are invited to insert coins into the branches of the tree and its human limbs, in the tradition of wishing trees.'

This makes me wish I'd had the chance to propose an idea. These two works just won't help the viewer to understand that they represent evolution, and they don't reflect Darwin's ideas in any concrete way.

The moths, in contrast, bring instantly to mind the idea of slow genetic change over many generations. "Look! See how they go from light to dark? They evolved a darker color to adapt to their changing environment." But anyway, now that you know how I feel, check out the 10 finalists for yourself. And if you're lucky enough to live close, go check out the exhibition. It will be on display until September 14th.

Finally, my thoughts on Artist's Statements, as summed up in a classic Calvin and Hobbes comic:

Automotive Evolution: a metaphor for biology?

2008-06-11T15:26:00.006-05:00

There are no end-points in evolution. It's not a goal-oriented process leading to some perfected peak design, once reached thus ending the process of change. It's continuous; things are constantly revising their shape over and over again. This is true in biology as well as our own man-made industries.

That's what I thought of when I saw this video of the new BMW GINA Light Visionary Model... a car with a fabric 'skin.'

Be sure to watch to the end... the headlights are the best part. The car BLINKS. Not in a retractable-headlight way but in a fleshy closing of the eyelids way. And whether this is awesome or creepy, I have yet to decide. It's like a switch from a car with an exoskeleton to a vertebrate animal with moving hard parts inside a flexible skin!

Personally I find the evolution of automobiles to be a fantastic metaphor for biological evolution. But for teaching, I'm not sure. Because there are many out there still who don't understand how Natural Selection works without an intelligent hand to guide it. Car evolution is guided by consumer choice, studies on safety, advancements in technology, and the artistic flair of the automotive designer:

horses 'evolve'... do cars?

But the evolution of living things is guided by the blind, selective processes of nature. Unfortunately this leads biologically-ignorant people into thinking the entire process is 'random!' Case in point, a ridiculous blog entry from the Discovery Institute called Do Car Engineers Turn to Darwinian Evolution or Intelligent Design? But wait! To save your brain cells and sanity, I'd recommend going straight to the SGU criticism on the most recent Skeptic's Guide 5x5 podcast. The ID blog entry is based on the premise that automotive designers refer to the 'intelligent design' of their cars rather than the 'evolution' of them. (And I guess the implications are that therefore biological evolution is false?)... even if that premise were true, which it isn't, automotive designers DO refer to their changing designs as 'evolution,' and rightly so!

Logos evolve, too.
Though their design has nothing to do with functionality and everything to do with consumer choice. The actual car is a much better model of what happens in biology.

A little rant about the caduceus

2008-06-05T16:45:00.009-05:00

This may be a bit off-topic, but I must share this little pet-peeve of mine, which is categorized in my brain somewhere between the phrase "a whole nother" and people who type "RU" instead of "are you" in instant messages.

This is a caduceus:
a.k.a. the Wand of Hermes. It's a staff spiralled by two snakes and there's a couple of wings at the top. This is the symbol of commerce, not medicine. What are news reports saying about medicine when they put a caduceus on the screen when talking about doctors or health insurance?

This is the Rod of Aslepius, the symbol of medicine. One rod, one snake, no wings.
As seen on ambulances and other EMT supplies in the Star of Life:
And now that you know that, you'll be seeing caduceuses being used wrong everywhere you look. You're welcome.

Is Paleoart Scientific?

2008-06-03T14:54:00.002-05:00

After my Paleoartist of the Month post, I received an interesting email from the writer of Bloggasm (great name), who just interviewed James Gurney: Pencil journalism: An artist's attempt to depolarize the proselytizers. The interview covered the same post by Gurney that was featured last week on Pharyngula, where he shared his experience of inviting two Jehovah's Witnesses to sit down and allow him to sketch one of them.

It's nice that the post is getting him lots of attention, but personally I remain much more interested in the entries about art and technique and dinosaurs.

On that note, on May 27, Laelaps featured an interview with Paleoartist Michael Skrepnick, someone I already have in mind for a future PAotM. Skrepnick discusses how he became a paleoartist, as well as some of the challenges of reconstructing extinct animals, the techniques he uses, and the scientific validity of paleoart.

