Wonderful Novel with a Tinge of Cryptozoology

At the Water's Edge
Sarah Gruen
Spiegel & Grau
368pp.

This is a magical novel, weaving fact and fiction together to set the scene for one troubled American wife's World War II venture to Scotland with her despicable husband.  The people, the lake, and the maybe-there monster are all lovingly depicted along with the times.  If it's a half-notch below Water for Elephants (one of my favorites among all modern novels), It is nevertheless superb in every way. I know a lot of the monster-related history, and Gruen uses much of it, tweaking it occasionally to suit her narrative (as when the allegedly hoaxed "Surgeon's photograph" become a real hoax created by the protagonist's father in law).Gruen  puts us firmly, flawlessly into the time and place and explores life through the eyes of Madeline Hyde, a would-be independent woman in a very constricted life.  She's never preachy about the oppression of women in those days (which, among the upper crust, included lobotomies when necessary to keep them in line): she lets her points flow honestly from her characters' experiences and emotions. This is a wonderful book, and I look forward to the next one.

Jurassic World: Science no, Fun yes

OK,  I went to Jurassic World. 

I understand why some paleontologists despise it - it wouldn't have hurt the movie to make the dinosaurs more in line with the latest scientific discoveries, and they should have taken the opportunity to make the dinos more accurate (which also would make them more visually interesting). In fact, the raptors are LESS accurate than in the last movie, and it's disappointing. (And, why, in the name of Roy Chapman Andrews, do we keep seeing them with cute little "bunny hands"?) And how can pterosaurs lift way more than their own weight? And why does the mosasaur look different sized in every shot, and why is it bigger than a blue whale to start with?   And so on... 

Nevertheless, this is a terrifically enjoyable monster movie, with the right balance of scary and funny moments. One death is drawn-out and gratuitous, but the rest of the violence is ok. The actors generally give good performances in the usual monster-movie stereotype roles. There are enjoyable nods to the original Jurassic Park, and there's a climax where my all-time favorite dinosaur gets on the screen again. The last joke, played out as people evacuate the control room, is a hilarious skewering of a common movie trope: I won't spoil it for you. There was a lot of predictability in the script, but the filmmakers did a decent job of hiding it.  (You knew the sinister defense guy was going to die, but they made you wait for it.)  And most of the ideas about what would actually be in a theme park of this sort, and how it would be marketed and run, seem pretty spot-on.

(Missed opportunity: a TV network should have had the older Ian Malcolm commenting on why you didn't need chaos theory to predict that a plan that twice ended in disaster was going to end, once again, in disaster. "They've removed the chaos. It's back to old-fashioned linear mathematical certainty.") 

No, I don't believe in the super-powered Indominus rex.  You don't get significant additive (that is, positive or enhancing)  characteristics of another species as a random side effect of splicing in some genes for some other reason.  That we MIGHT be able to someday design something like this - and I think we might - is a scary thought, though, and it works great in the movie. And the discussion over the creature's name is funny and entirely plausible.

The CGI (save for a couple of moments) is good, and if the mosasaur is insanely big and some of the dinosaur behavior makes no sense, well, I'm willing to forgive the filmmakers most of their faults, because they created great entertainment. Turn off your brain, grab your popcorn, and enjoy the action.

Random untruths.

I don't know why I keep returning to this stuff, but: 1. The US Government has no contact with aliens. Such an event would become the central fact driving US space, defense, and intelligence budgets. It's not mentioned once in the massive leaks. Case closed. 2. There are no simple natural cures for cancer or other killer diseases. Arguing otherwise means that doctors and pharma CEOs are letting their own cancer-afflicted families die horribly rather than admit to simple cures and diminish drug profits. Case closed. 3. Vaccines are effective. The modern victories against diseases like polio are aided but not caused by improved sanitation, etc, because vaccines stop these diseases even in nations where the poverty and sanitation remain terrible. Case closed. 

Now back to space exploration, zoology, and stuff.

