(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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin!
Happy 200th birthday, Abraham Lincoln!
Happy 150th anniversary, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life!
And here’s to a happy Darwin Day and upcoming Valentine’s Day to everyone else.
As a part of my own contribution to the Blog for [...]

This is a story for you to read while eating lunch.
So as you all know I went fishing this weekend.
What you don’t know is that in the process of catching fish I saw one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.
I was catching small bream (sunfish) to use as bait to catch catfish when [...]