My daughter is very attentive to the insect population around our house. She spends many hours collecting all sorts of insects and other animals. Â In the fall of 2013 she brought me a leaf that she thought had a caterpillar of some sort on it. Â She is well aware that bugs make little... Continue Reading →
Since its inception, one of the Creation Museum’s most provocative exhibits has been one that places dinosaurs and man side by side. While this is anachronistic to most people at least everyone agrees that dinosaurs really lived at some time in earth’s history.* This year the Creation Museum added a new exhibit where you can... Continue Reading →
How does a hill get a flat top? Â The picture below is a Google Maps satellite image of St. George Utah. To the left you can see an airport. This airport is on top of a long hill whose top is well over 100 feet above the city below. Â The airport was built here because... Continue Reading →
We all learned from an early age that earthworms are God's good gift to gardeners. Â They rework the soil and help to degrade leaf litter thus helping to make nutrients and water available to plant roots. Â Our appreciation of earthworms can be traced back to Charles Darwin who spent more than 40 years... Continue Reading →
The book of Job contains some of the most descriptive language about the natural world in all of Scripture. Â In Job 39 alone, we find God describing the natural history of animals including the mountain goat, deer, donkey, ostrich, horse, hawk and eagle in order to illustrate His omniscience and wisdom in creation. Â Although... Continue Reading →
I'm posting a short follow-up to a story about huddling penguins that I wrote about a few weeks ago (Heat-sharing Huddling Penguins - A Benefit to Selfish Behavior?). Â I was pointed to a really fascinating set of videos that show emperor penguins in the process of forming huddles. Â You can see these videos embedded in... Continue Reading →
In a paper entitled, "Modeling Huddling Penguins" in PLosOne (an Open Access journal) a few months ago mathematicians take on a difficult question in biology:  Do individuals organisms make decisions to share a resource for the greater good (altruism) or do they generally act only as selfish individuals.  It is very difficult to test the cause... Continue Reading →
I would like to take a small diversion from my usual material on this blog to do a little backyard natural history.  Our new home has almost a half acre of grass which abuts to our neighbors yard which is several acres of hardwood forest.  In researching our home I found out that our... Continue Reading →
One of the stranger behaviors of termites was reported this past week and a summary can be found in a note in Nature. This report contains a description of exploding termites! How, and probably more intriguing, why would a termite explode and commit suicide?
An interesting new resource for research into 17th century natural history has been made available this year in the form of the first of what will be 10 volumes of the monumental work Biblia American by Cotton Mather (1663-1928).   The first volume coves this American puritan's commentary on Genesis.  Unfortunately the book is rather expensive... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 