The interview reminded me of an interesting and slightly annoying conversation I had last year. In graduate school, I asked the professor of my Vertebrate Paleontology class, "Why are Parasaurolophus so often depicted with a fan of skin stretched under their head-crest?" Like so:

(painting by Rich Penney)

With a smirk, my professor said it was "because dinosaur artists need to make money." I was taken aback! So, of course, I had to bring up the subject the next time we were in the fossil lab together. I asked what he thought of reconstructions. He didn't like them! It's one thing to draw the bones, but once you start adding flesh and environment, you're bound to make mistakes, he asserted. I wish I could remember his exact words, but his point was that these types of illustrations are just artworks, not science.

Well, to an extent, I dissagree. Even something like this:

(from the Natural History Museum, if you can't tell)

...makes certain assumptions about the animal that future research could show to be wrong... placement of bones, posture, etc...(Actually I'm not sure how old this drawing is, but it looks painfully quadrupedal, doesn't it?)

And what's more, mistakes that have been made in the past, such as the idea that the Parasaurolophus crest was an air chamber or some kind of snorkel:

(from a very, very old book called "All About Dinosaurs")

... also existed in the literature. It wasn't a fanciful idea drawn up willy-nilly by a carried-away artist, but was rather illustrated based on what was believed by scientists about the fossil at the time.

I'll admit, as an artist who is partial to this kind of work, I'm probably biased. So I'll quote Michael Skrepnick from the above linked article:

Throughout the history of paleontology, paleo art has provided a reliable visual record, and essentially a "mirror" of progress within the science. Greater advances in technology, related disciplines, sheer volume of specimens and research, all reinforce an increasingly accurate assessment of ancient life on earth.

I'll admit Skrepnick might be biased, too, but I couldn't have said it better than that. Indeed we can confidently assume that the more we learn, the more accurate the art becomes. He continues:

Not so very long ago, snarling, upright theropods stalked slow, lumbering, swamp dwelling sauropods, incapable of walking unsupported on dry land. At the time, it was accepted, "cutting edge" science, today we have a much revised understanding of diversity and extremes in dinosaur evolution. Barriers have been broken, sauropods twice the size walk freely on land, tyrannosaurs have "tipped" forward, small theropods have feathers, psittacosaurs have "quills", etc. . .

Is our understanding now refined enough to offer a realistic vision of lost worlds ?

What I wonder, will today's " cutting edge " look like, in 2108 ? . . .

So what is the worth of paleoart? Yes it is fluid, and dynamic, and changes with scientific views and is bound to continue to change. But I think its real value lies in the way it captures the imagination of the general audience. Think especially of young people, whose early interest in science often begins with reading about fantastic prehistoric creatures. We owe it to them to make biological history exciting, to give it life and color and generally just more badass and cool. Here, have some more James Gurney to prove my point:

rrraarr!

Paleoartist of the Month

2008-06-01T15:50:00.009-05:00

It's the first of June, which means it's time for Paleoartist of the Month! Each month I'll feature a favorite paleoartist based on some merits that I haven't decided yet. Right now, it's pretty random. Please feel free to submit ideas for July!

June's Paleoartist is James Gurney, who we all know as the artist behind Dinotopia:

The reason I chose Gurney for this month is because I just learned through Pharyngula that he has a blog which he updates almost daily. (Hey, he uses blogspot, too!) It's full of such useful information about illustration, color, light, form, style, that I've linked it on my own sidebar and will be checking it daily from now on. He even has a series of entries on Dino Art Tips!

I wish I would have discovered this site months ago. Reading it has been a delight, and he shares his ideas and methods on a number of techniques. It always makes me happy to see people with amazing talent openly sharing what they do and how they do it. It's going to take me weeks to read through all the back entries!

What I particularly love about Gurney's work is how genuinely animal-like his dinosaurs appear. Even when they stand along side humans in the utopian cities of his Dinotopia books, their behavior and mannerisms are believable as fellow creatures who really did once live on this earth, and not monsters dreamed up in some fantasy.
And of course, to bring it all home, good paleoart (even when it's not strictly scientific) allows our imagination to flourish, and to feel the existence of these long-gone beings who once inhabited this very planet, losing out to natural selection in the long run but definitely leaving their mark.

Frogamander vs. Crocoduck!

2008-05-29T19:43:00.012-05:00

Allow me to rant for a moment. I love listening to science podcasts, especially ones focusing on skepticism, but there have been a couple of irritating mistakes in the last week. It's also possible I'm getting uptight over nothing and being the evolutionist equivalent of the dreaded Grammar Nazi, but anyway...

