A kiwi on moas 24 Sep 2007 This is a nice post by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms, a kiwi studying spider systematics (and what’s not to love about that; cephalopods be buggered!) on the species of moas that used to live in New Zealand. I didn’t realise they’d be forest dwellers. It’s a worthwhile blog to get the feed for. Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution Species and systematics
History The Blue Book is in PDF 10 Sep 2009 Systematists know the tome by Gareth Nelson and Norman Platnick, Systematics and Biogeography (1981), as the Blue Book (shades of Wittgenstein!). It was published once and is now so hard to get that I have been unable to find a copy in ten years of looking. Now, Malte Ebach tells… Read More
Evolution Evolution quotes: Quetelet on populations 12 Jan 201212 Jan 2012 Populations arise imperceptibly; it is only when they have reached a certain degree of development that we begin to think of their existence. This increase is more or less rapid, and it proceeds either from an excess of births over deaths, or from immigrations, or both. In general, it is… Read More
Evolution A periodic table of insects? More thoughts on classification 25 Aug 201225 Aug 2012 Seen by Malte Ebach at the XXIV International Conference of Entomology in South Korea: What’s fun about this (to a philosopher of taxonomy) is why a periodic table doesn’t serve to classify taxa in biology like this. Instead we get this: [From here] The answer is that elements are, and… Read More
> cephalopods be buggered Yeah, go on, piss off the people who agree with you about everything else 🙂
Then you’d better get to the NZ Ecological Society conference at the end of this year. “The conference features a major symposium titled “Feathers to Fur: the ecological transformation of Aotearoa”. This is an update of 21 years of progress on the topics that make New Zealand unique, following on from the 1986 conference “Moas, Mammals and Climate” which was published in a special issue of New Zealand Journal of Ecology in 1989.” I spent several days caving with Trevor Worthy examining a new cave system jam packed with the fossils of extinct NZ species, including a number of moa species. Just awesome.