Extinct

The Lord God Bird Trailer

The Voice of America has announced that a new documentary film is in production about the ivory-billed woodpecker. The title of the new documentary by George Butler is The Lord God Bird. This film’s title, of course, reflects the name of the bestseller that appeared just as the news of the new video was hitting the media – Phillip Hoose’s The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). However, Phillip has confirmed that his book is not the foundation of this documentary. The VOA’s low-key release follows: A North American bird believed to have [...]

GEICO’s Cavemen – Neandertal Prejudice or Comedy?

What would happen if a small relict band of Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis) was discovered? What if they learned to speak some language known to modern humans (Homo sapiens) and tried to integrate into our society? For hominologists, such questions have been pondered for years, due to the fact that many of us have considered it a real possibility that Neandertals are behind reports of nuk-luk, Bushman, wudewasa (Eurasia’s Woodpeople) and other unknown hairy hominid sightings and encounters. (See The Field Guide of Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates, specifically on “Neandertaloids,” pages 13, 23-26, 52-53, 90-91, 118-119, and 170.) The issue [...]

Laotian Rock Rat: Definitely A Living Fossil

The Laotian rock rat (Laonastes aenigmamus) is a living fossil. New DNA results confirm it is the last surviving member of a once-large group of rodents that was known only by fossils, which supposedly vanished from the fossil record 11 million years ago. Surprise, this is the mammalian version of the coelacanth. Nobel Intent, at Ars Technica’s science-centric journal, summarizes the findings: DNA sequence analysis has now joined the argument and comes down strongly in favor of the living fossil contention. Not only is the rock rat like nothing we’ve ever seen before, it’s not much like anything we’ve ever [...]

Are Cell Phones Wiping Out Bees?

The mysterious vanishings of honeybees through Eurasia and America is beginning to worry people. Across the country, beekeepers are grappling with the bizarre disappearance of hundreds of thousands of honeybees that leave their hives and are never seen again. In many cases, all that is left is an empty hive, a handful of sick bees and a swarm of unanswered questions.Gary Campbell, “The great honeybee mystery,” Fort Collins Weekly, April 14, 2007 Could it be cell phones? Read Campbell’s complete article here. How fragile is the genetic basis of the bees? The current bee population in the United States is [...]

KNM-ER 1470: An African Fossil Ape?

KNM-ER 1470 = Homo rudolfensis = ancient ape? The skull above was discovered by Bernard Ngeneo in 1972, at Koobi Fora in Kenya. It has an estimated age of 1.9 million years. Originally, KNM-ER 1470 was claimed to be a Homo habilis skull. The braincase was found to be surprisingly modern in many respects, much less robust than any australopithecine skull. It also did not have the usual robustness and large brow ridges of Homo erectus. The face, in contrast, is extremely large and robust. In the last few years, an increasing number of anthropologists have classified this skull as [...]