The first offense was on the May 7 episode (#146) of the "Skeptic's Guide to the Universe," in which host Steven Novella was discussing transitional fossils and mentioned Confusciusornis, one of the feathered dinosaurs of China, referring to it as "a beautiful half-reptile/half-bird." He then made it much worse by reinforcing his idea with the phrase "it really is LITERALLY half-bird and half-reptile." I was irritated, but after some calming tea, I eventually got over it.

But then today I was catching up on "Skepticality," (episode #078) and host Swoopy, in referring to the fossil amphibian Gerobatrachus hottoni said the following:

"...and in Texas, a part-frog/part-salamander is the only fossil found to shed new light on how amphibians evolved into two separate species."

First of all, the fossil represents a possible common ancestor of frogs and salamanders, not some sort of frogamander hybrid, and second of all... two separate species? Living amphibians include three orders: Salientia (frogs and toads), Caudata (salamanders), and Gymnophiona (caecilians), each of which contain many, many, species. Picky? Maybe. This could just be an example of a poorly-phrased remark, and I'm sure Swoopy knew what she meant to say, but there's a point to my rant, so stay with me here.

At least they got it right on the notes section of their website for the episode:

"Just this week, the discovery of the 300-million year old Gerobatrachus hottoni ("Hotton's elder frog") confirmed the previously contentious inference that modern frogs and salamanders evolved from one group of ancient primitive amphibians. The dispute arose because of a lack of transitional forms; but, like so many "missing links," this newly discovered fossil sealed the gap."

If we want people to accept evolution, they have to understand it. We must avoid this confusing language! The missing link between A and B is not "half-A/half-B"; that's not how evolution works! And saying it that way is misleading and confusing and yet... oh, so common.

It's no wonder the Kirk Camerons out there are saying fossil evidence for evolution would have to include something like the Crocoduck:

...

Well, then.

To anyone who has studied and understands evolution, this is, of course, ridiculous. But look at it from the point of view of someone without that education and imagine hearing a news report about a frogamander or dinobird and it becomes clearer how people can become confused and decide to discard the idea of evolution entirely.

Bonus reconstruction of Gerobatrachus hottoni! (From the NGS article)

(awesome)

Even the National Geographic article (linked above) calls the creature a "Frog-amander," and comparative biologist Jason Anderson said of it:

"It had an overall amphibian gestalt...you know, kind of a froggy salamander-y sort of look... so it's kind of a frogamander, if you will."

But he also remarked:

"It pretty convincingly settles the question [that the] frog and salamander shared origins from the same fossil group."

Evolution of course predicts the existence of just such a fossil, but it's so important to keep in mind that a common ancestor of A and B won't necessarily look like an A/B hybrid. Take our common ancestor with chimpanzees, which was most certainly more chimp-like than human-like. We can't accidentally lead people to think that evolution occurs in a manner I once heard referred to as "Pokemon style evolution" in which individual organisms just kind of morph into something else.

It also reminds me of the Nickelodeon cartoon "Avatar: The Last Airbender," in which every animal species is a combination of two or three other things. Platypus bears. Saber-tooth moose lions. Lemur-bats. Rhino-lizards. In fact, the characters became confused upon finding out that the Earth King owned a bear.

Katara: The King is throwing a party at the palace tonight for his pet bear.
Aang: Don't you mean platypus bear?
Katara: No, it just says, 'bear'.
Sokka: Certainly you mean his pet skunk bear?
Toph: Or his armadillo bear?
Aang: Gopher bear?
Katara: Just, 'bear'.

(short pause)

Toph: This place is weird.

So unless we're talking about actual hybrids like ligers and camas (so cute), let's leave our half-and-half animals in the land of fantasy and talk about a reality of missing links and shared ancestors. It's actually much more interesting that way, anyway.

Although...
(sabertooth moose lion picture courtesy of AvatarSpirit.net)

"cdesign proponentsists"

2008-05-20T12:59:00.004-05:00

Another video from Expelled Exposed, and the people at the National Center for Science Education, this time on the evidence demonstrating that "Intelligent Design" is in fact Creationism and not science.

No illustrations this time, but I'm sharing it, anyway.

Time for some fish evolution comics!

