Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Physical Anthropology category.
Chris Beard Fires Back on Ida
Filed in Ida, June 5, 2009, 7:25 pmApparently the backlash against the media storm that came in with Ida has begun. Chris Beard wrote in the New Scientist this week utterly dismissing Ida as anything but an adapoid. With a diagram. Where Beard sees Darwinius http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17173-why-ida-fossil-is-not-the-missing-link.html The main thrust: What does Ida’s anatomy tell us about her place on the family tree [...]
Weird mistake in D. masillae paper?
Filed in Ida,Rambling, May 24, 2009, 8:54 pmI noticed this reading through the paper for my last post. I’ll quote how the authors describe Table 3: Table 3 lists 30 anatomical and morphological characteristics commonly used to distinguish extant strepsirrhine and haplorhine primates. They were taken from the standard primate textbook by Fleagle [74], form the classic W. C. Osman Hill monographs [...]
Darwinius as a “Missing Link”
Filed in Ida, May 23, 2009, 8:48 pmI’ve finally gotten around to reading the PLoS ONE paper describing Darwnius masillae, the newly descrived adapoid from Messel, Germany, represented by a remarkably (95%) complete skeleton of an immature (approximately 1 y/o) female. The media blitz that accompanied the announcement of the fossil on May 20th put heavy emphasis on the notion that this [...]
Huge Little Adapoid
Filed in Ida, May 20, 2009, 4:43 pmIn storm of media hype, including a special tribute from Google, a new little adapiform fossil has surfaced from Messel, Germany, formerly of Archeopteryx fame. Her name is Darwinius masillae, or ‘Ida,’ apparently. And she is beautiful: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090519-missing-link-found.html
Art on the Walls?
Filed in Archaeology,Human Evolution, March 15, 2009, 1:35 pmThe blog’s new banner is of a scene in Lascaux Cave, a complex of caverns painted with some of the most beautiful animal imagery of the Upper Paleolithic, as well as enigmatic geometric figures and a single possible human. The caves and their imagery were considered so important they were declared a UNESCO World Heritage [...]
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