Philae Phones Home

This is kind of incredible, in the best way.  ESA's cometary lander put down on Comet 67P in November 2014.  It transmitted for two and a half days and went silent, its batteries run down, its body-mounted solar cells presumably shaded by terrain and unable to recharge it.  As the comet approached the Sun, though, solar energy (direct or reflected) on the cells increased enough to wake up the spunky little 100-kg spacecraft and prompt it to transmit an electronic "hello."  Indeed, it turns out the lander has considerable information in its memory queue and must have been actively gathering data at some point during the long silence.

Congratulations to the ESA team.  A space first - the landing of a probe on a comet - has become even more memorable.

Happy World Ocean Day

OK, it's not a great day for the oceans. They're in a lot of trouble.  But the situation is';t hopeless.
First, more people know about the challenges and difficulties plaguing the oceans and marine life with every passing year.  More people get active, even if it's just little things like writing some blog articles.
Second, our knowledge is increasing every year.  We find more species, learn more about them, figure out more about how they are integrated and how the food web works.
I don;t know whether the gains every year are more important than the losses, but there ARE gains. Science, hard work, and hope can keep the planet's lifeblood flowing.

In celebration, the top quotes from the planet’s leading marine scientist, “Her Deepness,” Sylvia Earle.

“If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system.”

“Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.”

“We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.“

“Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.”

“Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you're lucky enough to see lots of them,  that means that you're in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don't see sharks.”

“I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.”

“I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.”

Some skeptical reading on matters of health

I'm not sure why I've spent a lot of time reading way-out health claims and their rebuttals.  I have yet to find anything directly connected to my own health in arguments over vaccines, GMOs, and so many other things, and I have no medical background, so why do I bother?
I guess I am intrigued by controversy.  But the point to remember in a lot of these debates is that controversy exists only on the Web, or in the minds of a fraction of the population (or in a fraction of a percent of those medically educated in some way).
Take vaccines. They are the greatest advance in human health in the history of the world.  Antivax activists say they are only in favor of more information. The trouble is the information they cite is, to use a precise scientific term, crap.  Vaccines don't cause autism, which is present genetically in the womb. They don't cause much of anything they are accused of. There ARE people, very rarely, who have a strong allergic reaction to an ingredient in a vaccine, and in the US there's a vaccine injury legal system for precisely this.  The system does not exist for people given autism by vaccines because there aren't any.
Parent like to know a cause when their kids develop problems.  I'm a parent, and I still want to know why my daughter has lupus, and I may never know.  Parent want to know, not only for themselves, but because they genuinely want to help other parents avoid seeing the same (often heartbreaking) problems.  But correlation in time - whether it's your child showing symptoms of autism soon after a vaccination or a child who develops a gastrointestinal disease after eating a normal diet for some years - doesn't mean that what you see is caused by what you think it is.  That's why there is exactly one discredited / withdrawn / fraudulent study saying vaccines = autism outside the fringe-medicine press.  It's why there is one withdrawn / discredited French rat study linking GMOs to ANY health problem in ANY mammal.
Peer review is not a perfect tool, but it's the best we have. And think before you claim "conspiracy" - the claim really means that doctors and pharmaceutical execs let their own families, their own children, themselves all die rather than suggest "secret" natural cures. (Actually, another writer pointed out a contradiction here: leftist activists claim Big Pharma is hiding cures for cancer, but they also claim that simple natural substances cure cancer, so what would those Big Pharma cures be NEEDED for?)
So ignore sites like naturalnews.com, which is neither natural nor news.  Eat a healthy diet, which does matter. Exercise.  And when something goes wrong, remember that one doctor may be wrong about it, but it's pretty unlikely that they all are.  Don't listen to people like the one described here.  Read real medicine and science by people with real expertise (like this blogger here ) and real medical organizations, like here, and real journals, like you'll find here, and accept - as bad as it is - that we simply don't have cures for anything yet.
But hope.  There's a lot of hope.  Keep funding real science and real medicine, and every decade, we'll say goodbye to another "incurable" malady.  The future is bright. It's just not perfect.