2008-05-08T19:05:00.009-05:00

I love Cectic and I love Tiktaalik. Therefore, I love this cartoon:
And as long as we're looking at cartoons about the missing link between fish and tetrapods......both by the amazing Gary Larson, of course, who I really wish would come out of retirement. Aw, what the heck, one more: (from Perry Bible Fellowship)
There will be a post later about iconic images of evolution, one of which is the lobe-finned fish triumphantly crawling out of the water. And for some reason, it always seems the fish is drawn with water to the left and land to the right. Speaking of Tiktaalik, here's a non-comic example from the NY Times article on the find:
Left to right, again! The same is true of the common March of Progress drawings, which always show a man walking towards the right followed by a procession of his more and more hairy and hunched-over ancestors. I don't think this is a coincidence. After all, any time you draw a timeline, the past is to the left and the future to the right. And in this culture at least, we read from left to right. So it only makes sense that evolutionary progression should be drawn left-to-right, as well.

I almost forgot Ray Troll!

German cladogram illustration

2008-05-07T13:49:00.006-05:00

I had to share this beautiful example of an illustrated cladogram:

(click for big)

Unfortunately, I have no idea where it came from or who drew it. The blog I found it on said it was from "some German website." And they wonder why we illustrators and artists are so afraid of the Orphan Works Act?

Anyway, the meaning of the illustration is pretty clear even if the viewer doesn't know German--which is a sign of a good drawing and also for the usefulness of illustrations as a whole. The monochromatic color scheme and the sharp, clean lines of the drawing are unique from what cladograms of this kind usually look like. There's a lot of information packed in, but it's not visually overwhelming or 'busy.'

If anyone knows where this piece comes from, please let me know.

Update! The poster comes from a German science publishing house in Stuttgart called Schweizerbart and is available for purchase. Might have to buy one if they ship internationally. Thanks to Chucker for helping me track them down.

"Creationism Disproved?"

2008-05-06T19:04:00.003-05:00

The National Center for Science Education has released another video, this time on the evolution of the eye. I really hope they make more of these. A short, accessible video that is thorough without being overly complex--perfect to send to that non-science educated person who has been told that the eye is an example of "irreducible complexity" and thus disproves evolution.

Intelligent design proponents say the eye is too complex to have evolved. The scientists in this video say, "Look at the evidence."

The video uses some nice illustrations, but it's too bad someone couldn't throw together a Flash animation of the process they're talking about. (No, I'm not volunteering ... well, maybe if they asked nicely...)

Other video critiques by the NSCE of intelligent design can be found here.

Illustrating Convergent Evolution

2008-05-02T15:09:00.001-05:00

Today I'd like to point you in the direction of a blog by paleo artist Carl Buell (a.k.a. Olduvai George) who has a great entry from February of 2006 on Illustrating Evolution. He doesn't blog much anymore, but take a look at some of his work. This is an illustrator who knows how to use Photoshop to its full artistic potential.

This painting from the "Illustrating Evolution" blog, which depicts the extinct marsupial Thylacine along side a Dingo, demonstrates his main point in the article.

"Although we talk all the time of the incredible diversity of life on our planet, that diversity is really an amazing amount of variation on a relatively very few themes."

The evolutionary idea that similar selective pressures can produce similar-looking organisms with very different ancestors (also known as convergent evolution) is one of the easiest concepts of evolution to illustrate visually. All it takes is a piece like this. Two dog-like mammals, one a placental mammal and the other a marsupial.

Actually, this type of convergent evolution is evident several times in the separate evolution of placentals and marsupials:
Mammals are a good place to start thinking about convergent evolution, but examples exist throughout the animal kingdom (and probably plants too, but I can't think of an example just now).

Take dolphins, sharks, and Ichthyosaurs, for example. All three are pursuit-hunters of fish, relying on speed and streamlined bodies to survive, and despite starting off with very different looking ancestors, (a mammal, a fish, and a reptile) all ended up with torpedo-shaped bodies, paired triangular pectoral fins, a single triangular dorsal fin, and double-lobed tail fins.
Aso note that the main difference in locomotion, namely the up-and-down motion of the tail in dolphins, which differs from the side-to-side motion in sharks and Ichthyosaurs, is due to the parasagittal gait evolved by early mammals. The therapsids (which include modern mammals) changed their locomotion from a side-to-side motion of the spine to an up-and-down motion when they started walking with their limbs directly under their bodies. Think of the way an alligator runs compared to a greyhound and the distinction should be clear. And though the dolphin evolved back to something shaped rather fish-like, it retained this style of spinal motion!

