Coyote Crossing

Darwinius masillae

Darwinius masillae, an Eocene primate fossil. Photo courtesy PLoS One

[UPDATE: Carl Zimmer deflates some of the hype as well.]

Crazy busy today — first actual paid work in months — but I couldn’t let this announcement go uncommented. What a

Late-Breaking Pleistocene Desert Woodrat News

A woodrat in Utah’s Great Basin is surrounded by toxic juniper leaves, which is much of its diet. Credit: Denise Dearing, University of Utah

As the U.S. Southwest grew warmer between 18,700 and 10,000 years ago, juniper trees vanished from what

I Want My MammothTV

(Half my readers are gonna think the title to this post is with-it and happening, and the other half will find it an appealingly obscure retro-historical reference. It’s win-win!)

Via The Excavatrix, Paleolab Guy Trevor Valle and Zed the Mammoth

Protect Gold Butte

Most of you have never heard of it, but northeast of Las Vegas, in one of the least-visited parts of the continental United States, a desert treasure in Nevada needs your support.

I visited Gold Butte for the first time in 1997. I was just

Who says I haven’t accomplished anything in this life?

… (continues)

Paleontology

[Time to haul this one out of the archives, what with all the targazing I’ve done the last couple days.]

Paleontology

“What is it that sets us apart,” she asked,
“from sunset or sierra?
What is the line between ourselves
and the terrain from

Breaking Pleistocene Update

I went over to the Page Museum this morning to get a look at some of the fossils they pulled out from underneath the May Company parking lot.

I got a handful of blurry, underexposed photos with my phone. They’re here.

On a side note, why is it

Major cache of fossils unearthed in Los Angeles

From the Los Angeles Times:

Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils

Spermophilus

Here is a fine, very well-fed individual of the species Spermophilus variegatus, also known as the rock squirrel. This one happened to be working the crowd outside the El Tovar on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, but the species ranges throughout

By A Nail

A running coyote, painting by Carl Dennis Buell

The ancestor of all dogs climbed trees like a cat.

Or so the experts hypothesize. The raccoon-sized, foxy omnivore Prohesperocyon is as likely a candidate for the ancestor of all dogs, wolves and

Desert Bones

Despite its dangerous reputation among non-physicists, the typical uranium atom is only weakly radioactive. More than 99 percent of the uranium found in nature consists of the isotope U-238, whose atomic nucleus contains 92 protons and 146

Not to scale

The Raven had come up to spend Thanksgiving in the desert, and we did. Rather than feasting, we whiled away that holiday with a long walk in the rainy creosote, watching dark winter storms trail through the Ivanpah Valley. Friday was taken up with

The Memory of Water

This is my whole life: driving alone through the landscapes of the arid West. There is someone waiting for me at home, or there is no one waiting for me at home, or I am already home, watching the far horizon recede through the dust-spattered