JO, SJG

A couple little personal items today, if you'll pardon me. First of all, its my wife's birthday. Her name is Jennie, and she blogs here, mostly dealing with her addiction to thrifting and her appreciation of all things vintage. She also sells vintage clothing and housewares in her very own Etsy shop. If that's your thing, it would behoove you to take a gander and buy lots of things. It puts her in a super mood. The weekend trip I wrote about yesterday was part of her birthday present, so don't think the only thing I gave her was a free plug on this little blog!

Second, today is the eighth anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould's death. When I was a teenager, my brain flitted between pseudosciences (I wrote my senior term paper on UFO abductions), like a hummingbird trying to pull nectar from plastic flowers. Gould's eloquent writings on the history of science and evolution were in part what set me nice and straight, to flowers that don't just look pretty but offer actual nourishment. Thanks, Steve.

Painting by Carl Buell, via Flickr.

Pteranodon by Buell

Pteranodon sternbergi by Carl Buell, via flickr.

In my estimation, paleoartists don't get much better than Carl Buell. I've mentioned him previously, but what the heck: this Pteranodon is fantastic. So is his other work, including my favorite rendering of the famous "walking whale" Ambulocetus. He hasn't done a lot of dinosaurs lately, but he's done some wonderful cenozoic mammals. Many of his paintings show his sense of humor, as well: for instance, the one in which he and an australopithecine knock back a couple brews. I'd imagine that the little hominid would be in for a pretty fun night around the campfire.

Be sure to check out Buell's flickr stream; he's apparently had some setbacks preventing him from establishing a better web presence, so it's the best collection of his work I've found. He was also interviewed a few years back by the science blog Unscrewing the Inscrutable.

The Carls, Buell and Zimmer

Image by Carl Buell, via flickr

Revered natural history artist Carl Buell doesn't do a lot of dinosaur art, but his flickr photostream is definitely worth a look. Some of the pieces are to be featured in The Tangled Bank, a new textbook on evolution by the fine science writer Carl Zimmer. It looks beautiful. Zimmer recently showed off some photos of the printed book on his Discover blog, The Loom. It includes a spread featuring a chart of theropod-bird evolution and a Buell painting of Archaeopteryx.

Zimmer also appeared on the season premiere of RadioLab, talking about one of his favorite subjects, parasites. And he discusses The Tangled Bank on the New York Academy of Sciences' podcast, Science and the City.