Hairy Museum of Natural History

February 12, 2009 marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and 2009 also marks the susquecentennial of his most famous work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. There are a ton of posts, projects, and events celebrating these facts all over the web today, and, of course, darwinday.org is a great place to find information on a lot of them.

Back on Darwin Day 2004, HMNH Curator of Ich-theology Ray Troll and Kirk Johnson came through Albuquerque on one of the last legs of their epic Fossil Freeway adventure. That evening, the three of us got together and recited The Evolutionist’s Prayer, an ode to common descent that Ray and I composed for the occasion. Feb. 12 is a great time to reflect on our rich evolutionary heritage and deep connections to all life on this planet.

This year, Ray has released a new piece of art and music in honor of the occasion – check out Trollart.com and give his new song, “Fishface,” a listen!

Artwork © Ray Troll 2009

Other Darwin-inspired links of note:

• In other Darwinian music news, Thomas Holtz provides the lyrics to “The Twelve Days of Darwin.”
• ReBecca Hunt at Dinochick Blogs has some great Darwin art, and a couple of Ray Troll posts of her own.
• Seed Magazine has several articles, slideshows, and other tidbits as part of their Darwin 200 celebration—The Evolution of Life in 60 seconds and the Saved by Science slideshow are good places to start.
• The Daily Mammal has two drawings (so far) up in a “Darwin Day” series.
• Rigor Vitae shows the Evolution of a Public Image in honor of the day.
• I couldn’t agree more with John Hawks’ criticism of a recent article calling for the death of “Darwinism”.
• And, if you’ve never taken a look at Anne Weaver’s The Voyage of the Beetle, today would be an excellent day to do so!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Paleo-Pop, Webbery.

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Amanda, the Self-Designed Student, is within reach of winning a cash prize to help offset her collegiate expenses, and you can help—simply click on the vote box below (or click this link) to help her win the “My Favorite Toy” contest at brickfish:

What’s Your Favorite Toy? Brickfish

You are allowed to cast a vote every couple of hours, so vote early and often, as the saying goes. It looks like the contest is in its final few weeks, so there’s still plenty of chances to help a fellow paleo-blogger out.

There is also a prize for the entry that is linked to from the most websites—if you run a blog or other site, you can increase Amanda’s chances of winning by posting a link to her entry in the competition as well.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Webbery.

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Take a virtual stroll through the collections at Hominin.net, an in-process, open-access database of hominin fossils. Assembled by Kambiz Kamrani, Hominin.net can organize fossil speciemens by locality map, timeline, or taxonomy, and an extensive list of literature is available, listed by title or author.

Although the project is still in its early stages (only about 45 specimens are listed as of this posting), it is already showing signs of becoming an amazingly useful resource. It is great to see someone using the open-source Simile widgets to organize natural history specimens—the Timeline component definitely has a lot of potential for paleonotological content. I’m particularly excited about the following planned feature:

• Embeddable snippets of fossils to be used in blogs, websites, etc.

I’m eager to see how this will be implemented—not only would it be handy to have a collection of ‘stock’ images and info for hominin specimens at one’s disposal, it might also be a great guide for researchers and institutions interested in creating embeddable content for specimens and objects in all kinds of collections.

Tip of the Hairy Museum toupee to Afarensis for bringing this to my attention.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Hominids, Neogene, Webbery.

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Diagram of IVPP V 13240, Paratype of Odontochelys semitestacea. After Li et al. 2008.

Zach Miller, who runs the blog When Pigs Fly Returns, has a good-sized post up about the origin of turtle shells, especially in light of the recent discoveries of Chinlechelys and Odontochelys. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the same issues, and I’ve started by coming up with some color-coded diagrams of these unique Triassic testudines to look at how the different bones of the shell are expressed and interpreted. I’ll post more about them here eventually, but Zach’s been able to put them to good use in his latest post, How the Turtle Got Its Shell. Check it out!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Reptiles, Triassic, Webbery.

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LIFE magazine and Google have begun making millions of images from the LIFE photo archive available online. Some quick searches have already brought these interesting items to my attention:

• “Cave Man of Early Britain”, shown above, who seems quite a bit rougher around the edges than his rarified contemporary, l’Homme Neanderthal.
• A dramatically foreshortened moa.
• A Jurassic scene by early paleoartist Joseph Smit. Unsigned pieces that look like Smit’s work include this size comparison of a human, Diplodocus, and Gigantosaurus, and a couple of placid sauropods unperturbed by the kangaroo-hopping carnosaur (Laelaps?) entering from stage left.
• Paleolithic art authority Abbe Henri Breuil.
• Lots of AMNH exhibits and specimens:
  • Walter Granger and Barnum Brown alongside the AMNH Tenontosaurus.
  • Assembling the Anatotitan pair at the AMNH.
  • Working on the old Tyrannosaurus mount.
  • Cleaning a cast of the Styracosaurus skull.
  • The fossil of the gliding reptile Icarosaurus, before it flew the coop at the AMNH (and made its way back again).
  • A Placodus skeleton.
  • Dusting the Wilmette Meteorite.
• And this shot of teenager Tony Lessa sporting a Coelophysis on his ride.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, Paleo-Pop, Webbery.

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