14 Days of Genitals, Day 2: Dance for your Life

Jumping spiders are the teddy bears of the arachnid world - they're small, fuzzy, and like to launch themselves at you for hug attacks.

14 Days of Genitals, Day 1: Lekky in Love

It's that time of the year again, the time when we horrify and amaze you with facts about animals sex lives in hopes of making you feel so much better than your own (cuz even if you're celibate, at least you don't enjoy humping dead baby seals). This is the third year running - if you're interested in old posts you can follow the "14 Days of Genitals" tag down the rabbit hole.

We're going to pitch a few softballs to start then finish this run with truly horrifying sexual strategies. Today's article focuses on the mating displays of manakins.

The creepy-eyed bird, not the creepy-eyed dress-up dolls.

 

Cenozoic Cheat Sheet

Meaghan likes to give homemade Christmas gifts. Last year she made nerdy science-themed chocolates, and the year before that she designed dorky mugs. This year, she decided to go a big more useful and create the only calendar that really matters... the Cenozoic calendar. Really, Meaghan was just kind of tired of looking up the NALMA (North American Land Mammal Ages) divisions and decided to make a cheat sheet for herself illustrated with her lab's favorite Cenozoic animals!  

Hadrianus, a big ol' tortoise

Fossils, Feral Cats, and Fire: Meaghan's Summer at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument

Spending a summer in Dayville, Oregon, probably doesn’t sound like much of a career-advancing opportunity unless you study obscure small towns or farming (or fire - we had lots of those). It’s deep in Eastern Oregon, so deep that it’s a 30+ minute drive if you want more than the canned beans and melted men’s deodorant the only store in town has to offer. The population is 145, but the age distribution is akin to a teetering, inverted triangle - I saw an order of magnitude more rattlesnakes than I did people under the age of 35. But Dayville is home to much more than cows and near-retirement ranchers: it has huge exposures of millions of consecutive years of fossil-forming layers of the Cenozoic and is a 15-minute drive from the world-renowned John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. As a paleontology doctoral student studying Cenozoic mammals, there’s no place in the world I’d rather be located (also, I conveniently like rattlesnakes).

Horse Evolution Rap Battle: Equus vs. Eohippus

We've been talking about it for a year, and it's finally here: the horse evolution rap battle that you didn't even know you were waiting for featuring Equus (aka the modern horse, aka Amy) versus Eohippus (aka the Equid Ewok, aka Meaghan). This video is probably about PG, for that time Amy rides the tiki torch and also mentions "Flipping the Bird." Full lyrics below. Enjoy!