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POPSWho are Leakey's Angels? The third of Leakey's Angels is Birute Galdikas, a German-born Canadian who was introduced to Leakey in the 1970s. Unlike Goodall and Fossey, Galdikas actually had training and experience in the field, and she approached Leakey to discuss the studying of orangutans. Her studies took place in the jungles of Indonesia. Galdikas is credited with coining the term “Leakey's Angels,” discussing the three women in a 1995 book.
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POPSEarly Human Ancestors Not Like Chimps When Darwin first published “Origin of Species” and later “Descent of Man,” detractors declared that they “didn’t come from monkeys.” One cartoon of the day (late 1800s) showed Darwin as an ape. I guess it now looks like apes may have descended from US!
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POPSBye Bye Birdie: Famed Fossil Loses Avian Perch just one of several species of feathered dinosaurs preceding modern birds. It may not even be a direct ancestor. Such revisions make paleontology a science of second thoughts. Reconstructing the history of life, researchers thrash out theories of ancestry, behavior and biomechanics guided by hints from ancient bones. Archaeopteryx -- combining the feathers, wishbone and wings of a bird with the reptilian tail, teeth and claws of a dinosaur -- had already become a question mark. Newly discovered fossils have prompted scientists to revamp their assumptions about archaeopteryx's distinguishing features over the last decade. A cornucopia of fossil finds in China demonstrated that feathers coated many dinosaur species, not just birds. The newest finding, though, demonstrates that our understanding of even well-studied fossils like archaeopteryx -- scrutinized, measured, modeled for 150 years -- can still be upended.
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POPSMan-Eating Bird - Non-Fiction
WOW!!! With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller's sea eagle. And the bird's talons were as big as a tiger's claws. "It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child," said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. "They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine." Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. "In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation," Dr Scofield said. New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other continents in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. "Haast's eagle wasn't just the e
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POPSThe Dinosaur Fossil Wars Ever since he had heard about a private collection going up for sale in the mid-1990s, Frithiof, now 61, had been hunting dinosaurs. "I'd thought fossils were things you could see only in museums," he says. "When I learned you could go out and find stuff like that, to keep or even to sell, it just lit a fire in my imagination. I studied every book I could, learned techniques of extraction. Fossils inspire a powerful curiosity."
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POPS"Dinosaurs Were Airheads" continued: The analysis of the predatory dinosaurs revealed large olfactory areas, an arching airway that went from the nostrils to the throat, and many sinuses—the same cavities that give us sinus headaches. Overall, the amount of air space was much greater than the brain cavity.
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POPSLucy, the oldest hominid skeleton When we were at the museum visiting Body Worlds 2, volunteers were making plaster molds of dinosaur teeth and other interesting things. We picked up a cast of Lucy's footprint. My daughter is taking it for show and tell today. In preparation I looked up some facts on Lucy. I had no idea she was so tiny. She is shorter than my 5-year-old! Her footprint is so twee.
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POPSThe Jurassic Coast The nearest coast to where I lived as a boy. It sparked my interest in geology and paleontology. I was there again yesterday. Bliss!
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