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New Commentary Stirs Dino-Bird Brouhaha
The chicken on the table, the pigeon on the street, the parrot in the zoo: all of them are living descendants of dinosaurs. Over the past ten years a flood of fossil evidence, from evidence of bird-like breathing apparatus to remnants of pigments in preserved feathers, has confirmed beyond a reason...
February 16, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Welcome to the Year of the Tiger
The Lunar New Year was on Sunday, welcoming in the year of the Tiger. The World Wildlife Fund has taken that as a sign to launch their own tiger campaign "Tx2: Double or Nothing" with the aim of doubling the wild tiger population by 2022, the next year of the Tiger.Like many large predator species ...
February 16, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
How Will Climate Change Affect the Pika?
Could this cute little pika disappear, a victim of climate change? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says no; the agency declined to place the mammal on the Endangered Species List last Friday.The American pika (Ochotona princeps) is a cousin of the rabbit, though smaller and lacking the bunny's f...
February 10, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Winter Birds: Saved by the Suet?
There's nothing like 30 inches of heavy, sticky snow to concentrate a flock of birds at a bird feeder. I've seen more than a dozen different species at my backyard feeder since the storm hit. I like to think all that seed and suet is helping them survive a miserable winter, but is it true?Apparent...
February 08, 2010 |
By Laura Helmuth
Dinosaurs, Now in Living Color
For the first time ever, paleontologists can look at dinosaurs in color.In last week's issue of the journal Nature, scientists described the discovery of melanosomes, biological structures that give feathers their color, in the wispy "dinofuzz" of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx. Not only did ...
February 05, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
How Sleepy Are Sloths and Other Lessons Learned
Smithsonian scientists use radio technology to track animals in an island jungle in the middle of the Panama Canal
February 03, 2010 |
By Megan Gambino
New, Bird-Like Dinosaur Solves Evolutionary Puzzle
About a year and a half ago, as my first post on Dinosaur Tracking, I wrote about the discovery of a tiny, termite-eating dinosaur called Albertonykus. It belonged to one of the strangest groups of dinosaurs recognized to date. Called the Alvarezsaurids, these dinosaurs were covered in feathers, ha...
February 01, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Fossil Feathers May Preserve Dinosaur Colors
At one point or another, almost every general book about dinosaurs I have ever seen has said the same thing: we cannot know what color dinosaurs were. Scientists have found the skin impressions of some specimens, but as far as we know these traces contain nothing that might tell us what color those...
January 28, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Spiders "Under The Influence"
It hasn’t taken much research (aside, I guess, from trial-and-error) to know humans under the influence of anything, from martinis to marijuana, tend to function less efficiently .But that doesn’t seem true for certain spiders, according to research done by William Eberhard, an entomologist at the ...
January 27, 2010 |
By Erica R. Hendry
Picture of the Week—Spike-headed Katydid
Yasuní National Park, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, according to scientists who recently completed a study examining the park's plant and animal populations. A single hectare (2.47 acres) of land, for example, contains 655 tree species, more than you ...
January 22, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
See Scotland from an Eagle's Point of View
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to soar like an eagle? A BBC television show trained a golden eagle to carry two tiny cameras and then sent the bird flying over Scotland. If you could see the world from an animal's point of view, which one would you pick to put cameras on?(Hat tip: Bad...
January 20, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—An Ostrich
One of the oldest books about animals is the Historia animalium, by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner (1516-1565). It's really a collection of five books, published from 1551 to 1558, that include animals both real and imaginary (e.g., unicorns and sea monsters). The image above is a page from vol...
January 15, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Birds and the Bees and the...Crickets?
Orchids of the Angraecum genus are famous—in evolutionary biology, at least—because of the comet orchid, A. sesquipedale, of Madagascar. After Charles Darwin examined this orchid, he hypothesized in 1862 that, based on the length of the flower's nectar-spur, there would be a a moth with an equally ...
January 14, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Advice for Tarantula Owners: Wear Goggles
Eye doctors in England have some advice for tarantula owners: wear protective glasses when caring for your pet.The Chilean Rose tarantula (Grammostola rosea), the species of tarantula most likely to be found in your local pet shop, has tiny hairs on the rear portion of its body. If the spider feels...
January 04, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Truth About Lions
The world's foremost lion expert reveals the brutal, secret world of the king of beasts
January 2010 |
By Abigail Tucker
Man-Eaters of Tsavo
They are perhaps the world’s most notorious wild lions. Their ancestors were vilified more than 100 years ago as the man-eaters of Tsavo
January 2010 |
By Paul Raffaele
The Call of the Panama Bats
Scientist Elisabeth Kalko uses high-tech equipment to track and study the 120 bat species in the region
December 28, 2009 |
By Megan Gambino
Were Feathered Dinosaurs Venomous?
Though its dinosaurs looked pretty good, Jurassic Park was not particularly accurate as far as science was concerned. One of the real howlers that sent paleontologists reeling was the decision to make Dilophosaurus, one of the largest of the early predatory dinosaurs, the dinosaur equivalent of a s...
December 22, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Were Dinosaurs Meant to Fly?
One of the most important insights Charles Darwin had was that evolution does not follow a pre-ordained path. There is no evolutionary endpoint that organisms are striving toward. The "endless forms most beautiful" we observe in nature are both shaped by adaption to local conditions and constrained...
December 16, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The Most Ferocious Man-Eating Lions
Africa's lions may usually prey on zebras or giraffes, but they also attack humans, with some lions responsible for over 50 deaths
December 16, 2009 |
By Abigail Tucker
