Hairy Museum of Natural History

The repeated reminders at A Blog Around the Clock have inspired me to check out a nifty new undertaking: The Beagle Project aims to build a replica of the HMS Beagle, stock it with sailors and seaworthy scientists, and circumnavigate the globe on a modern day voyage of inquiry and discovery.

The most famous passenger on the original Beagle was a young Charles Darwin, and the insights he gained during his travels would later inspire his famous theory of Natural Selection. The Beagle Project is hoping to inspire a new generation of researchers by retracing the route of Darwin’s voyage, collecting new data, and comparing current observations with those made during the 1830s. Those working on the Project aim to have the new Beagle set sail in 2009, as part of the celebrations marking Darwin’s 200th birthday.

Read all about it on their website and blog, and if you are similarly inspired by the idea, consider tossing a few pounds their way.

Monday the 12th is Darwin Day, after all, and there’s no better way to honor the founding father of biology’s Grand Unifying Theory. But if you need another reason to reach for your wallet, check out the participants in the Beagle Bring and Blog sale, organized by MissPrism, for a chance to convert your donation into fantastic Darwin-Day prizes!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Paleo-Pop.

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A couple of links from the Age of Mammals:

First up, Debby Cotter Kaspari shows off her excellent painting of the gigantic camel Megatylopus, enlarged to its mind-boggling life-size for an exhibit at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Kaspari’s blog, Drawing the Motmot, is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of natural science.

Afarensis’ “Friday Primate” this past week was the Dryomomys szalayi, a Late Paleocene plesiadapiform from the Clarks Fork Basin of Wyoming. Plesiadapiforms were squirrely little tree-dwellers that evolved shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct. Their exact relationships have been hard to pinpoint, but the recently-described skeletons of D. szalayi and the contemporary plesiadapiform Ignacius clarkforkensis have led researchers to conclude that plesiadapiforms were true primates. This makes them some of the earliest known members of our own mammalian order, and should help shed some light on how primates first evolved. Additional resources about this story can be found at Anthropology.net and Palaeoblog.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cenozoic.

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So, while I was making some corrections to this site’s code, I decided to take the plunge and add a couple of new navigation structures—the online equivalent of upgrading the museum’s wayfinding signage. If you’ll turn your attention to the left-hand column, you should notice a veritable rainbow of options to assist you, our valued visitor, in getting the most out of your Hairy Museum experience.

First up, a usable timeline. HMNH entries have been sorted by geologic time periods almost since the blog began, but they were never presented in any meaningful order or context. But now, everything is in the proper order, and we’ve got context coming out the wazoo! For example, pointing to the ‘Cretaceous’ link in the timeline will bring up a tooltip giving you the age of the Cretaceous Period, and clicking on it will load up every HMNH post about things that happened during that time.

The periods are nested, so that by clicking on the ‘Mesozoic’ link you can load up all entries in the ‘Triassic,’ ‘Jurassic,’ and ‘Cretaceous’ categories. And the colors are reasonable approximations of the hues specified by the Commission de la Carte Géologique du Monde for geologic maps and timelines. So it’s not just fruity, it’s international-standards-compliant!

Below the timeline is a table of categories arranged phylogenetically, or by evolutionary relationship. Right now it’s just the chordates—yes, there are a few invertebrate posts floating around, but for now this is a good start. These categories are also nested: selecting ‘Bony Fish,’ for instance, will load up every post on fish, tetrapods, reptiles, birds, and mammals. (For why this is so, look here.) As far as I know, there’s no international body specifying colors for taxonomic groups, so I just went with my aesthetic judgement on this one.

Feel free to poke through the new organization and see how it works. If anything seems unusual/erroneous/broken, or if you have any thoughts on how it could be made better, by all means leave a comment or send me an email. Enjoy your visit!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Rogaine.

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