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!

Ultimate Ungulate

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

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

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

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...

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

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.