nope - not a fake at all...

I hang out online sometimes with a bunch of like-minded fossil-enthusiasts (The Fossil Forum).

Tonight somebody posted this:

Just watched the new this evening and they were talking about a dig going on right now outside of Glen Rose, on the McFall ranch. The news showed the footprints of the therapod and the human prints together. It was interesting. For report go to cbs11tv.com

So I mosied over to the Dallas, TX CBS news site and found the article “Local City Known As Dinosaur Capital Of Texas, by Arezow Doost.”

Sounds innocuous enough for a title, right?  Then I read the first three sentences:

“Did you ever think that there were dinosaurs in North Texas?

As it turns out, this is one of the most prolific areas for dinosaur tracks in the state. One group of scientists have even found tracks dating back millions of years.”

Read that last sentence again:

“One group of scientists have even found tracks dating back millions of years.”

Cause, you know, all those other groups found tracks that weren’t millions of years old…
(for those of you who missed out on elementary school, dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous sixty-five million years ago.)

Absolutely hilarious…and mind-numbingly maddening.

After reading a bit more, then you learn what it is really about:

“Scientists believe that one of the most unique findings is human prints dating back to the same period as the dinosaur prints. “We are looking for the truth,” said Baugh. “We don’t want anything else but the truth.”"

I rolled my eyes. Obviously, I had a feeling what I would find out with a little search, but I decided to check out the scientist quoted in the piece, because I thought it was a bit odd that he said “We are looking for the truth. We don’t want anything else but the truth.”

You see, that is a very non-scientist thing to say in a media piece, and it instantly threw up a red flag to me. I say this because when one is actually in the practice of being a good scientist, a statement like that is like a commercial fisherman saying “no really, we’re just out here to catch fish.” What else would a fisherman be fishing in the ocean for? If you’re a scientist, a statement like that is less than unnecessary.

Yeah this guy, Carl Baugh, is a young earth creationist discredited in the scientific community and with a questionable education. He is obviously seeking to prove his own wrong beliefs - not actually do what good scientists do, which is let the data speak for themselves. Check this out for some rather hilarious reading on Baugh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Baugh

Sigh…it is Texas after all (I was born and raised in east Texas, FYI)

As an added moronic bonus, if you look at the url of the story you’ll see that it’s filed under “pets.”
(http://cbs11tv.com/pets/Texas.Dinosaur.Capital.2.1069336.html).

What kind of of idiots are running that station?

One thing about the fossil record - it’s insanely consistent across both time and continental space, if fragmentary. And it has consistently shown us that human and therapod existence is quite a few tens of millions of years apart.

Hell, mammals were barely existent back then, compared to today. But primates? LOL - no.

***

Side note: I’m going fossil hunting in Aurora, NC tomorrow and at Greens Mill Run in Greenville, NC on Saturday!!  Shark teeth here I come. Please just let me find a megalodon.

I’m back!!!

Oh…you never realized I was gone?

Ah well, that’s ok, because I AM back - back from a stressful few months of wondering where I would end up, how I would feed my babies (i.e. cats) and their baby-momma (my wife - yeah that does sound rather gross), and several dozen unknowns also thrown into the mix.

And after all the trials and tribulations, I can now state with certainty that I got the one job in my new future hometown (Pittsburgh) that I wanted more than anything: a post-doc in the lab of Dr. Veronica Hinman at Carnegie Mellon University.

What will I be doing you ask?

Well, I will be doing none other than studying the evolution of gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Specifically, I’ll be looking at GRNs in the context of development using the wonderful sea critters in the phylum Echinodermata. For those of you not in the know, the “spiny-skinned” echinoderms are the asteroids (starfish/sea stars), ophiuroids (brittle stars), echinoids (sea urchins), holothuroids (sea cucumbers), and crinoids (feather stars, sea lillies and such).

Click for larger! Or Click HERE for super high resolution posters.

That’s right folks - I am now at least an honorary marine biologist! … kind of.  I don’t know if the real marine biologists would ever deign to allow me such a title, but I can call myself whatever I want.

Many of you may know this already, but the process by which a single fertilized cell becomes a complex organism is an insanely intricate one. DNA is often called a “blueprint” for life, however in reality it’s more like a cooking recipe informing each cell which ingredient to add and when, where, and how to add it - all codified into a multi-layered genetic computer program with kernels, plug-ins, sub-circuits, and all sorts of other technobabbly organic craziness.

