Happy birthday, Ask a Biologist!

Well, it's actually this coming Friday (the 14th) but since this is a good chance to promote the site, why not start early?

Ask a Biologist is a Q&A website started up by University of Bristol graduate, Dr. Dave Hone. The unique thing about AAB is that unlike many Q&A forums around the internet, AAB's answerers are all either qualified PhDs, PhDs in training, or have a similar level of experience or qualifications. So there is a certain level of quality and authenticity to the answers provided. The questions are either answered by someone in the field or someone decently knowledgeable in the field with proper scientific research and citations to back it all up.

As with many forums, absolutely anyone can ask questions on AAB, sometimes even the contributors ask the other experts for opinions. But it is primarily aimed towards children and young persons still in school. So if you know of any kids aching to get some of their burning questions regarding biology, then please use this chance to direct them to http://www.askabiologist.org.uk.

I am a regular contributor to AAB as well and if you are aware of the DinoBase Forum then you will find the layout almost identical - in fact they were both designed by the same web-designer and software engineer.

Comments

Will Baird said…

Hey Manabu!

I am going to be hosting the Boneyard paleo carnival next week. Would it be possible to grovel enough to get you to post either some new paleo art or some more nifty functional paleo morphology like you did for the sabre tooths?

Thank you!

15 March, 2008 05:06

Raptor's Nest (old) said…

You wouldn't have to try too hard to get me posting. My blog's coming to its first anniversary later this week so I'm kind of building up to it...

17 March, 2008 00:14

The difference between Lion and Tiger skulls

A quick divergence from my usual dinosaurs, and I shall talk about big cats today. This is because to my greatest delight, I had discovered today a wonderful book. It is called The Felidæ of Rancho La Brea (Merriam and Stock 1932, Carnegie Institution of Washington publication, no. 422). As the title suggests it goes into details of felids from the Rancho La Brea, in particular Smilodon californicus (probably synonymous with S. fatalis ), but also the American Cave Lion, Panthera atrox . The book is full of detailed descriptions, numerous measurements and beautiful figures. However, what really got me excited was, in their description and comparative anatomy of P. atrox , Merriam and Stock (1932) provide identification criteria for the Lion and Tiger, a translation of the one devised by the French palaeontologist Marcelin Boule in 1906. I have forever been looking for a set of rules for identifying lions and tigers and ultimately had to come up with a set of my own with a lot of help...

Old drawings: Allosaurus

Recently, I came across a stash of old drawings that I had completely forgotten about. I'll try and upload them in the next week or two. Some are palaeo, others are not, but still quite interesting nonetheless... Here is the first. I think it is an Allosaurus head. At least the skull looks like an Allosaurus and it has lacrimal horns like an Allosaurus , so it must be an Allosaurus . Nothing special I guess...

R for beginners and intermediate users 3: plotting with colours

For my third post on my R tutorials for beginners and intermediate users, I shall finally touch on the subject matter that prompted me to start these tutorials - plotting with group structures in colour. If you are familiar with R, then you may have noticed that assigning group structure is not all that straightforward. You can have a dataset that may have a column specifically for group structure such as this: B0 B1 B2 Family Acrocanthosaurus 0.308 -0.00329 3.28E-05 Allosauroidea Allosaurus 0.302 -0.00285 2.04E-05 Allosauroidea Archaeopteryx 0.142 -0.000871 2.98E-06 Aves Bambiraptor 0.182 -0.00161 1.10E-05 Dromaeosauridae Baryonychid 0.189 -0.00238 2.20E-05 Basal_Tetanurae Carcharodontosaurus 0.369 -0.00502 5.82E-05 Allosauroidea Carnotaurus 0.312 -0.00324 2.94E-05 Neoceratosauria Ceratosaurus 0.377 -0.00522 6.07E-05 Neoceratosauria Citipati 0.278 -0.00119 5.08E-06 Ovir...

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