Peter Brown, one of the discoverers of Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit (previous posts here), had a few interesting remarks in an article in today’s Oregon Daily Emerald:

Though the hobbit people were very small — the adult stood as tall as a 3-year-old human child and had a brain the size of a newborn human baby — they had incredible strength, Brown said.

“Chimpanzees have an arm strength four times that of a human; the hobbits were similarly as strong, we think,” Brown said. “You wouldn’t want to arm wrestle one, that’s for sure. It would probably snap your arm off.”

Continue reading “Do Not Arm-Wrestle With Hobbits” →

The movie Flock of Dodos, which takes a look at the evolution-creationism struggle, will have a free showing on Monday in New Haven, Connecticut. I’ll be there as part of a panel discussion after the movie, moderated by Michael J. Donoghue, the director of Yale’s Peabody Museum. The panel will also include Randy Olson, the director of “Flock of Dodos”‘ John Hare, a theologian at the Yale Divinity School; and Richard Prum, a Yale evolutionary biologist who specializes on the evolution of birds. Not having seen the movie, I can’t offer a review, but I certainly am curious to see it.

Continue reading “A Flock of Dodos, trailed by a journalist” →

Dinosaur paleontologists don’t look for fossils simply because dinosaurs are cool. They want to solve evolutionary mysteries. Like all living things, dinosaurs form groups of species. You’ve got your long-necked sauropods, your head-shield-sporting ceratopsians, and so on. The distinctiveness of a group can make it difficult to determine how it evolved from an ancestor. Whales may be mammals (they nurse their young, for example), but they’re all fish-shaped.

Continue reading “Irish elk of the Jurassic” →

Don’t insult leeches. 

Originally published February 7, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.