Last week, on Fossil Friday, I posted a picture of one of my favorite fossils. This one is not unique; it is one of the most common fossils found across the world and as a result it is wildly popular. You can find them in most paleontology collections, natural history museum…
This week on Fossil Friday, I bring you my favorite fossil. Found all over the world, these carnivorous invertebrates went extinct 65 million years ago. They are one of the most abundant fossils found today. What are these organisms and who are their modern relatives?…
It seems like just yesterday, doesn’t it? But today, August 29, 2013, is the 89th anniversary of the Science League of America. The original Science League of America, of course, not the blog. When Maynard Shipley was giving a talk on evolution in San Francisco on August 29, 1924, he asked those…
Wednesday night was retirement celebration night for NCSE friend Judy Scotchmoor at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. The education director (or to give her full title, Assistant Director for Outreach and Education) at UCMP for decades, Judy has made UCMP a model for academic…
A new poll commissioned by Carbon Brief investigates public opinion about climate change in the United Kingdom. Given the choice of three claims about the occurrence of climate change, 56% of respondents preferred "Climate change is happening and is mostly caused by humans," 37% preferred "…
UPDATE: Exxon Mobil is one of the signatories of a document from the business community supporting the Next Generation Science Standards, which include climate change and human impacts on the environment as integral components. -MM As glaciers around the world, including the…
Don’t ask why, but I was reading Philip Larkin’s Required Writing over the weekend. As the title jokingly suggests, it’s a collection of pieces “produced on request,” as Larkin explains in his preface. Larkin, of course, is the English poet and novelist famous for his glum lyricism;…
Denial—or writing about it—seems to be all the rage these days, with a New York Times op-ed by Adam Frank entitled "Welcome to the Age of Denial" coming along shortly after Time published a piece by Mary Pipher—“We Are All Climate Change Deniers”—as well as a look at the…
Recently the online edition of the Grand Island Independent, a newspaper in Grand Island, Nebraska, carried a story with the prosaic headline "Northwest school board begins budget work." This came to my attention through the magic of the search engine because, amid many paragraphs about…