Ed Note: Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. [...]

Any animated film starring pirates, Charles Darwin, and a dodo is going to be worthy of mention here, but Aardman Animations — of Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run fame — has outdone itself with “The Pirates!: Band of Misfits”. I missed its theatrical run. But I happened to catch it recently and I think [...]

Blogger’s note: I am away for the next several weeks. In the meantime, I’m bringing you some classic Artful Amoeba posts. This one was originally posted on January 18, 2010. Unlike rinderpest, the subject of the last post, Guinea worm still awaits eradication. A major factor holding this up: the Civil War in Sudan. Though [...]

Blogger’s note: I am going to be out of blog contact for the next several weeks as I get hitched (yay!), honeymoon (double yay!), and move (goodbye Colorado! Very sad to leave). In the meantime, I will be bringing you some classic Artful Amoeba. This post originally appeared on January 13, 2010. Since I wrote [...]

There is something curious about the sedimentary rocks laid down around the world 250 million years ago, at the height of Earth’s greatest extinction: they are often riddled with filaments, and no one is sure what they are. Nothing like them has been found in rocks before or since. What seems apparent, and what everyone [...]

The TedxDeExtinction conference, discussing how and whether to resurrect extinct species from DNA, took place on the Ides of March 2013 at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC. Watch archived versions of the talks. If people had the ability to resurrect extinct species (dubbed “de-extinction”) and reintroduce them to the wild, should we direct [...]

This is one of my favorite videos that I’ve seen on the whole of the internet. (Gasp!) Piecing together clips from dozens of science documentaries and specials overlaid with stunning music, the youtube user UppruniTegundanna starts out tracing the history of humans, integrating technological and artistic development. Then it takes a turn to beautifully visualize the [...]

The last three males of an all-but-extinct fish species would really, really, really like to meet a female. Once upon a time the Mangarahara cichlid (Ptychochromis insolitus) lived in a single habitat: a river in Madagascar from which the species gets its name. That river has now been dammed and the habitat has dried up. [...]

A South African butterfly species that lepidopterists feared had gone extinct more than a decade ago has been rediscovered after a search on Google Earth revealed a habitat much like the insect’s former home. That tip refocused a stalled search for the lost species that had not been seen since the mid-1990s. The Waterberg copper [...]

There’s nothing like the scientific thrill of discovering something for the very first time—or, in rare cases, rediscovering something that most people had presumed forever lost. Take the Cuban solenodon (Solenodon cubanus), for example. Unseen after 1890 and long presumed extinct, it unexpectedly showed up again in 1974. Sightings after that were few and far [...]

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Scientific American Blog Network (which this blog preceded by a few years), so instead of our usual news coverage we’re all marking the occasion by asking to hear more about you. Please drop on down into the comments section on this page and tell us a little bit [...]

The unsustainable demand for the Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup is directly responsible for the slaughter of more than 70 million sharks every year. In a process known as finning, the sharks are caught, pulled onto boats, stripped of their valuable fins and dumped back into the ocean where they slowly and painfully [...]

Are we looking at Asia’s first pheasant extinction? The endangered Edwards’s pheasant (Lophura edwardsi) has not been observed in the wild since 2000, and now surveys conducted by the World Pheasant Association (WPA) in the bird’s two most likely habitats in Vietnam have failed to turn up any sign of the species. Edwards’s pheasant was [...]

The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), better known as the Tasmanian tiger, has long been the poster child for human-caused extinction. Hunted out of existence by Australian farmers who feared that the striped, canine-like marsupials would kill their sheep, the last thylacine died in captivity in Hobart Zoo 75 years ago next week, on September 7, 1936 [...]

A planned hydroelectric project on Ecuador’s Rio Topo will generate 22 megawatts of energy for the surrounding area, but building it also will likely wipe out a rare plant. The plant, a mosslike liverwort called Myriocolea irrorata that lives only in the region, was first discovered on the banks of the Rio Topo in 1857 [...]