A science writer at Denver ComiCon

OK, so I'm not just a science writer. but a general nerd, and Denver ComiCon is a don't miss item on my calendar.  I dress as my favorite literary character, wizard Harry Dresden.  All being Harry requires is:

• Black duster (I need a longer one to get the look just right, but this one will do)
• Staff (carry one often anyway due to bad back)
• Black low-crowned hat (Stetson calls this style a "gambler's hat," and I wear one anyway)
• Being tall (can't help you with that one.)

I dress it up a bit with Harry's amulet and shield bracelet.

Anyway, ComiCon had a skeptics' booth, which I didn't expect, held down by Kyle Sanders and his wife in Ghostbusters uniforms.  Kyle illustrates SKEPTIC magazine and writes the webcomic Carbon Dating.  Great to meet you, Kyle.

There were panels on NASA and space in general with utility for SF writers, like how to construct believable planetary ecosystems.  There were good panels on writing (Peter Wacks of Wordfire Press was especially full of good advice for freelancers).  There was the usual bewildering assortment of elaborate cosplayers, including a Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy in a suit so well constructed to look like an organic whole that I wondered how he want to the bathroom.  Carole Hightshoe had the Wolfsinger Publications booth up with my horror novel, The Dolmen, which was handy since the opportunity came up to give a signed copy to Dresden Files author Jim Butcher.  The enormously successful Butcher treated a writer he'd never heard of as an equal, and I won't forget that.

I also met Mitch Pileggi of The X-Files, who gave me a tidbit on the upcoming reboot: When I said Skinner should be retired and writing a management book about dealing with an incredibly difficult employee, said, "I can tell you this much: Skinner's not retired."
My oldest daughter had a good time meeting Lou Ferrigno, the original Hulk (he publishes advice she uses in the gym), and both daughters enjoyed exploring the exhibit space.

Anyway, a great time was had.  My advice for next year: arrive early for parking.  An estimated 80,000 nerds overwhelm both public transit and parking lots.  And keep some MREs on your person in case the food lines break you.

Here's to  2016!

God, science, and John Glenn

One of my personal heroes is astronaut / fighter pilot / Senator John Glenn.  Now he's encapsulated my own beliefs precisely in this article:

Glenn from space: "to look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible." Glenn today: "I don't see that I'm any less religious by the fact that I can appreciate the fact that science just records that we change with evolution and time, and that's a fact. It doesn't mean it's less wondrous."

Under the sea - a creature from another time

OK, so it's not really a "living fossil." But that other overused term, "missing link," has some utility here. 

 Two billion years ago, microbes with a nucleus and other changes from the bacteria and the archaea evolved, and, as this article explains, they kept evolving into every multicellular creature on planet Earth, including us. A new sample from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean yielded a strain of archaea, dubbed Lokiarchaeum, which had many eukaryote-type features including genes that code for the proteins giving eukaryotes a complex structure the other types lack. . Since the latter evolved from the former, this was a snapshot of early evolution that had scientists jumping up and down (I don't know if the "jumping" part is literally true, but it seems close enough).
To swipe the key language from this article, "Lokiarchaeum was much more complex than other archaea and bacteria, although not as complex as true eukaryotes... a Lokiarchaeum-like ancestor could have evolved into the first full-blown eukaryotes.. Once the ancestors of eukaryotes evolved a complex skeleton, the next major step may have been the origin of mitochondria."

The scientific team is trying to learn more about these creatures, despite the handicaps of limited supply and the annoying fact the microbes keep dying soon after being scooped up.  But the work done so far has given us a look at evolution from the days when dinosaurs were only one of Nature's dreams and humans were not even that.  Keep up the good science, guys!
 

