This past week on the Fossil Friday, I gave you what looked to me like a turkey leg. But actually it was a dino femur. Who was it that it belonged to? It was a Diplodocus! From Live Science: "Because Diplodocus could not elevate his head more than about 17 feet (5.4…
I’ve just returned from NCSE’s annual rafting trip down Grand Canyon, where Josh Rosenau, Genie Scott, and I regaled our fellow rafters with our unique “two model” approach. There are all kinds of Grand Canyon rafting charters that specialize in everything you can think of: yoga, en plein…
This week on Fossil Friday, I bring you the world's largest turkey leg! Well, no, not really, though the animal once attached could have tasted like chicken. This came from a pretty well-known dinosaur from the Jurassic, so I will give you no clues. What is this fossil and what animal is it…
NCSE is pleased to announce the next of a new series of on-line workshops aimed at broadening and deepening the networks that make our work possible. The next workshop focuses on on-line petitions as a tool in science education advocacy, with advice about how to write, promote, and use such…
I don’t know who put it on the Netflix queue, but a copy of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) arrived in my mailbox recently. That, of course, is the mockumentary starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the eponymous Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh…
Here we go again… Fossil suggests flight was common among bird-like dinosaurs Tail feathers suggest new dinosaur may have taken flight Dinosaurs could fly before birds? That’s no bird: This "four-winged" dinosaur looked like an airplane Don’t get me wrong; I love it when fossils make the…
Many years ago, I moved to Paris with only high school French to sustain me. Parisians have a reputation for—shall we say—brusqueness, and I had no shortage of embarrassing encounters that I interpreted as scorn for my weak French and wretchedly obvious American-ness. Over time as my French…
I mentioned recently that I was rereading Ray Ginger’s Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (1958) in order to prepare for a talk about the Scopes trial. While doing so, I took notes about more than just the ornate vocabulary, which I discussed in “A Ginger Glossary” (…
This past week on Fossil Friday, I gave you a stack of fossils all the way from Danville, Kentucky! What were they? It was a couple of Cystaster stellatus on a Rafinesquina alternata brachiopod dating from the Upper Ordovician. The C. stellatus are an extinct…