university

Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones

November 13, 2020

What did our ancestors who were unfamiliar with the origins of the fossilized remains of prehistoric creatures make of them? Did they recognize such things as belemnites, brachiopods, bits of vertebral columns, and other curious, stone objects extracted from the ground as the remains of creatures from long ago? If so, were such creatures factual or fantastic? And in any case, what useful qualities – or even extraordinary, perhaps even magical, powers – did they assume these mysterious objects might posses?

Charles Valentine Riley

May 20, 2020

It was at the BioQuip display for the Entomological Society of America’s 2019 annual meeting that I first became aware of Charles Valentine Riley. Those better versed in the history of entomology than I am are likely shocked by such an admission; however never being one demure from getting his education in public, I readily confess to all such instances of ignorance in my ongoing quest to correct as many of them as possible before finally shuffling off this mortal coil.

Common Spiders of North America

October 28, 2019

Contrary to what may be erroneously inferred from all the entomologically incorrect Halloween displays being more and more commonly seen these days, spiders do not possess internal calcified skeletons.

Thrifty Science

May 4, 2019

What with all the talk these days of “citizen science,” as opposed to those activities engaged in by profesionals in formal research facilities, one can be forgiven for not immediately calling to mind a time when almost all science was the purview of amateur experimenters making investigations of the things closest to their daily lives through the use of items they had ready-to-hand.