She-Tirts

I think this is pretty close to what we're going with:




It's simple, which I feel it needs to be, but accurate enough without being overly cumbersome.

_Archosauria_ Show Logotype

Alternate:

Happy Birthday Charlie Darwin!

Charles Darwin's ideas weren't particularly new, per se, but he hit the highest, best notes of scholarship with his seminal work:

Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1st edition

Through his scholarship, he helped become one of the unifiers of biology. In spite of the myriad of changes the modern synthesis has undergone since then, he remains relevant reading.

Photographic Texture Studies for an Early Triassic Archosauromorph

Courtesy of Zach, I was able to shoot photos of his geckos (which were largely cooperative).

I'm posting the images here for general reference. The images were shot with the same Nikon D50 I use for animation; 60 mm Macro lens, fully manual.

New Beginnings...

Yesterday I quit my job, leaving two weeks notice in spite of the fact that I start the new job at 8 am on Tuesday. Due to the night-shift the old job had me working, I felt I could juggle both jobs until the two-weeks' notice expired. I don't know if management agrees with me, but at this point, management's agreement with me on anything is purely moot.

So why did I quit? Was I tired of getting paid anything but what I was worth? (A note to self for the future: verify in advance whenever an advertisement claims a hired applicant will be paid dependent upon experience; in this case, it was a falsehood.) Partly. But the stress was most of the reason.

I've started having extended panic attacks since, oh, about August of last year. This was... making it difficult to function, much less be happy or pursue anything that would make me happy.

And I have better things to do than wander through life and not be happy.

_Euparkeria_ study: 2

So how is the first member of the upcoming show coming?

Source material for Euparkeria is rather thin on the ground; my primary source of anatomic information comes from Robert L. Carroll's book, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution (1997). And it does feature some nice views of Euparkeria's skull (p 270).

Only...

The views presented are only in plan and elevation views. A section view of the skull is missing, so I derived this from the two existing views:



Note that it is orthographically rendered, and I have no idea if the eyes pointed quite that far forward. But from the three drawings I was able to sketch this pretty quickly:



Hang on, I think this would make a fine logo for the show! It just needs a bit of tweaking. Watch this blog for further updates.

Carroll, R. L. 1997. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. 7th printing. WH Freeman and Company, New York. p 270 and 264.

Where Are the Missing Links?

I've just reposted an old entry from the old journal, and it reminded me of a point I wanted to make in that post so long ago.

Every so often, the creationist canard "there are no missing links" will reappear like a gunshot-tattered zombie. Creationists and anti-intellectuals alike appear to take weird delight in stitching together this smelly, rotten argument, as though they really expect it to pass (this time for sure!) though the chainsaws of scientists and laypersons who know better.

The problem is (to extend my metaphor to perhaps not-unreasonable extents), science has progressed beyond the chainsaw when it comes to dealing with these oozy and invalid arguments. With every new major fossil taxa uncovered (like Tiktaalik, Indohyus and Yanoconodon and so on and so on) as well as yet another molecular study of extant organisms revealing even more evidence in support of what is already one of the best supported scientific theories, science now has chainsaws and grenades and sharp sticks and particle beams and... well, you get the point.

But I want to beat up on the zombie, too. So I typed this, which perhaps might make a few creationists think twice before reaching for their sewing needles and scissors before they wind up with gross gobbets of gray flesh splattered all over their smocks.

The literature doesn't really talk about missing links for the simple reason that they don't really exist--I mean, there're just not missing ("missing," in the sense of creationist use, implies "not there").

Now there really are unknown ancestor taxa that would link known taxa, but since you can't really have a lineage without ancestors, the fact that the ancestor is unknowable is irrelevant. (Arguing that is it is somehow relevant is like suggesting that knowing exactly who the mother is of a bunch of kids is somehow necessary in order to identify the kids as being human.)

If it lived, it had an ancestor. What animal the ancestor is is actually unimportant. If the ancestor were known (by accident, because, again, ancestors are unknowable), it would simply be very closely related to its descendants, and therefore close enough at hand anyway.)

But the gist is this: cladistically, closely related organisms cluster closely together.

Distantly related organisms will have a range of intermediates (transitional forms). That is, many many links "separate" them.

So setting aside the uselessness of the "no missing link" argument, my rejoinder is: what's missing about the links? Since we find so many of them, it's really not possible to regard them as "missing."