National Geographic News has a story up on an x-ray of a Mallard that came back clearly showing the face of an alien (lower center of picture, between the bird’s legs).

The center’s experts say there’s no telling for sure what created the eerie image. Holcomb said he suspects it was caused by grains of food in the duck’s digestive system.

This explanation, rather than a bird-borne alien invasion, seemed more likely when the duck died from its injuries soon after the x-ray was taken. An autopsy revealed grain in the bird’s belly and little else.

Nevermind the autopsy and that no evidence exists for aliens… We’ve got a picture! An x-ray! Clearly this is all the evidence that should be needed. Teach the controversy!

I’m reading The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen. It’s an excellent book.

In what I’m reading now, Quammen spends some time discussing dwarfism and gigantism and the factors that cause it. (It’s complex, I won’t try to recap). In one of the most fascinating things I’ve come across in a while, he discusses the historical diet of Komodo Dragons (which are really just mind boggling huge monitor lizards).

The question, you see, is what would allow a Komodo Dragon to get so mind boggling huge. A problem arises. While they currently eat deer, goats, and pigs, these animals have only recently arrived to the islands on which Komodos live. Thus the lizards have been around much longer than their food.

One of the disadvantages to becoming as big as a Komodo Dragon is the amount of food needed. Lots and lots of food. Small birds, furry rodents, and buzzing insects just won’t cut it.

It seems there’s only big animal in the fossil record worth eating if you’re a Komodo Dragon — pygmy elephants.

There are actually two species of small elephant known from the fossil record, occuring in the areas where Komodos now exist. The smaller of the two was only 5 foot high, around the size of a modern cow. The ancestral Komodo Dragons first arriving would likely already have been large monitor lizards. At first, juvenile elephants would have been their meal ticket to survival as the selective pressure to grow bigger pushed their gigantism.

The hypothesis on the historical food source of Komodo Dragons has been advocated by no less than Jared Diamond. (Yes, the ecologist and Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond). It was originally suggested by an earlier biologist named Walter Auffenberg, who conducted the landmark study on Komodo Dragons in the early ‘70s. Diamond reviewed the evidence and made a case for this hypothesis.

If this hypothesis is false, the fossil record has left no trace of what ancestral Komodo Dragons feasted on. But the idea is intriguing. To me it’s these little tantalizing wonders that make science so fun. I mean, whose heart doesn’t warm a little at the thought of a monstrously big monitor lizard crunching on the bones of a baby pygmy elephant?

And so of course that raises the next question. How did elephants arrive on an island in the first place?

The answer is just as worthy of it’s own post but in short, they swam. Quammen also devotes some discussion to this fascinating topic, including well documented accounts of modern elephants swimming at sea. There were a couple that were documented swimming from a small island to Sri Lanka in 1954. A few years later, a mother and her calf made the same swim in the opposite direction. Reports of elephants swimming to islands exist elsewhere in India, Cambodia, and Kenya.

A more sensational example, which may or may not be true, is an elephant which was reported to have been lost overboard from a ship approaching South Carolina in 1856, and to have swum the remaining 30 miles to shore.

But the best evidence comes from the fossil record. For example, the Channel Islands off the coast of California (I’ve been there to see Island Scrub-Jay by the way) sported a species of pygmy mammoth (yes, the irony is ripe). Scientists assumed that a land bridge was responsible for their presence, yet a closer look revealed that the water between the island and the mainland was deep and that no land bridge ever existed. Also telling is that many other species around during the Pleistocene which left good fossils on the mainland do not occur on the islands. If such a land bridge existed, their absence is not to be expected.

So there you have it. Two good hypothesis that Komodo Dragons ate pygmy elephants and that elephants colonized islands by swimming. See — science is fun!

So I’m in the mountains without a TV (I’m not complaining), but today as I was hiking I remembered the new Volkswagen commercial that I saw before coming out here. (Astonishingly, I cannot find the video anywhere online. If someone has a link, please provide it).

In the commercial, a young guy arrives with his girlfriend at her house and comes to the front door. The father looks around and says, “It’s a lovely day. Maybe you would like to take a hike.”

The guys gets furious, I mean intense rage. “I’ve had it with your stereotyping, Craig! Not all Jetta owners like to take hikes!”

My mother-in-law has remarked to my wife that weird people drive Volkswagens — as if I needed another excuse to want one…

I suppose I more than meet the stereotype however.

Ed Brayton over at Dispatches From the Culture Wars, one of the blogs I read (and thoroughly enjoy) had a couple of posts the other day on Christians behaving badly. One is hilarious, the other deeply saddens me.

In the first, Pat Pat Robertson claims on his website that his special protein shake is his secret to leg pressing 2,000 pounds at 76 years of age. Ed links to a CBS sportsline story that gives the Florida State record at 6651 1335 pounds and that guy had the blood vessels in his eyes burst from the strain. My parents used to always tell me not to lie because if done enough, the truth becomes impossible to seperate from the lies. I’m pretty sure they were right. Either Pat really doesn’t recognize reality anymore, or he’s putting a little extra something special in that protein shake.

The second story is about a high school graduation ceremony in Kentucky. I’ll quote Ed’s telling of the background.

