A "toothy" baleen whale

A bit delayed. No worries though, I will soon be back up to speed with the news. I am also possibly looking into a new format so I can make quotes easier to distinguish from my typical rambles. I will promise however that the same color configuration will be used, the typical black and shades of beige. Any suggestions with links are welcome.

Whale fossil sports fierce teeth
Elli Leadbeater

From BBC News | Science/Nature

Palaeontologists have discovered a bizarre whale fossil in Australia with a set of fearsome teeth. The specimen has surprised scientists because it belongs to the group known as baleen whales. Modern day baleen whales are all placid, plankton eaters, but the new fossil shows the group were not always the ocean's gentle giants. Details of the 25 million-year-old find appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The small, large-eyed baleen whale used a fully developed set of teeth to hunt its prey. Scientists had thought that two groups of ancient whales evolved drastically different eating habits more than 34 million years ago.

Rodney Start, Museum of Victoria

They believed ancient whales that fed by filter feeding evolved to become today's enormous but passive baleen whales, and those that hunted became the ocean's giant predators, the toothed whales. Toothed whales include the killer whale, sperm whale and dolphin, whereas baleen whales are typified by the humpback and blue whale. The new specimen shows that ancient baleen whales probably hunted prey like their toothed relatives.

Modern-day baleen whales are named after their characteristic baleen, a comb-like structure between their jaws which allows them to filter tiny plankton from the sea to eat. Baleen is made of a substance called keratin, just like our fingernails and hair. "Specialised skull features tell us that this fossil is undoubtedly a baleen whale," said lead researcher Erich Fitzgerald of the University of Monash in Victoria, Australia.

"Surprisingly, it appears that the original features of baleen whales did not include the filter-feeding apparatus." Instead, the newly-discovered ancient whale probably used its large, sharp teeth to capture and chew prey, which it located using its large eyes.

Image: Erich MG Fitzgerald

"It's always been known that ancient baleen whales had teeth, but this fossil is very important because it looks like the teeth were not used for filter feeding," commented Mark Uhen, head of research at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Michigan, US. The fossil represents a previously unknown species, named Janjucetus hunderi after its teenage finder Staumn Hunter, who noticed it in an exposed boulder while surfing in 1997.

Janjucetus hunderi lived between 25 and 9 million years ago after the last common ancestor of the toothed and baleen whales. The species also has unusual hearing. Unlike modern baleen whales, this animal's hearing was probably specialised to detect very high-pitched sounds. This is similar to toothed whales, who now "echolocate", producing high-pitched soundwaves and listening to the echos to find prey.

Janjucetus' living descendents, the baleen whales, appear to have lost this ability, possibly because they no longer hunt large prey. Instead, their ears detect the very low-frequency bass sounds which we associate with whalesong. Despite its high-frequency hearing, the unusually large eyes of Janjucetus suggest that it probably used sight to find food items.

Spore the website

http://www.spore.com/


The new video game by TheSims creator Will Wright now has a wesbite. SPORE™ is an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space.

Look for updates to the SPORE™ site next week for the Leipzig Game Conference.

Returning from the depths

Myself with our new products this year: the "man bag." An Austrian gas mask bag to be correct.

Mr. Phil Manning of Manchester (possible graduate advisor?) and myself

Neal Larson (aka the ammonite guy) and myself

Pardon my random absence over the last 16 days. School has started up again and it has been a helluva week securing everything back into a fashionable order. Being my junior year, I am attempting at compressing all of my activities into my very active schedule: varsity tennis, visits to middle and elementary schools to teach kids palaeo, all my advanced placement courses I'm taking this year, church youth group and orchestra etcetera. I am checking and double checking to make sure my senior year is exactly how I want it...or at the very least as best as possible.

I have signed myself up for AP (advanced placement) Biology with in adjacent independent study course and Anatomy. I really want to take AP Environmental sciences as well, but my school district's lack of competent scheduling and demand of certain credits has disabled my ability to take such a course. I'm not happy about it either. Regardless, it also appears as if I will be relatively busy with examinations: AP Biology test, SAT subject test Biology E/M. I will be taking the 'E' version of the biology SAT by the way, which is more focused on ecological biology and evolution, as opposed to molecular biology and evolution.

This junior year, however, will be the year of college campus visits. I have already obtained the visit necessities list from the CollegeBoard site and I am prepared to venture off to some new school of thought. If you happen to be admissions director to a certain college and reading this blog post, please feel free to send me some of your school's information pamphlets. The decision to visit a particular college will vary with factors such as distance and cost to getting there and in the focus on my particular subject interest: evolutionary biology, osteology, phylogenetic systematics and vertebrate paleontology.

Cheers.

Each to their own I suppose

It is not a usual thing for me to do, to blast creationist with their ideas of palaeontology and fossils. As a Christian I feel embarrassed that others of the faith would go so far as to damn those who accept evolution and consider it evil and anti-God. Creationism has really become red in tooth and claw more than nature ever has done. Such attacks can be seen on the feedback page of the TalkOrigins site.

Some groups are more conservative and do not make such vicious attacks on evolutionist, albeit they seem to consider themselves the only people who interpret the evidence correctly and are likely to have very, fallacious information on the topic of the history of life on Earth. I've already pointed this out on another post that you can read about here. My only desire to see this new creation museum stems from my curiousity to see how these people have approached the issue of evolution and the interpretation of the evidence.

I certainly dislike the comments made by the ICR president John Morris concerning evolution. The article says that Morris believes the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man evolved from lower forms of life. "Americans just aren't gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish." Morris goes around using the same damned delusion that is completely wrong of evolutionary theory (which I have subsequently posted about too--view by clicking here) and shows how high these sorts of folks put humans on the pedestal of importance. The real underlying issue is that much of the human race thinks high of itself when compared to the rest of nature. We often define progress in a way that hinges on our view of ourselves, a way that relies on intellect, culture or the emotion that humans experience.


These Creation groups are full of anthropocentrism, regarding humans as the central element of the universe and interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience. They are simply repeating the acts of the Church and the Roman Inquisition that resisted Galileo discoveries of heliocentrism in the 1600's.

America is lucky. If there was no seperation of church and state, I would bet that we would be seeing modern day Galileos and Scopes still defending the science that only trys and seek for the truth of the natural world we live in. It's not about being anti-God, but most Creationists sure act as if that is the case.

'Creation Museum' Seeks to Disprove
Evolution, Paleontology, Geology

Complete article on FOXnews.com

PETERSBURG, Ky. — Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve. That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that's the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky. Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago.

Ken Ham standing in front of the new Creation Museum

"If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that's our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there," museum founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which is due to open next year. Ham, an Australian native who started the Christian publishing companyAnswers in Genesis in the late 1970s, said the goal of his privately funded museum is to change minds and rebut the scientific point of view.

"Genesis is not science," said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were."

John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Researchin San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man evolved from lower forms of life. "Americans just aren't gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish," he said.