Great Whites... and REALLY Great Whites

Everyone's fascinated by the great white shark, a beast that can be 7m long and can (and has) put humans on its menu on occasion. It is the largest and, in some ways, most evolved of a line that goes back 400 million years. Sharks outlasted the mighty Dunkleosteus, the great reptiles like Liopleurodon, and the most fearsome whale of all time, Livyatan melvillei. Today there are nearly 400 known species of shark, and the great white is their metaphorical king (or queen, since the biggest ones are always female).
One thing people like to speculate on is how big great whites get. The maximum length of the species has been subject to countless tall tales, overestimates, and mistakes (for a long time the record was 36.5 feet / 11.1m, but this was a misidentified basking shark.) Looking at claimants from the Azores, Cuba, and Australia, the answer seems to be that the provable maximum length is under 23 feet / 7m. (I've named 7m the "Ellis/McCosker limit," since Richard Ellis and John McCosker have done the most research on this and produced the best single book on the species so far.). There is a case where an expert theorized bites on a whale carcass floating off Australia might belong to a monster in the 25-foot neighborhood (around 7.5m) which would be mean real great whites get as big as Bruce in Jaws.  The question of exact lengths can devolve into a pointless debate over inches/centimeters, so I'm going to say the biggest great whites approach 7m, with exceptional sharks possibly larger, and call it a day.

Katherine, a great white tagged off the Florida coast. (Wikimedia Commons)

For centuries, human being killed great whites when they had the chance and otherwise avoided them at all costs. Silly stories about a shark swallowing a whole man in armor did nothing for their reputation. Herman Melville called the great white "the dotard lethargic and dull, pale ravener of horrible meat."
Today, scientists take significant risks in order to learn more about great whites - not to kill them, but to conserve them. This article from Nat Geo tells of a dramatic tagging venture, involving the largest great white ever pulled out alive, tagged, and returned to the ocean. "Apache" is 5.5m (18 feet) long, enormous for a male. the shark weighs about two tons and did not come aboard peacefully, but the conservation team lead by Michael Domeier looks for a selection of sharks, including the biggest (presumably oldest) as well as the smaller ones that are relatively easy to handle. (Relatively.)
There's a lot we don't know about this species, including its mating and migration habits. Without knowing more, we can't tell whether the population is being affected by factors like climate change and overfishing of its prey. Great whites are taken in the pointless and destructive shark-finning trade, but, though classed by the IUCN as Vulnerable, they are not endangered - at least not yet. This is important because healthy top predators are vital to an ecosystem. This article documents how at least one population seems to actually be on the rise.
Those of us who dabble in either sharks or cryptozoology are always asked about Megalodon: Carcharocles megalodon, a distant cousin of the great white, which became extinct over 2m years ago.   While Meg gets 80 - 200 feet long in fiction, we know for sure that they reached at least 15m, maybe 18m, and may have been the largest fish ever to have lived (there's quite a lot of dispute about a couple of older prehistoric fish, but there is no doubt Meg was  at least the largest shark ever.)  

Megalodon naturally attracts novelists like, well, great whites are attracted to chum.  A lot of the literature is fun, if little of it could be called scientifically precise. Steve Alten has made a good living off his fictional Megs. Briar Lee Mitchell write a good novel with the all-time-best title of Big Ass Shark.  There are lesser-known novels, incredibly bad cheap-crap movies, and even worse fake "documentaries," along with other ways to get a Meg fix, but the fish is extinct, period, done, over with, gone, dead. the only really interesting possible Meg sighting, which novelists have played off a good deal, was the New Zealand shark of 1918 claimed by lobstermen to be ghostly white and at least 100 feet long. This case was accepted by an expert who interviewed the men, and it's frankly still a mystery: if I had to make a guess, I would suggest an exceptionally huge and unusually light-colored great white, plus human exaggeration factor, was involved.  (Ellis once observed that the name "great white" only makes sense if you're looking at the shark upside-down.) 

So no Meg, but we'll settle for the great white - which is more than enough. It's pretty damn awesome, and hopefully we can keep it on Earth for millions of years to come.  

