Welcome to the Carnival of Evolution #18!
First off – big news here at the Carnival. As you can see, my edition is late again. I can’t seem to find the time to keep up online anymore (thanks alot starfish gene cloning). Thus it is with both disappointment and excitement that I am turning over administration [...]

(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 [...]

Okay, so I’m a week late posting the link (sorry!), but the Carnival of Evolution #13 is now live in technicolored form at FYI:Science!.
Quite a selection of excellent articles is up for your perusal – so go over and get some summer evolutionary reading under your belt!Be sure to submit your own writings next [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As I have recently shown you all, Spring is here in full force in North Carolina.
I love it more than almost anything, but there are two weeks of Spring that are quite hellish for me.  You see, I am incredibly allergic to Oak pollen (most species but not all).
This fact has lead to a tragic [...]

Oh yes, woolly we be. Check out the latest update on our celebratory Darwin beard contest over at Southern Fried Science.
Great Darwin Beard Challenge History:

The Origin: Deep Sea News, Southern Fried Science, Biochemical Soul
Week 1: Biochemical Soul, Deep Sea News
Week 2: Southern Fried Science – Hats

Week 3: Biochemical Soul – Hardcore

Week 4: Biochemical Soul – The [...]

“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 couldn’t imagine how Miriam Goldstein of The Oyster’s Garter could top her previous hosting of the Carnival of the Blue #21 in which she waxed lyrical and poetic.
However, as I have come to expect from Miriam, she completely knocked the socks off of my expectations with her shiny new edition of the Carnival of [...]

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 [...]

Alright, so Kevin at Deep-Sea News got a little busy this past week “laying down the hardwood.” He claims this involved flooring installation…
Thus I have taken on the reigns of presenting this week’s Great Darwin Beard Challenge images.
For those of you new here (and I know there are several due to my Science Blogging: The [...]

Just a couple of quick notes to my fellow developmental biologists out there:
First, due to my recent post, Science Blogging: The Future of Science Communication & Why You Should be a Part of it, I was reminded through my comments at Larry Moran’s reaction post at Sandwalk that I haven’t met very many developmental biologist [...]

Over the past few years, a new development has arisen in the world of science amongst those who wish to purvey the wonders of reality to the general public.
I’m speaking of course about the ascension of the Science Blog.
Many articles have been written on the burgeoning importance of science blogs for the processing and dissemination [...]

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 [...]