SCIENCE

Blog Carnival #26: Career Advice, Pink Floyd, Colorado Fossils and More…

November 29, 2010

Publish or Perish: At SV-POW!, Mike Taylor presents a tutorial on “How to become a palaeontologist.” His central message: write papers. “I know a whole bunch of people who should be published palaeontologists, but aren’t. Some of them know far, far more about extinct animals than I do, and I am frankly bewildered that they have somehow never made it into print: I assume they are letting themselves be defeated by some kind of psychological barrier.”

Say “Micropachycephalosaurus” Five Times, Fast: Everything Dinosaur makes the case for species pronunciation guides.

Pink Floyd and Paleontology: Yes, there is a connection.

Team Spirit: Dinochick provides us with this video of a drunken Bears fan climbing on top of the Brachiosaurus outside Chicago’s Field Museum: “You know you would like to do this. Maybe not in public, but how many of you have seen a sculpture or even a cast you think would be fun to scale?” (Not that the Field Museum lacks team spirit: back in April, the staff dressed the giant sauropod in a specially-made Blackhawks hockey jersey.)

Forewarned is Forearmed: Tetrapod Zoology publishes this extensive guide to the anatomy of Godzilla

A Mammoth Discovery: Bob’s Dinosaur Blog reports on a treasure trove of fossils discovered in Snowmass Village, Colorado: “a mere two weeks after a bulldozer operator accidentally unearthed a Woolly Mammoth skeleton while digging a reservoir, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science embarked on a full-throttle, week-long dig to recover as many bones from the site as possible before the onset of winter. So far, the results have been spectacular: workers have recovered the bones of five, count 'em, five Mastodons, two Woolly Mammoths, three prehistoric bison, one Megalonyx (the Giant Ground Sloth that was first discovered by Thomas Jefferson), and even an Ice Age deer.”

Survivalists: A mass extinction event threatens the denizens of Walcott’s Quarry! Can two plucky trilobites survive?

A Dinosaur Symphony: Palaeoblog commemorates the 70th anniversary of Walt Disney’s epic film, Fantasia: “Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ provided the score for the evolution of the Earth including a wonderful sequence on the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. Many school teachers actually showed this sequence in science class—that’s where I first saw it!”

Nazi Dinosaurs: The blog Lady, That's My Skull calls our attention to a 1943 edition of "Clue Comics," which recounts the adventures of the Boy King, "an exile from the Nazi-threatened land of Swisslakia who....fought spies and saboteurs that threatened America's security, using his wits, royal fortune and a skyscraper-sized Golem that only he could command." But Hitler has a trick up his sleeve and orders his minions to build a robot T-Rex. Does this mean the end for Boy King?!?

The entire gripping tale has been posted over at Flickr.