References: 

Bright, Michael.  1989.  There are Giants in the Sea. Robson Books.

Civard-Racinais, Alexandrine, and Maud Fontenoy. 2012. Great White Shark: Myth and Reality. Firefly.  

Compageno, Leonard, with Marc Dando and Sarah Fowler. 2005. Sharks of the World. Princeton.

Ellis, Richard, and John E. McCosker.  1991. Great White Shark. HarperCollins.

Ellis, Richard.  1983.  The Book of Sharks.  Alfred A. Knopf.

Ellis, Richard. 2012. Shark: A Visual History. Lyons Press.

Klimley, A. Peter. 2003. The Secret Life of Sharks.Simon & Schuster.

Lineaweaver, Thomas H., and Richard H. Backus.  1970. The Natural History of Sharks. J. B. Lippincott.

McCormick, Harold W., et. al.  1978. Shadows in the Sea: the Sharks, Skates and Rays. Stein and Day.

Ricciuti, Edward.  1973.  Killers of the Seas.  Collier Books. 

Steel, Rodney. 1985. Sharks of the World. Facts on File.

Wood, Gerald L. 1977. Animal Facts and Feats. Sterling Publishing Co.

"Great White Sharks," http://marinebio.org/species.asp?id=38

"Size of the Great White Shark," Science, 13 July 1973.

Books and Writers and stuff

If you want to write, or if you already write but want to get better, or if you just want to have a great time with other writers - Pikes Peak Writers Conference is the place.  It offers workshops, panels, speakers, and classes for every type of writing.  Don't miss it next year.

I had a great time there talking to Seanan McGuire, writer of urban fantasy and the InCryptid novels.   (I had a model Dunkleosteus with me: she immediately recognized it and loved it so much she posed for pictures.)

Reading Midnight Blue Light Special, one of the InCryptid line. The Price/Healy family is charged with keeping cryptids, many of whom are shape-shifters living in inhabited areas, from the public eye and from the hunters of the Covenant of St. George. Cryptids in this book include pretty much all the animals of cryptozoology (the hero rents her apartment from a sasquatch) plus several from fairy tales and some original species of her own, so it's not cryptozoology in the sense of focusing on real or necessary plausible animals, but she's clearly read the literature and includes cryptids from around the world and tosses off lines like, " If wishes were horses, we'd have an easier time feeding the chupacabras." It's a wild, funny, and original series. I recommend it!

I read Steve Alten's reissued Meg, in a special edition bundled with the prequel Meg: Origins. It's not often an author gets the chance to go back and rework the introduction to his world. He adds a pretty good prequel, fixes a couple of things that were eyebrow-raising the first time around (Meg v. a wading T. rex is now a simulation), and gives one of his better characters, Terry Tanaka, more to do. (The swipe at Richard Ellis seems petty, though: Richard savaged the science in the original Meg, and so did I: Alten has fixed some aspects of that as well.) The book still doesn't rise to the level of his best cryptozoological work, The Loch, and his SF novel Sharkman (Sharkman's science is iffy, but well within the allowable "reach " for a SF tale, and I gave it a top review for its superb characterization), but Origins should win some new fans for his universe of big-toothed predators.

I meant that about the Writers Conference. I'm already signed up for 2016!

Earth Day, a Pulitzer, and a planet full of species

Happy Earth Day!