The ID Pyramid Scheme

2008-05-01T12:08:00.003-05:00

I can't take credit for the idea, but I thought it was brilliant and deserving of graphical representation:

Interactive Cladograms!

2008-04-26T16:38:00.003-05:00

Even before people knew of the theory of evolution, we have categorized the living things around us into groups, and groups within groups, and so on. For thousands of years we've understood that all hoofed animals were different from wolves and dogs and other canids, but that together these were mammals that had characteristics different from another group called 'birds,' and that mammals and birds were more similar to each other than to another group that included bugs and spiders.

Once evolution was in the picture, the reasons these groupings exist in the first place became crystal clear: each group contains a common ancestor which 'branched off' in speciation events. A tree-shape is indeed the best visual way to represent this, and has been from the start. This was Darwin's first tree from his notebook:(neat, eh?)

By the way, his handwriting is hard to read, so:

"I think (sketch) Case must be that one generation then should be as many living as now. To do this and to have many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction."

Trees can be ridiculously simple to ridiculously complex (see previous post). But if you want a tree to be a useful database of life in its entirety, there's really only one way to go, and that is a clade that is interactive, with the ability to zoom in on levels of detail from the base of the tree and its major branches to the very ends where individual species exist.

Here are a few very great examples, in no particular order:

Wikispecies - Like Wikipedia, this wiki is an open directory that anyone can contribute too. While this doesn't look like a tree, it indeed is, and navigation up and down the branches is quick and easy (so long as you know where you're going, that is). The great thing about the individual pages is the "taxonavigation" at your fingertips: every grouping from species up is visible and clickable. I should mention that Wikipedia has scientific classification lists as well, but not nearly to the amount of detail as Wikispecies, though they do have more factual information.

UCMP Web Lift to Taxa - This extremely comprehensive tree is the one we used as part of my favorite undergraduate biology course: Systematic Zoology. It's a bit hard to navigate, unfortunately. As you zoom in on the tree, look for the "Systematics" button to move down the branches. Navigation lacks a way to move back down the branch, but the good thing about this site compared to the others is the abundance of pages describing the larger groups (rather than only having individual pages for species at the end of each branches, they have an entire page describing the phylum cnidaria, for example.)

The Tree of Life Web Project - This awesome page is the result of some five hundred contributing scientists. Its organization is similar to that of Wikispecies, but like the UCMP page, it also includes actual trees on each page, much appreciated by visual people such as myself. Aside from that, I also have to say it's just designed better in general and is nicer-looking than the others.

Wolfram Demonstrations Tree of Life Project - I can't comment on this one because I have not downloaded it yet, but the demonstration looks neat and really gives you an idea of what interactive trees could look like in the future. The idea of clicking on branches to move up and down the tree rather than text links is terribly exciting to me.

So where is all of this going? Will we see the day when every species is documented and compiled in a database like this? It will always have to be changing. Placements of groups on the tree of life change, and disputes exist between scientists. Sometimes clades determined by genetic data disagree with those based on phenotype. But the dynamic nature of these interactive databases even allows for the discrepancies to be communicated.

I look back at the sketched tree drawn by Charles Darwin, and I have to wonder what he would think about all of this.

Visual Complexity

2008-04-13T11:19:00.000-05:00

Here is an amazing collection of visual complexity in biology. It's like looking at beautiful works of geometric abstract art, except there is rigid scientific meaning behind each one, which only makes them all the more beautiful.

Especially check out the Mammal Supertree and the Tree of Life:

Bolinsky's response to the "Expelled" plagiarism

2008-04-12T13:16:00.000-05:00

Update for yesterday's post.

This email, written by XVIVO medical illustrator David Bolinsky and forwarded to Richard Dawkins, explains in more detail the depth of the plagiarism on the part of the makers of the 'Expelled' movie.

It's a must-read.

Plagiarism at its Worst

2008-04-11T16:24:00.000-05:00

As a professional illustrator, the one thing that truly gets my blood boiling is plagiarism. What's worse is when pieces of scientific art are plagiarized by anti-science propagandists, often creationists, to construct straw-man arguments.

At last year's annual conference of the Association of Medical Illustrators in Bozeman, Montana, I saw many amazing talks and presentations, but only one received a standing ovation.

