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Hi everyone,

For those of you who haven’t spent the last few days watching a certain movie involving bats, I figured it might interest you to know that I’m back on. Still a few things to do, like reconstructing the blogroll, and re-posting quite a few comics. Unfortunately, I’ve lost quite a few posts forever, this being the final straw that compelled me to leave my former host, Yahoo.

I had a really unacceptable number of problems with Yahoo over the months I hosted with them. My site seemed to slow to a crawl, or go offline altogether, with alarming regularity. But the final straw was when I tried to access the site to post, and found it missing completely. It seemed like a good time to move on.

eTrilobite.com is now hosted by Dreamhost, one of Wordpress.org’s recommended blog hosts. So far, I’m really happy with it. It autoinstalls Wordpress 1.6, saving me some trouble. So far, performance seems much better as well.

So I’m now back online, and looking forward to getting back to some science blogging. The really annoying thing about all these technical problems is that it hurts me in my attempts to build up the readership.

*update* Thanks to the (apparently) more rigid rules for themes in WP 1.6, I was able to find and fix the problem that had kept my RSS feed from working. RSS can now be enjoyed by all! Sign up on the home page. *update*

It seems that my domain transfer has worked. I’m now on my new host and getting everything set back up. I hope to have the website fully operational in the next 24 hours. Keep checking back! New posts coming soon

I was going to post something today, but instead, I’ve been sending nasty emails. Today cafepress decided to remove one of my designs for copyright infringement. Here is the design below. I suspect some overzealous cafepress employee considered this to be an unacceptable infringment on Indiana Jones copyrights. Below is the deeply offensive usage of the quote “you call this,” from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

Obviously, I’m trying to get the design reinstated. I’ll keep you all updated.

So I hinted yesterday that I would be doing something special for the Flying Trilobite edition the the Boneyard this Saturday. But at that point, I didn’t really know what it would be. Well, now I do. Ladies and Gents, I’ll be producing a real live “meatspace” work of art for the carnival!

You’ve never seen any of my offline art before, and there is a reason for this. A lot of the paleoart I do involves fairly accurate recreations of various creatures. My offline art is too abstract for that purpose.

You can probably see this in the oil pastel piece to the left, which is based on a petrocan station just beyond Hope, British Columbia (the wording is intentional, haha).

But, I made up my mind, and this morning I set out to get my hands dirty. First, I had to find a decent pencil. I was originally thinking charcoal, but my stash of the stuff has been crushed to powder. Oh well. Eventually, I found a non-HB pencil. Not actually sure what it is, as it is unlabeled, but it’s softer and darker than an HB. Super.

So, all ready to go… but what to draw? I tried a few traditional dinosaur scenes, but after a few minutes I realized that wasn’t working. I really had nothing, so I just started to doodle. I mean, this is the reason I never do offline paleoart in the first place! For some reason, the KT extinction was on my mind. As I doodled, I thought about how I really don’t like many of the “dinosaurs running from fiery meteorite” scenes I have seen over the years. And lo and behold, my doodling turned into just such a scene!

Actually, I think it’s kinda surprising how the piece is turning out. I’m really putting the art back into paleoart! Obviously, it’s not done yet, but I hope to finish it up by tomorrow or maybe friday, in time for the Boneyard.

Doubtless many of you have heard of the Boneyard blog carnival. Well, it’s being hosted this coming Saturday at The Flying Trilobite, my fellow trilobite-centric paleoartist. In his post, he challenged us all to come up with something artistic for the carnival, and I feel I should oblige.

So, for the next few days I’ll be posting some fresh artwork. Not 100% sure what it will be yet, but I’m hoping I can scrape something together.

Oh, and the “Top 3″ Feature has been moved to Wednesday, so you can look forward to that tomorrow!

Darren Naish (of Tetrapod Zoology), and Mark Witton recently published a paper on Azhdarchid Pterosaurs in PLoS ONE, entitled A Reappraisal of Azhdarchid Pterosaur Functional Morphology and Paleoecology.

The paper looks at available evidence, and concludes that Azhdarchids were not skim-feeders, flying low above the water and scooping up fish. Rather, it seems they were terrestrial stalkers, walking on four legs and hunting terrestrial prey.

I’m not finished reading the entire paper, but so far, it’s an interesting read. For those of you not so keen on diving into a technical paper, Mark and Darren have set up a blog with a dumbed-down version of the paper. It’s called Azhdarchid Paleobiology.

But the main result of all this is that I’ve gotten a lot more interested in Pterosaurs. Expect more writings in the near future!

3. Dig Into the Past: Polo!
Dig Into the Past is a blog of the Houston museum of Natural History. In this post, Steven recounts the first day of a dig with the HMNH paleontology bigwigs, including Robert Bakker! I know I’m jealous.

2. The Speculative Dinosaur Project
We all know that a meteorite finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago… but what if it hadn’t? The SDP seeks to answer that question. I know, I know, it’s not a blog. But it’s a cool concept, and a huge amount of work has gone into it. So jump in, the dinos are fine.

1. Laelaps: Paleontological Profiles: Michael Skrepnick
Being a dabbling paleoartist myself, I tend to latch onto interesting tidbits about other artists. Brian Switek interviews the totally awesome paleoartist Michael Skrepnick.

Considering the war of attrition over the Theory of Evolution that persists even today, it is hard not to imagine Charles Darwin as a radical, a brilliant scientist, bent on shattering the theistic view of life. Certainly, anti-evolutionists would love us to believe that Darwin was radical, was a fascist, also a communist, and the founder of the modern concept of genocide. Of course, none of this could be farther from the truth. Charles Darwin was not a radical, but rather a product of the time in which he lived. A time vastly, and perhaps purposefully misunderstood by many today.

Darwin was 28 years old when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne. By then, Britain was already changing. Over the course of his adult life, Darwin saw Britain’s agrarian economy industrialized, and its culture modernized.

Science was changing too. Until sometime during the nineteenth century, science and religion had lived together in relative harmony. The first half of the century saw the publishing of influential works blending science and theology, including Natural Theology (1802), and The Bridgewater Treatises (1833-36). These works argued that evidence for Genesis could be found in the natural world.

But by the time Darwin published Origin of Species (1851), the ground had started to shift. The ideas of post-revolutionary French biologists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck were starting to make inroads in Britain, and home-grown scientists, especially geologists, where starting to question theistic science. Meanwhile, an Evangelical movement was underway in Britain, fully committed to a literal interpretation of Genesis. On top of that, working class radicals were quick to point out the danger this “new science” posed to belief.

So to paraphrase Billy Joel, Darwin didn’t start the fire. But needless to say, the debate over Origin of Species quickly became heated. Darwin’s work became one of several flashpoints where various forces fought for control of science.

It should be noted of course, that this “crisis of faith,” occurred in only certain sectors of society. The rapidly expanding middle class remained overwhelmingly religious, and the flow of scientific works written by clergy continued through the entire period. It is notable though, that science and religion were increasingly regarded as separate spheres. Faith was largely undiminished, but science was allowed to continue independent of it.

So no, Darwin was not a radical, being by all accounts a mild individual. But in many ways, he lived in a radical time. Most people, when thinking about the Victorian era, seem to picture a “stodgy” time, characterized by rigid morality, runaway British imperialism, and discrimination. All that may be true, but it ignores the huge cultural forces that helped separate religion and science, to the lasting benefit of humanity.

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