A lot has been happening on our little planet.  Some of it, despite the seriousness of our ecological predicament, is good news.   In fact, all of it's good news in some way.
First, we know we are in the middle of the sixth great extinction, but we need to make people more aware of it.  The people who hand out Pulitzer Prizes have given this awareness a big boost by picking, as this year's winner in Nonfiction, Elizabeth Kolbert's compelling, highly readable, and powerful book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.   I can't say enough about this book: Kolbert is authoritative, engaging, and memorable in her assessment of the science and her first-person reports on her trips to see the threats and the threatened species for herself. There have been five mass extinctions in known geological history, the most recent being the impact which ended the Mesozoic, and Kolbert documents the way human beings have brought about yet another mass extinction. Some of the extinctions are unwitting (early Native Americans certainly didn't intend to wipe out the mastodon) and some shockingly deliberate, as when a scrounger stomped on the last viable Great Auk egg ever to exist.  Kolbert recounts her own journeys, ranging from the depressing to the amusing, to pull us in and give the science a human dimension, but she never lets herself overpower the story.  Rarely has an author provided us with such a compelling account of an ongoing crisis which demands global action before we lose yet more irreplaceable creatures and their habitats.

  

In the meantime, that good news I mentioned? We are  still finding new species, and every news article on such discoveries is one more little ray of hope (and prod to action). We have a new frog from Costa Rica, Hyalinobatrachium dianae, that, despite being less than 3cm long, looks startlingly like the beloved muppet Kermit.   We have new action on protecting key habitat around the world - whether a habitat corridor in Suriname  to the world's largest marine reserve around Palmyra Atoll, Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, and other terrirories in the Pacific. In the latter case, a national monument created by President Bush in 2009 has been expanded five-fold via executive action by President Obama.  And we learned more about existing species that will make a difference in conservation planning, the most striking example being the fact that western Pacific gray whales migrate over 27,000 km and intermix with eastern gray whales.

Finally, science has restored Brontosaurus to its proper stature: the of iconic and beloved king of the plant-eating dinosaurs. If all's not right with the world, we are at least making some strides.

The big guy (Wikipedia Creative Commons license)

New species of beaked whale?

There are 22 known species of beaked whale (though not every one is accepted by every expert).  So what happens when scientists record calls that sound like a beaked whale - but don't match any known species? Well, they publish a paper like this one.  There is no certainty without more data, but we may well have detected a new species.

Bobcat v. shark

I sued to fish in Sebastian Inlet, just north of my hometown of Vero Beach.  Turns out this bobcat (a BIG bobcat: maybe they are growing larger without competition from the near-extinct Florida panther) decided to go fishing, too.  If someone said they'd seen a bobcat jump into the ocean to haul out a shark, I'm not sure I'd believe it, but the picture is here to prove it. (Not "here" as in this post - copyright law, you know - but in this news story.)

Amazing.

"Bully for Brontosaurus!"

That was Stephen Jay Gould's title for an essay in which he argued that some things should be called just what they are called and a brontosaurus is a brontosaurus.  Well, everyone thought it was an apatosaurus, mislabeled.  Turns out it's not.

Bronto is back!

Classic AMNH brontosaur skeleton (with, somehow, the skull of a brachiosaur...) 

Now we can get back to arguing whether Pluto should be called a planet.  (HINT: Yes)

Museum Exhibit: Mythic Creatures

This is a great exhibit (currently at the Denver Museum ofNature and Science), created by AMNH, Field Museum, and others. It mixes real animals (life-size Gigantopithecus (biggest primate ever) and Aepyornis (elephant bird of Madagascar), mythical (European and Chinese dragons, a stunning model of Sinbad's roc as a giant golden-eagle looking bird, mermaids, Inuit and Japanese water spirits, among others) and cryptozoology. There's an interesting setup where you can "See a Serpent" by moving whales and dolphins through waves and getting the impression of a large single creature. The Denver Museum added mythic creatures of Colorado, with a jackalope, a fur-bearing trout, and other creatures. Bigfoot gets a surprisingly brief mention given his prominence among cryptozoological creatures.   There are short videos on animals of land and air (the land one includes anthropologist Adrienne Mayor talking about fossils and their interpretations as mythical creatures and comments by George Schaller). It's a terrific collection with a good exhibit store (none of MY books, though cryptozoology authors Loren Coleman and Ivan Sanderson get in, along with Mayor and some modern bestiaries.)  It’s in Denver through the summer!

