Well that didn’t take long. Remember my post last week that discussed possible Neanderthal/modern human interbreeding based on skeletal morphology evidence? You may recall, I figured that genetic evidence would tell the tale. Today Nicholas Wade of the New York Times reports on a study that finds circumstantial evidence that a gene for brain size …
Author: Reid Farmer
Scapa Flow
After the signing of the Armistice that ended the First World War in 1918, the warships of the defeated German Fleet were interned at anchorage at the main Royal Navy seabase at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland. The ships were kept there with skeleton crews of German sailors to …
Chupacabra
I have always been intrigued by the legend of the Chupacabra. Terrierman Patrick Burns and his working terriers have hunted one down, and he has the pictures to prove it.
I Wonder if Steve Remembers This Picture?
Or this one? UPDATEWell, since I got Steve to bite, I’ll let everyone know where these came from. I was rummaging through books the other night and found “Quail Hunting in America” by Tom Huggler. The guy drove three-quarters of the way across the country in 1985 hunting along the way so he could write …
No Comment
…….other than this was on the back of a large pick-up truck driven by a small young woman.
The Eyes Have It
Now that our children are adults and aren’t around so much to educate me, I find that I am often late catching on to new trends and new products. But I have to say that I hadn’t seen these candy gummy eye balls until this Halloween. They really crack me up. I’m almost afraid to …
H. neanderthalensis – H. sapiens Interbreeding?
The BBC reports that the question has come up again as to whether early modern humans and Neanderthals, whose occupation of Europe overlapped, interbred. This new speculation is based on radiocarbon dating and re-examination of 30,000 year old skeletal material from a cave site in Romania. The bones (cranium shown above) are said to show …
Phorusrhacids
Ah, synchronicity! The press release on “terror birds” that I posted on last week came just as Darren Naish was finishing a literature review of phorusrhacids. You can read the first of a series of posts on these big critters over here at Darren’s Tetrapod Zoology.
A Horseman
I couldn’t think of a single contemporary “hook” for use of this photograph, but I like it so much I just had to put it up. This is my grandfather, Travis Reid, in a picture taken in Jonesboro, Arkansas. From his appearance and its placement in the album, I believe this was taken in the …
Big Bird
The LA Times carries the LA County Natural History Museum’s announcement of the discovery of the largest fossil bird every found. There was no species name listed in the story, but the fossil skull, discovered in Patagonia, is related to an extinct group of birds known as phorusrhacids – “terror birds.” He has been dated …