(Note: As always, click image for better versions – these are heavily compressed)
Emerald Isle, NC
Last weekend we had a short but nice going away get-away with some friends (psychology graduate students, a parole officer, and a lawyer/rockstar) in Emerald Isle, North Carolina.
My dorky goal was to find more fossilized shark teeth (see [...]

For those of you who don’t know, David (WhySharksMatter) over at Southern Fried Science managed to snag an interview with Paul Gasek, Discovery Channel Executive.
David, as his handle implies, is all about sharks and shark conservation – in fact it seems he’s been making quite a name for himself in sharkworld. Well, David, as well [...]

As someone who has been a lifelong fossil collector, I have a terrible, unforgivable sin to admit: I lived for eight years in North Carolina and never knew of the existence of Aurora, NC.
Mind you, since moving here for graduate school, fossil hunting had fallen off of my priority list, largely owing to the fact [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Spring is Here!
This Nature Walk edition continues from #4.2 – Birds.
I’ve broken this post up into four parts due to the large number of images:

4.1 – Arthropods

4.2 – Birds
4.3 – Reptiles, Amphibians, & Mammals (this post)

4.4 – Plants & Fungi

The images are highly compressed for bandwidth’s sake, but you can click on the images [...]

Spring is Here!
This Nature Walk edition continues from #4.1 – Arthopods.
I’ve broken this post up into four parts due to the large number of images:

4.1 – Arthropods

4.2 – Birds (this post)
4.3 – Reptiles, Amphibians, & Mammals

4.4 – Plants & Fungi

The images are highly compressed for bandwidth’s sake, but you can click on the images for [...]

Spring is Here!
Days like these remind me what I love so much about the South…warm Springs exploding with life.
This edition of my series of Nature Walks is a big one. I took all of the following images over the past few days – some on my lunch break, some at the NIEHS campus, some at [...]

Today I witnessed (and was an integral part of) one of the strangest and coolest insect-related events I’ve been privy to.
My wife and I are trying to get our home fixed up to be put on the market.  One of the things we will be doing is repainting our front porch. Unfortunately, our porch is [...]

“Only a handful have ever been found before. But none like her. Her name is Lyuba. A 1-month-old baby mammoth, she walked the tundra about 40,000 years ago and then died mysteriously. Discovered by a reindeer herder, she miraculously re-appeared on a riverbank in northwestern Siberia in 2007. She is the most perfectly preserved woolly [...]

I owe the following example of evolutionary adaptation to the always amazing evolutionary and developmental biologist Dr. Sean B. Carroll, from his lecture “Making of the Fittest” for the Darwin College – Darwin Lecture Series, available at iTunes U (I highly recommend everyone give it a listen).

Imagine that you are a fish – exothermic and [...]

I am a fossil collector.
Ever since I was a small child I have been collecting fossils.  In fact, I can trace my own fascination with biology directly to my discovery that the very house in which I lived (actually a trailer back then), was set upon land literally made of these long dead and formerly [...]

What’s better than children singing? Children singing about science. And to take it once step better, give all the little kiddies British accents.
Apparently these videos have been around for quite some time, but I somehow missed them. Thus I’m guessing that some of you may have missed them as well.
The following are a couple of [...]

There’s one particular event of every summer in the South that I always await with great anticipation: the emergence of the millions of annual Dog Day cicadas (Tibicen canicularis).
It’s not just the event itself that I love. The cicadas are certainly wonders in themselves; but for me, they are more than just insects of the [...]

One of my science blogger buddies, WhySharksMatter over at Southern Fried Science, has received the opportunity to interview an influential shark researcher, Dr. Dan Abel. He is asking for anyone and everyone to pose a question you would like asked of Dr. Abel. Perhaps you want to know something about sharks or maybe something about [...]

Here is an awesome NGC video I saw a while back. I dug it up because it goes along nicely with our ongoing conversation on Medical Research in Animal Models, including discussions of self-awareness in animals.
Be sure to check out the sequence starting at 1:50, which shows the different responses between monkeys, apes, and humans [...]

This weekend I heard an incredibly interesting story on NPR’s This American Life titled “Almost Human Resources” (Act 3). The story was all about the issues surrounding chimpanzees in the human world surpassing their usefulness and how we should care for them. Apparently this now includes retirement homes with TVs.
This story, along with a recent [...]

This weekend my wonderful wife arranged a date night for us. And how awesome does it make her that it consisted of the single most breathtaking documentary I’ve ever seen – “Under the Sea 3D,” a stroll through the evolution of life at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, followed by a heaping plate of [...]

If you haven’t read my piece on Flatfish Eyes & Recapitulation Theory, you should check it out. For those of you who have read it, I updated it with the following AMAZING morph animations of flatfish development that I somehow missed before (much thanks to Adrian Thysse, FCD of Evolving Complexity for pointing these out [...]

Ok, so this one is more of a nature drive than a nature walk.
Today I had a half an hour to kill while waiting for a Western blot to run at work, so I took a quick drive around the NIEHS campus, which is typically covered with wildlife (see my last Nature Walk).
I was fortunate [...]

Earlier this week, thanks to the wonderful science & nature Twitter community, I followed a link from someone now forgotten to an article entitled “7 Symbiotic Wonders of the Aerial World.”
Therein, in symbiotic relationship number one, sat a photograph that I found utterly astonishing:
According to the WebEcoist website which published this list of “symbiotic wonders.”
“It [...]

For my next Nature Walk, on my Friday lunch break I decided to take a quick stroll around the lake at the NIEHS campus, camera in hand. Over the past couple of month several coworkers have spotted two river otters in the lake (which is strange indeed). I even managed to spot one while staring [...]

Heart the size of a Mini Cooper.
Mouth big enough to hold 100 people.
Longer than a basketball court.
Weighing as much as 25 large elephants.
It is the largest creature ever to inhabit the earth.
But we know precious little about it.
Yes, I am now an advertising pawn of big media. But it’s a particular medium that I have [...]

Most biologists at one time or another in their training have learned of the 19th century theory expounded upon by Ernst Haeckel called “Recapitulation Theory“.
The theory’s thesis: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Don’t worry – it’s not as complicated as the biological jargon might imply.
The idea boils down to a simple one – one that seemed to [...]

As an actively researching scientist, I generally call this blog a “science blog.” However, I would argue that most scientists are first and foremost “naturalists.” As such, much of my time outside of the lab is not necessarily spent dwelling on all the intricate details of my own research (I try to limit how much [...]