The fate of Steller's sea cow

The known history of Steller's sea cow is well known, tragic, and short.  In 1741, naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller was shipwrecked on Bering Island.  This is one of the Komandorski Islands, which lie between Kamchatka and the Aleutians. There he and his companions met the sea cow.  It was a huge plant-eating mammal, up to 35 feet long, with a bilobed tail like a whale's and a placid disposition that made it easy to approach (and to harpoon).   After Steller's crew finally returned to civilization, sealers and other voyagers began stopping off in the sea cow's haunts to slaughter the inoffensive mammals for their meat.   By 1768, the species had apparently been hunted to extinction.

There are a few odd data bits about the sea cow that hint-just hint - it hung on a little longer.  Native hunters reported killing them as late as 1780. Early Russian colonizers of Bering Island reported sighting sea cows in the 1830s.  Fifty years later, the explorer Nordenskiold returned from the region with a sea cow skeleton of unknown age and a tale of a live sighting from 1854.  In 1910, fishermen in Russia's Gulf of Anadyr reported a sea cow stranded on the beach, but the report was never investigated. Other Russian sightings in 1962 and 1977 came to nought.

Now we have some science indicating that the animal's range was, in fact, greater than we thought - although, alas, they don't hint at survival but at an earlier extirpation event.    It extended, not west or south as sometimes suggested, but north to Alaska's St. Lawrence Island. Bones collected from the island were spotted at a handicrafts show in faraway Atlanta, Georgia (USA), having been made into knife handles, and the provenance traced to St. Lawrence.  They were analyzed by the team of Lorelei D. Crerar , Andrew P. Crerar , Daryl P. Domning , and E. C. M. Parsons.  (They also offer some older history I was unaware of: that "According to the fossil record, animals in the genus Hydrodamalis inhabited coastal waterways from Japan through the Aleutian Island chain to Baja California during the Late Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene. Hydrodamalis gigas was still present in the Aleutian Islands and central California less than 20 000 years ago." )  

The St. Lawrence population was apparently wiped out or driven out by Yup'ik  hunters around 900 AD.  So it is that one of the most fascinating animals in modern history met its fate as the hands of hungry humans: not once, but twice.  

Other references: 

Haley, Delphine.  1978.  "The Saga of Steller's Sea Cow," Natural History, November.

Mackal, Roy.  1980.  Searching for Hidden Animals.  New York: Doubleday.

Stejneger, Leonhard.  1936.  Georg Wilhelm Steller.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard  Press.

New species swing in

As I like to point out, we get a lot of new species every year. Most are tiny invertebrates you wouldn't notice even if you stepped on them (especially since you would be on the bottom of the ocean and therefore drowning), but the mammals, birds, sharks, etc. keep coming too.

A Field Museum expedition to a white-sands forest - an environment I didn't know existed - came up with three new plants, four frogs, four fish, and a titi monkey of striking coppery appearance  made of which one scientist said, "none of the experts... have seen this coloration before, and there isn't anything like it in the Museum."

Never stop exploring!

Book review: The Species Seekers

The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth
Richard Conniff
W. W. Norton & Company (2010)

