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The End of the Red Deer River Dinosaur Expedition (For Now)
One month ago I wrote about the efforts of paleontologist Darren Tanke and crew to launch a dinosaur-hunting expedition along Alberta's Red Deer River using the same techniques employed by famous fossil collectors Barnum Brown and Charles H. Sternberg. That journey has now come to a premature end.A...
July 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
50 Years of Chimpanzee Discoveries at Gombe
Fifty years ago today, Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve (now Gombe National Park) in Tanzania and began documenting the lives of the chimpanzees that lived there. When Goodall ended her fieldwork to advocate for the chimps and the environment in general, other researchers too...
July 14, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Painting With Penicillin: Alexander Fleming's Germ Art
The scientist created works of art using microbes, but did his artwork help lead him to his greatest discovery?
July 12, 2010 |
By Rob Dunn
Hunting Dinosaurs by Boat
Between 1910 and 1916, during the second great dinosaur "bone rush" in North America, the famous fossil hunters Barnum Brown and Charles Sternberg engaged in a bit of friendly competition along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada. The areas along the banks, often inaccessible by land, were rich i...
June 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Leonardo da Vinci - Paleontology Pioneer
Although he’s been dead for nearly 500 years, Leonardo da Vinci is still remembered as the quintessential Renaissance man, a polymath whose curiosity and creativity ranged widely among the arts and sciences. One of his interests was the study of fossils. In a new paper in the journal Palaios, Andre...
June 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
When Diplodocus Invaded Europe
On July 4, 1899, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie finally got his Diplodocus. He had set his eye on this fossil prize in the fall of the previous year when the New York Journal ran a fanciful illustration of the giant dinosaur peeping into a 10th story skyscraper window, and after some initial disa...
June 09, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Rare Meteor Event Inspired Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass includes the poem "Year of Meteors, (1859-60)" in which he documents many events in those years—including the hanging of abolitionist John Brown and the election of Abraham Lincoln. He also includes descriptions of a comet and meteors:Nor the comet that came unannounc...
June 07, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What Does an Eclipse Look Like from Space?
If you have no knowledge of how the Earth and Sun and Moon move, an eclipse is a scary thing. With no warning, the Sun goes black and your world turns dark. An eclipse, however, is really just the shadow of the Moon passing over the Earth, as seen in the above photo (a NASA image taken by an astron...
May 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
American Wines With Native Vines?
First it was pet turtles and now it’s wine grapes—I just can’t stop thinking about what it means to be native. The United States ferments 700 million gallons of wine each year, most of it from the sugary mash of Vitis vinifera, a grape species imported from the Old World. Yet North America boasts a...
May 20, 2010 |
By Brendan Borrell
Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex
There are at least two stories behind every dinosaur skeleton you see at a museum. There is the story of the animal itself, its life and evolution, but there is also the story of its discovery, and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City many of the fossils on display attest to t...
May 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The Dwarf Dinosaurs of Haţeg Island
For hundreds of years, people have been finding the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in Romania's Haţeg basin. The Cretaceous-age deposits are remnants of prehistoric islands that sported their own unique faunas, but in the days before fossils were recognized as being the remain...
May 07, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Bone-Hunter Biographies
Finding, excavating, preparing, studying and mounting dinosaur skeletons is hard work. We marvel at the articulated bones of these creatures in museums, and while each skeleton tells the story of the creature it once belonged to, there is also the story of its discovery. These stories are often jus...
May 04, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Q and A with Barron Hall, Veterinary Dentist
Root canals on cheetahs, lions and gorillas is just another day at the office for veterinary dentist Barron Hall
May 2010 |
By Megan Gambino
Lost Soviet Reflector Found on the Moon
In "Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe" from the April issue of Smithsonian, writer Richard Panek describes an experiment that measures the distance between the Earth and the Moon:Twenty times a second, a laser high in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico aims a pulse of light at t...
April 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Tyrannosaurus rex, the "Prize Fighter of Antiquity"
It has now been 105 years since the famous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex was described by the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, and just about every major dinosaur museum has at least one skeleton of the terrifying predator in their paleontology exhibits. Thanks to the discovery of numerous indiv...
April 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
UPDATED: The World's Worst Oil Spills
I've been thinking a lot lately about oil spills. At the beginning of the month, a Chinese freighter ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, grinding a couple miles coral into dust and leaking oil along the way. A couple of weeks ago came news of a new study showing that o...
April 27, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
How Dryptosaurus Got Its Name
In 1866, back when the scientific study of dinosaurs was only just beginning in North America, the naturalist E.D. Cope received word that workers at the West Jersey Marl Company in Gloucester County, New Jersey, had discovered the gigantic bones of an unknown fossil animal. As Cope did much of his...
April 19, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Little Ice Age Art
One of the most iconic images people conjure up when they think of the Netherlands of the past has to be ice skaters on canals. This painting, Ice Skating near a Village, appears in an exhibition (which closes July 5) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C of work by Dutch artist Hendric...
April 16, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Dinosaur Casualties of World War I
On December 6, 1916, two years into "the war to end all wars," a German naval crew destroyed a set of 75-million-year-old dinosaur skeletons
April 13, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Accepting the Idea of Extinction
Some scientists say that we are living in a new epoch of geological time—one they call the Anthropocene—that is marked by what may be the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet. A scary number of creatures have gone extinct in recent human memory, some of them even in my lifetime. No on...
March 31, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
