"I Am a Paleontologist"

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"

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!

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!

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

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

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.

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

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!