My first book, At the Water’s Edge, was graced by illustrations by the marvelous Carl Buell. He’s got a lot of irons in the fire these days, including Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, which publishes this month. Paleontologist Donald Prothero is the author, and it’s packed with illustrations such as this one, which shows mammal-like reptiles that were increasingly more closely related to the first mammals. While you wait for the book to arrive, you can peruse his Flickr pages.

[Illustration courtesy of Carl Buell]

Continue reading “Link Love: Follow Carl Buell Through the Ages” →

I just took a survey about blogs about science, and you should too. Here’s the description:

This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey are completing an academic manuscript on the impact of science blogging and this survey will provide invaluable data to answer the following questions:

Who reads or writes blogs?

What are the perceptions of blogging, and what are the views of those who read blogs?

Continue reading “Link Love: Surrender Your Data!” →

“Attached is a photo of a tattoo I got immediately after turning in the final paperwork a little over two weeks ago for the completion of my Ph.D. in biological anthropology. It’s the first evolutionary tree that Darwin sketched in his 1837 Notebook B on the transmutation of species.” –Julienne

We’re up to 64 tattoos in the flickr set, which has been seen by over 96,000 people since I set it up last month (which doesn’t count the 130,000+ pageviews of the original post). I think I’ll just post my favorite of the week each Friday until people stop sending them to me.

Continue reading “I’m Thinking of Calling It Science Tattoo Friday” →

The New York Times, September 12, 2007

Link

There are times when life imitates art. Then there are times when life imitates science fiction.

One of the more famous monsters in film history is the extraterrestrial beast of the “Alien” series. It slowly opened its glistening fangs to reveal a second set of jaws that shot forward to kill its victims.

Scientists have now discovered a fish that does the same thing.

Rita Mehta did not have aliens in mind when she began to study the moray eel. Mehta, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, where she studies the evolution of feeding, was intrigued by the dining habits of morays.

Continue reading “Moray eels: The predator that always bites twice” →