XVIVO, a scientific illustration and animation studio in Connecticut, showed their 3D animated movie 'Inner Life of a Cell.' I'm sure you've seen it by now, if not, check it out. Medical illustrator David Bolinsky and Dr. Robert Liu presented the animation, explaining how they found innovative ways to use the features of the 3D software such as duplication and textures, as well as animating certain shots backwards, to create their highly complex sequences.

After all the applause, the two animators did have some tough questions to answer, though. The animation is aesthetically gorgeous, and precisely demonstrates inner workings of organelles and molecules in the cell, at multiple scales from cellular to molecular. However, the problem they admitted having was in simplifying these processes so much. They explained this was necessary; in order to see anything at all, certain elements just had to be left out.

For example, in the scene showing transcription of proteins, amino acids seem to fly into the ribosome as if directed by an unseen hand, ushered in one by one in the correct order. In reality, they explained, a sea of amino acids exists in the region of the ribosome, and they automatically fit in place in their correct order as the protein is transcribed. To show the process in real time (which is unbelievably fast), they simply couldn't show that level of complexity.

And herein lies the problem with the video when viewed without narration or explanation. It looks like a constructed machine, but not only that; it looks like every movement is being controlled by some intelligence. I think we all saw what was coming, but I didn't imagine to what extent!

The creationist responses to the YouTube video, where it showed up after the convention, were immediate. I suppose it's difficult for someone with no science background to understand that these 3D models are representations of what's going on in a cell. It's not as if the scientists shrunk themselves down and crawled in there "Fantastic Voyage" style with a nanobot video camera. (Some day, though... some day...)

But here's the really amusing/annoying part. This is a very, VERY well known animation in science illustration and animation circles. It's about the last piece of visualization you want to rip off and not get caught. Maybe it would be slightly more risky to rip off the introductory credits sequence to 'House M.D.' but that's beside the point.

Ripping it off is apparently what the makers of the anti-evolution movie 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed' have done.

Check out Pharyngula to read the letter from their lawyer. (By the way, PZ Myer's blog is just about the best evolution blog there is!)

The highlight of the letter:

This letter will also serve as notice to you that XVIVO intends to vigorously and promptly pursue its legal remedies for your copyright infringement, unless and until Premise Media, Rampant Films, and their officers, employees, and agents comply with the following demands:

That Premise Media, Rampant Films, and its officers, employees, and agents remove the infringing segment from all copies of the "Expelled" film prior to its scheduled commercial release on or before April 18, 2008;

That all copies of the "Inner Life" video in your possession or under your control be returned to XVIVO;

That Premise Media notify XVIVO, on or before April 18, 2008, of its compliance with the above demands.

XVIVO, I love you even more than I did. Which was already a lot. It's always great to see the artists standing up for themselves!

Now, they didn't take the animation directly. They were at least smart enough (I guess) to change the colors of the structures.

'Expelled' screenshot on the left. XVIVO's on the right. (Thanks to PZ Myers for the screenshots, wherever you got them!)

As much as I'm debating whether to even watch this documentary on YouTube when and if it becomes available, I am looking forward to seeing what, if any, commentary is provided when showing this animation. Beyond the classic argument from ignorance of "look at how complicated this is! How could this form by chance alone?" I don't expect much at all.

It will be a happy day when XVIVO wins this fight.

First Post - An Introduction

2008-04-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

The origins of this blog go back to a train ride. An agonizingly long (27 hour) train ride home to visit my family. I'd brought a small sketch book with me and was spending a lot of my time doodling. As a professional (I can say that now that I'm finally out of school) scientific illustrator, I tend to spend a lot of time doing that.

For some reason, I started to doodle trees. Evolutionary trees--also called clades. I was playing with all the different ways I knew of to represent species relations using clades, and since I had a lot of time on my hands, I started to sketch out other ways of representing evolutionary history. I ended up filling most of the book, and rather surprised myself by the depth of the subject

There are many, many ways to visualize evolution. Just a few that I thought of on my long journey were:

Cladistics
Line of descent drawings
Shared character / vestigial character illustrations
Development (embryo comparison)
Animations

I am hoping with this blog that I, along with the other contributors, can explore these and other topics, as well as how to best use them to educate both scientists and lay people on the topic of evolutionary biology.

Have an idea or wish to contribute? Please send me an email!