CNN reports on cougar sightings in the town of Blackstone, Virginia, a bit southwest of Richmond. The official line goes that since mountain lions (Felis concolor) were wiped out along the eastern seaboard in the early 1900s, they haven't been found anywhere except for a relict population in the Florida Everglades (where they are called "panthers"). But this one little town in the Virginia Piedmont has had more than the average number of sightings. I think it would be great if mountain lions reestablished themselves in the hills of the Old Dominion. Our deer population is out of control, and while it's unsettling to not be at the top of the food chain, ecosystem coherence takes a higher priority in my mind. Along similar lines, in 2004 it was reported that coyotes had moved back into Rock Creek Park, the large national park that runs through the heart of northwest Washington, DC. Park officials have suggested they wouldn't be surprised if black bears moved back in too.

Labels: critters, dc, florida, mammals, virginia

Labels: fossils, mammals, meetings, oceans, psw, smithsonian

Over the past couple of weeks, I've watched a number of videos that readers of this blog may be interested in. Yesterday, I blogged about A Private Universe and Minds of Our Own. Let me mention a few others today.

The Life of Mammals is a BBC production by the great David Attenborough, who also made Life of Birds, Life in the Freezer, Trials of Life, etc. etc. etc. (Attenborough has been making nature documentaries for the BBC since the late Miocene.) If you're into geology as part of a larger natural system, or if you happen to be a mammal yourself, this is a series well worth watching. Attenborough has a signature style involving showing up in different corners of the Earth, and carrying on a continuous narration the whole time. One moment he's in Tasmania, the next in Brazil, but his thought process is uninterrupted. The discussion is of the highest quality, without being too technical. He's got a real gift for this business. Five stars.

I also watched Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, from the Discovery Channel. It's about past creatures; Cenozoic mammals and birds. Because the animals it describes are extinct, it can't have footage of the narrator (Kenneth Branagh) strolling amongst the entelodonts or Andrewsarchus. Instead, they've used puppets and lots of computer generated animation to depict their subject. They're pretty clever about this, using "film" techniques that give it the flavor or an actual nature documentary: They mimic night-vision footage, for instance, as well as "handheld" camera shakiness, herds fleeing an overhead "helicopter" perspective, and the subjects nosing up to the "camera lens." While the animals they describe are quite interesting, I found the production to be a bit on the bombastic side, with pounding music intended to raise the viewers' adrenaline levels during a hunt scene, and so on. All told, the content wasn't as good as Life of Mammals, but I appreciated the way they handled the production, so I'd give it 3.5 stars.

Labels: critters, fossils, mammals, movies, teaching, tv

A new study in Current Biology looks at mitochondrial DNA evidence from 160 woolly mammoth fossils on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge, and finds that the beasts trooped east from Asia into North America, and then marched back again 40,000 years ago, at which point the Asian mammoths slid into decline and extinction. The interpretation by the study's authors is that the North American prodigal mammoths returned to the mother country and possibly wiped out their Asian cousins.

The original article on the Current Biology* site. *Link wasn't working quite right this morning...
Scientific American's treatment of the story.
An article in the New York Times reviewing the study.

Labels: alaska, critters, fossils, mammals, pleistocene, russia

Okay, so we've all heard what a stinker the new movie 10,000 B.C. is, right? I actually went to see it, on Geotimes' nickel, along with a couple of other scientists so we could assess the scientific validity of the film for the magazine. Afterwards, I went to enter my own "review" into Netflix (2 stars out of 5) and I noticed there was another "10,000 B.C." film in the Netflix library: "L.A. 10,000 B.C.," a program from the Discovery Channel that examined the natural history of the Los Angeles area during that same time. I decided to check it out, and last night I watched it.

My brief review: It's not really a traditional natural history program. Instead it takes fossil evidence and uses it as a starting point for a "reality T.V." style stunt program. They take three L.A. stunt actors and "train" them to be Ice Age hunter-gatherers. Then they build pneumatic robots to mimic the teratorn and Columbian mammoth, and the stuntmen and women have to battle them. No joke. This resulted in some cool visuals, though: the mammoth crushing a ten-pound can of tomatoes and having all that red spray everywhere (mimicking the head of a Clovis hunter). And the footage of the stuntman being tossed thirty feet through the air by the "angry" robot mammoth was kind of cool too.

But you can't really call that a nature program. There were some cool facts presented, but the majority of the film was devoted to sensationalism of the encounters between humans and these Pleistocene species. The film was also very repetitive, taking half an hour's worth of material and stringing it out into 1.5 hours. It appeared to have been designed so anyone channel-surfing could get an orientation as to what the program was all about regardless of when they tuned in. That's kind of lame if you're watching the whole thing from start to finish, methinks.

Labels: birdies, cenozoic, mammals, movies, tv