In this excellent book, Richard Conniff introduces us to the scientists, naturalists, dilettantes, and others (from the brilliant to the crazy) who contributed so much to the natural history we know. While the focus is on zoology as developed by European and American seekers, this also works as a history of the natural sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. This period saw hunting for new species raised to a manic level it's never attained before or since. When professional scientists were few, species-hunters came from every walk of life - doctors, sea captains, hunters, and women, who didn't get their due then and don't really get it now. (I had no idea that Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, was a bona fide expert on the fungi who was shunned by organized science in England.) Conniff creates an especially vivid portrait of Mary Kingsley (who died young in 1900), who was as daring a field collector as anyone. 
I've often thought a book could be written strictly on the scientific contributions of missionaries: Conniff does not neglect them, recounting Father Armand David's many daring discoveries in China. The famous names like Darwin are here, of course, but along the way we also meet such men as Walter Rothschild, who proved a hopelessly incompetent banker (the family has basically erased him from its history) but a keen naturalist and a funder of major collecting expeditions: Paul Du Chaillu, who made countless real contributions but also created the myth of ferocity among gorillas, and the men and women who supported the more famous naturalists (one item that sticks in my mind is Sir Richard Owens' wife's diary entry about coming home to find a dead rhinoceros in her no-doubt-immaculate front hall.) 
Some of the naturalists here may have hastened the demise of species by taking specimens seemingly without limit, but others foresaw the need to start protecting the natural world. Their discoveries also contributed greatly to the development of the idea of natural selection and to its subsequent refinement. Conniff presents this in roughly chronological order, and it's fascinating to follow the narrative as naturalists slowly put the pieces together and began to understand such concepts as ecosystems and natural selection pressures.  Conniff gives us these people as they lived, not ducking the racism, sexism and imperialism that plagued even the greatest minds of the day, but not wallowing in it either. This thoroughly researched and superbly written book is a time machine to the great era of species-hunting, and I cannot imagine any student of the natural sciences who will not enjoy the ride immensely.

The Skeptic and the Sasquatch

I haven't spent much time on sasquatch lately.  I'd have snorted "impossible" and closed the file a long time ago if it wasn't for the uncomfortable fact that there are sober, intelligent citizens who insist they've gotten a good look at it.

The investigators for the North American Wood Ape Conservancy (NAWAC) (who I always liked, even if their name implies preexisting belief in a "wood ape," for renaming the phenomenon so they could start fresh) didn't get a close look, but they did what is, compared to most of the dreck in this business, a very careful investigation over a four-year period that collected a lot of secondary evidence, from thermal images to rock-throwing, that couldn't be easily explained. I still would have passed it by if it were not for Sharon Hill, a geologist and a well-respected, smart skeptic who runs  the Doubtful News blog. Sharon read the report and agreed that a lot of this was very puzzling and needed answers to questions like (my wording) "Who trekked many miles into the wildest part of Oklahoma just to heave rocks at bigfoot hunters?" She wrote a very good post on it.

She has never, and does not now, endorse sasquatch as a real animal. She looked objectively at the report and agreed the investigators seemed sincere, didn't leap to conclusions, and had genuinely puzzling experiences.  (Here's the report.)

Well, you'd think Sharon had come out foursquare for demon-hunting, poltergeists, and New Age medicine.  Some of the comments from fellow skeptics focused on the report itself ("chock full of assumptions" was one fairly reasonable line) and others dismissed Sharon's seeming indulgence of such nonsense. One skeptic dismissed it with, "I'm astounded that any of this could be considered evidence."  

Now there are a lot of sincere people looking for sasquatch, and there are a lot of publicity-seeking idiots, and there are certainly hoaxers.  And missing one of the largest species in North America seems, on the face of it, not possible.  But the response went a little - well, unscientific.  No one accused Sharon directly of being an idiot, but a lot of them implied it, and, while some did read the original report, others flatly refused to.   (My favorite line posted in defense of the investigation was,  "Drunken hillbillies would have to be little more than brain dead to be hanging out in this very remote area, over a four year period, looking for an opportunity to throw rocks at investigators who are brandishing rifles.") As Sharon put it, “Several people misunderstood my approach. I have gained much information and understanding by not being hostile or dismissive to those on the metaphorical “other side of the fence”. I’m not out to debunk Sasquatch. I wish to understand what people are experiencing and why they conclude this creature is real.”

The point I'm getting at here is that Sharon considered the evidence and published a well-reasoned, objective review knowing full well that it would not go over well with some of her friends.  Her approach was scientific, just as it was when she destroyed the Melba Ketchum idiocy. The NAWAC people have not proven sasquatch exists: they have proven they encountered a lot of puzzling incidents. That's all Sharon said. Fellow skeptics shouldn't be taking her to the woodshed for it.

Press on, my friend.