Look at a hagfish and you’ll probably think it’s pretty icky. Don’t look at any hagfish and you’ll probably never think about them at all. But these oft-ignored creatures play an essential role in the ocean ecosystem, and you might want to think about them before they’re gone. Last week, the International Union for Conservation [...]

All things to nothingness descend, Grow old and die and meet their end… Nor long shall any name resound Beyond the grave, unless ‘t be found In some clerk’s book, it is the pen Gives immortality to men …and rhinos The Norman poet Master Wace wrote those words (well, all but the last line) in [...]

Last May, a University of Alabama graduate student was the first person to collect an oblong rock snail in over 70 years. The species, Leptoxis compacta, hadn’t been observed since 1933 and was declared extinct in 2000. Nathan Whelan, the biology PhD candidate who made the discovery, is glad that his research has a positive [...]

My coffee habit is killing the black-handed spider monkey, a cute New World simian (my favorite kind) that thrives in the canopy of Central American forests with tall trees. That’s pretty much the opposite of the kinds of forests that still exist where the spider monkey lives, because for decades we’ve been cutting down those [...]

The once rare brown argus butterfly is on the move, expanding its range and numbers in the U.K.—and it’s all thanks to climate change. Thus far, the world’s climate has warmed roughly 0.8 degree Celsius over the course of the last century or so, thanks to a rise in greenhouse gas concentrations now approaching 400 [...]

Tens of thousands of whales were slaughtered each year for decades from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, in the service of lighting city streets, painting ladies’ lips and providing multitudinous other modern conveniences. This monomaniacal hunt led many species to the brink of extinction. But recent research has suggested that gray whale (Eschrichtius [...]

If you turn on the news, you’re likely to be inundated with depressing pictures: Oceans are rising, species are dying, pollution is spreading. But how bad do most scientists think it really is? Are these doom-and-gloom projections the real deal, or just the lamentations of a few pessimists? Sadly, at least for conservation biology, the [...]

Some extinct animals have anatomical oddities that seem destined to be confined to the marginalia of history. Questionable characters, such as the single-fingered dinosaur and the flightless, club-winged bird, ultimately died off despite—if not because of—their idiosyncratic adaptations. Now, researchers have described a perplexing, long-extinct creature, this time with some dubious dental assets: large saber [...]

Three newly discovered groups of fossilized footprints show that dinosaurs and their early relatives were stalking the Earth some five million to nine million years earlier than scientists had previously estimated. This represents "a substantial extension of early dinosaur history," noted researchers in a description of the find, which was published online October 5 in [...]

When Pangaea finally broke up, some 200 million years ago, the result was a lot of heat. Specifically, volcanism, as enormous flows of basalt burst to the surface, ultimately covering more than nine million square kilometers. It wasn’t just the death of a supercontinent; it was also one of Earth’s five major extinction events—and the [...]

What if the only thing life has to fear is life itself? At a lecture Monday evening at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, paleontologist Peter D. Ward laid out the argument that life as we know it serves to make Earth less habitable—a downward spiral that might spell the eventual [...]

Our planet’s health is ailing. That’s the message in short from the 2012 Living Planet Report. Its content is sobering. We are devouring 50 percent more resources than the Earth produces annually. Species populations have plummeted by 30 percent in the last 40 years. Freshwater scarcity abounds, and CO2 levels are soaring. Yet, the report’s co-authors [...]

One of the most fascinating aspects of art is that two artists can use the same exact materials and create vastly different works. Last week, I posted an interview with Heather Knight, an artist who creates abstract porcelain tiles inspired by nature’s patterns and textures. Today, I introduce Kate MacDowell, another artist working in unglazed [...]

The intersection of science and art is bustling with activity. With this weekly-ish post, we’ll try to keep you abreast of the most happenin’ happenings around the country. Don’t miss out! SCIART LECTURES/EVENTS Beacon, NY’s Annual Open Studio Event (Beacon, NY) September 24-25, 2011; 12-6pm | Take a tour of scientific illustrator Chris Sanders‘ and [...]