There was apparently a tradition there for the students to elect a “graduation chaplain” to hold a Christian prayer at the graduation ceremony, with the full cooperation of the school. But this year, a Muslim student filed suit to stop that tradition and a judge issued an injunction against it. So instead, in the middle of the principal’s opening remarks, 200 students stood up, interrupted the proceedings, and recited the Lord’s prayer, prompting a standing ovation from most of those in attendance. That act received praise from the school principal and superintendant.

I think his post said all that needs to be said on the issue. It’s got a nice quote from a Baylor professor who points out that the kids are using prayer as a weapon. The point is a political statement; a statement specifically crafted to give them power and offend a person they disagree with. Furthermore, they went on to boo the kid as he crossed the stage. Love they neighbor as thyself? Turn the other cheek?

It’s amazing. They might as well have rewritten the golden rule to — “do unto other Christians who share your views on just about everything as you would have them do unto you.”

It sickens me. It angers me. There is no love here. Only self-righteous indignation. And the adults stand around and pat them on the back. Ever wonder where they learn it from?

My how time doesn’t matter when you live alone in the mountains. I didn’t even realize today was Friday.

Here’s a nice picture of The Bruce going psycho on a towel that I’m wiggling. One of the frustrating things about taking pictures of Bruce is that his eyes are huge and the flash always produces red eye. In this picture however, it just adds to the effect.

Last night I noticed a beetle trying vainly to get out of the building. Upon closer inspection, I found the colors absolutely stunning. He was pretty big too at about an inch and a half. I of course escorted him to a safer place.

The latest I and the Bird is up at Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding. The author is an artist, and he’s taken the time to illustrate a small block for each entry. Be sure not to miss it.

He did quite the nice job on his illustration for the post I submitted.

While returning to the Davis Mountains this morning to continue my thesis work, I had a Greater Roadrunner dart right out in front my car going 70mph (the car, not the roadrunner).

The cloud of feathers in the rearview mirror confirmed that I nailed it.

I turned around and went back to retrieve the speciman for our natural history collection. As if I didn’t feel guilty enough, the bird was a female carrying a dead Cnemidophorus lizard (commonly referred to as whiptails or racerunners). No doubt she was likely returning to the nest to feed young.

What made it even worse was that she was in pretty bad shape (besides being dead and all). I’d ripped out all her tail feathers in the collision. I salvaged the specimen. We’ll see if my professor wants a tailless roadrunner in the collection.

While the birding gods should have frowned upon me for my inadvertent misdeeds this morning, for some reason they instead blessed me not once but twice.

Coming back to the Davis Mountains Preserve up Highway 118, I nearly choked when I noticed a Turkey Vulture with nice white bands on the underside of tail. I brought the car to a screeching halt, turned around, and observed a nice Zone-tailed Hawk for some 15 minutes as it soared leisurely, at times directly overhead.

For those that have never heard of Zone-tailed Hawks, let me briefly explain. They look almost exactly like a Turkey Vulture. There are subtle differences which easily seperate the two, but one must look closely to see these. They even hold their wings at the same angle, and rock back and forth slightly as they soar, exactly like a Turkey Vulture. The purpose of this is to conceal their true identity from their prey (mainly small birds, rodents, and lizards), which does not see Turkey Vultures as a threat. Zone-taileds are also fairly uncommon in Texas and are on the state’s threatened species list.

As if that weren’t enough, upon returning to the preserve, I noticed a bare tree at quite a distance on a hillside. When I looked through my binoculars, it was an illusion — nothing there. However, hovering right near it was a White-tailed Kite. While this bird is fairly common in south Texas, the west coast, and southern Florida, it’s a heck of a bird out in extreme west Texas. I wouldn’t have even seen it if I hadn’t taken a look at my phantom bird on the dead tree.

All I can say is that I’m not worthy of the day which I received.

I didn’t mention it, but I actually ran home for a couple of days on Sunday and Monday. The timing worked out best that way.

While driving home, I stopped at a gas station with old time gas pumps. I mean really old time gas pumps. I don’t remember the last time I saw pumps like these, though the only gas station in Bakersfield, TX (Pecos County) has them.

While the pump may be old, it’s prices unfortunately are a sign of the times.

MSNBC has a decent article by Robert Bazell on the debate over evolution and intelligent design. His main point is we should focus on the values used to make our decisions, a difficult area of medicine when hard choices have to be made.

As I said, it was decent. I think he could have made it a little more clear, however, by discussing the importance of evolution in medicine, as I don’t think many people grasp it. The entire discussion and worry of the bird flu is an issue of evolution.

Science is something very specific. It is a means of understanding the world around us by posing hypotheses that can be tested with experiments or observations. But science can never help us make moral or value judgments like those the new physicians will face.

Serious efforts in biology and medicine can no more ignore evolution than airplane designers can ignore gravity.

It is hard to believe that — whatever the outcome in the many evolution battles — we will stop worrying that the H5N1 bird flu virus might evolve into something easily transmissible among humans.

It is far more difficult to know what moral values should guide our decisions, and perhaps we should put more effort into helping students grasp that reality.