‘Oddball’ crocs

From National Geographic: Built to move on land, DuckCroc may have been quick-witted, as well as quick on its feet. Scans of DuckCroc's brain shows it surrounded by air pockets — signs that it was a turbocharged organ in need of cooling. DogCroc also shared similar characteristics. You might call them the corvettes of crocodiles. But DuckCroc had an even bigger fore brain that was connected to a very specialized nose - perhaps something like a duck-billed platypus.

Amphibian lovers, set your TiVos. National Geographic is set to unveil a new group of “oddball” crocs at 9pm, Saturday November 21st in “When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs.”

“There’s an entire croc world brewing in Africa that we really had only an inkling about before,” Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, told National Geographic News. “We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn’t …

Western datebook: Darwin in San Diego

IF YOU are looking for intelligent design, you could do worse than the newly opened show celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th of the publication of his “On the Origin of Species.”  For more information, click here. The show runs through February 28, 2010 at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

For an online biography of Darwin from the Natural History Museum in London, click here or for links to the celebrated traveling show on Darwin from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Field Museum in Chicago, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Natural History, London, click here.

For the National Public Radio series Darwin: The ‘Reluctant Revolutionary,’ click here.…

The Los Angeles Aqueduct, explained

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THE  dams and aqueducts that make modern life possible in Southern California — Hoover Dam (1931-36), the Colorado River Aqueduct (1933-1941) and the State Water Project (1957– __) — all owe their existence to the Los Angeles Aqueduct (1905-1913.) This gravity-fed canal extending from high in the Eastern Sierra 223 miles southwest to Los Angeles proved that 20th century Californians needn’t go to water, water could be brought to them. Cities could be built in the sand. Call it a water grab, call it ingenuity, the story of the Los Angeles Aqueduct foretold the story of the modern West.

In a boon for teachers, conservationists and anyone with a passably curious mind, Chris Austin, editor of the Water Education Foundation’s newsfeed Aquafornia, has produced a sweeping photo essay on the Aqueduct. Moreover, she has allowed us to imbed it here. Congratulations to Chris and many thanks to her
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    Emily Green by e-mail at emily.green [at] mac.com

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