Darren, while still tormenting us over the cladistics of the Giant Hoatzins of Doom, has written a good post on the “dinosauroids” of popular imagination (and, as Reid reminds us , of the splendid science fiction novels of Ken MacLeod). He doubts the humanoid appearance of the early model, and prefers a “birdier” version by …
The Food Police..
…are coming for you. I never met a trans- fat I liked. But doesn’t this give you a shiver? “New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, by contrast, likes the idea. On Monday he reiterated that support, saying, ‘The next big health issue is obesity. If you want to do something about it, it’s going to …
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 …
Agnostic
I blogged recently on Rod Dreher’s moving account of his conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Last week the one and only John Derbyshire wrote an essay on his loss of religious faith. I thought I must be nuts to like both, finding them sane and thoughtful. But apparently I am not alone– both Dreher himself and …
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 …
Hmmmm
Patrick sent me this item: a foxhound pack in England is flying a hybrid eagle at foxes. IF– very big “if”– the bird is very well- trained and, above all, the dogs are accustomed to it, this could work– after all, hounds, eagles, and horses work together every winter in Asia. But most likely this …
“Sun Head”
The petroglyphs Reid blogged about below put me in mind of the “Sun Head” figure at the Tamgaly site in Kazakhstan, below. Could it be a shaman figure? According to a Kazakh brochure, other figures might be as well. “Unique representations of ‘magic personages’ can be found, dressed up in animal skins with wolf tails …
Around the web
Peculiar writes to me: “This one sounds like the first chapter of a pretty good thriller: “Disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk said on Tuesday he spent part of private donations for research to pay the Russian mafia for mammoth tissues to clone extinct elephant species.” He adds: “I like this line too, …