The New Homo erectus Pelvis From Gona

As both Kambiz and Hawks have pointed out, a new Homo erectus pelvis has been discovered in Gona.

Pretty Pictures and Interesting Carnivals

Seed Magazine has some wonderful science related pictures up. Check them out.
The Four Stone Hearth is up at Moneduloides and is chock full of anthropological goodness.
Greg Laden is hosting the Carnival of the Liberals.
Orac is hosting the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics Circle. Fortunately, everyone’s favorite brain eating zombie does not put in an appearance.

Cool Science News: Pygmy Tarsiers and Fossil Lemurs

I was planning on writing about the new Homo erectus pelvis but when I got home I discovered a crisis – Firefox gave me error messages and wouldn’t open (which meant no bookmarks and hence no access to anything important like this blog). Spent about an hour getting that straightened out. I’ll get the H. erectus post up tomorrow. In the meantime here are some really interesting stories.

Vote for Laelaps

Brian at Laelaps is in the running for a $10,000 science blogging scholarship. He needs your help. You can vote here. Voting ends November 20th so you need to vote soon!

Limb Loss in Scincid Lizards

I’m currently working on a long winded post about the new Homo erectus pelvis – which I hope to have up tomorrow – in the meantime it occurred to me that I had been meaning to mention a new paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology called Rapid and repeated limb loss in a clade of scincid lizards

Dinosaurs and the Civil War

This may be old news, but I just heard about it via email from a friend. It concerns a themepark in Virginia. The premise is that:

A family of Virginia paleontologists has accidentally dug a mine shaft into a hidden valley of living dinosaurs.Unfortunately, the Union Army has tagged along, hoping to kidnap the big lizards and use them as “weapons of mass destruction” against the South.

Carnage ensues and well that’s about it really. More – or better – pictures here

New Homo erectus Pelvis

Well, now we know why the publication date of the book on Ethiopian Homo erectus keeps getting pushed back. Kambiz has the story on the new female H. erectus pelvis. Most of the accounts I have seen focus on the birthing babies aspect – a hot research topic at the moment, but for my money the interesting part (and I say this without having read the paper) is this from National Geographic:

Creationism and Homo floresiensis

I’m sure everybody watched the Alien From Earth if not follow the link. Especially because I am about to lay some serious stupid on you. I was randomly surfing the web and stumbled across two articles on Homo floresiensis both of which were written by creationists.

Has The Common Ancestor Of Deep Sea Octopi Been Found?

According to this BBC News article it has.

Sunday Need to Read: The Backlog Keeps Growing

I seem to be acquiring papers quicker than I can read them. It doesn’t help the my printer is out of ink and I hate reading pdfs on the computer…a problem which should be remedied later this week.