This is where the “Gene Regulatory Network” comes in - the GRN is that central biological software controlling and allowing life itself. Not only will I be studying the structure of these networks in echinoderm development, I’ll be looking at the evolutionary context of the echinoderm networks in relation to each other to suss out how they work and which parts of the networks are conserved (or not) between these amazing creatures that diverged from each other about 500 million years ago.

I’ll initially be working on the “endomesoderm” network in the sea star, Asterina miniata. Down the line I’ll also be contributing to the development of the sea cucumber as a new model for studying “evodevo”.

In celebration, I spent a fair bit of time getting back to my art roots creating the above cladogram in the sand of the Echinoderm phylum (which you can get a poster of here if you’re into echinoderms. I rendered it out in pretty high resolution, so you will definitely be getting a high quality poster. I’m pretty proud of it as it took quite a bit of work in the Blender program).

I spent a while trying to find time-lapses or animations of starfish development online, to no avail. Thus I spent a week of much needed downtime to create this computer animation: (note - you can also watch it in High Definition on youtube)

NOTE: The details of the actual metamorphosis of the rudiment into the juvenile are not accurate - it’s quite hard to animate these types of changes - and to be honest I haven’t actually seen these creatures in the flesh. But it’s good enough to get a good idea of how the whole developmental process occurs in this type of sea star.

Anyway, I’m sure I will have much much more to say about the evolution and development of echinoderms in the future so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Hopefully, I can at least be an honorary member of the cool kids club, the marine biologists: Kevin, Eric, Andrew, David, Miriam, Christie, Rick, Mark, Jason, Chris, and all the others I’m surely missing.

Yeah - I can’t seem to find the internet lately. I just managed to snatch this little glimpse of it in the pale moonlight in between wake/work cycles, so here I am. I won’t bother giving you more excuses. Besides, Miriam has already used up all the best ones.

However, I need to take this time to get out the link for the next edition of that digital warehouse of evolutionary writing, the Carnival of Evolution.

The Carnival of Evolution #12 is now live over at the bastion of oceanic information and enthusiasm, Deep-Sea News, carefully assembled by Kevin Zelnio. From the nitty-gritty details of evolutionary mechanisms to that old chestnut, the never-ending peddling of creationism, Kevin wraps up the last month’s worth of excellent evolutionary writing to scratch that itch you know your brain’s been feeling since the last edition (despite the lack of nociceptors in your brain).

Be sure to submit your own writings next month to the Carnival of Evolution #13, which will be hosted by FYI: Science!

Use this form to submit your posts for next month’s edition.

*image source: Amazon via Living the Scientific Life.

Well, as some of you have no doubt noticed, I have been rather absent from the internets as of late. On top of a heavy load of scientific experiments on my plate, I’m also spending almost every waking minute trying to get my house ready to sell for my impending move to Pittsburgh (which includes painting every square inch inside and out - and let me just say that painting exterior trim sucks!).

Thus I have had zero time to even read new interesting science literature, much less write about it.  That being said, I have had time to keep my camera on hand as I piddle around the house. Considering that Spring is out in full force here, I have quite a few really good shots I will be showing you all soon.

In the meantime, you should definitely check out the Carnival of Evolution #11, which is now live over at Oh, For the Love of Science!, care of the wonderful writer, Allie. Take a stroll with her through the Museum of Natural History as she ponders the ontogeny and phylogeny of life and the implications thereof, all the while pointing you to some of the best evolution writing from the past month.

Be sure to submit your own writings next month to the Carnival of Evolution #12, which will be hosted by the so-famous-he’s-infamous Kevin Zelnio at Deep-Sea News.

Use this form to submit your posts for next month’s edition.

*image source: Alex Wild / Live Science via The Primate Diaries.

Nagraj Sambrani of Hoxful Monsters

If any of you have not read Hoxful Monsters, you should leave me and go there immediately.

I swear - everytime I read a post by Nagraj Sambrani, I find myself at least a tenth of an IQ point smarter (that’s a joke - no IQ debates here…). That adds up!

Nagraj’s latest post (New tree of animal suggests nervous system evolved only once in animal history) is on a recent huge study that analyzed a large number of genes throughout the “early” metazoan lineages, coming to the conclusion that the nervous system only evolved once (among other conclusions).

The amazing thing about Nagraj is that he has about as in-depth a grasp of the intricate data of metazoan taxonomy and phylogeny as possible (not to mention his expertise in developmental biology - a huge plus in my eyes).  And for someone for whom English is not a first language, he is an incredibly excellent writer, and getting better all the time.

I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Nagraj and point some more readers his direction, as he is most assuredly among the best writers to cover the detailed evolutionary and developmental science being published.

Scientifically speaking, Hoxful Monsters is most definitely my absolute favorite blog!