Todd's Blog

The second day of the Origins 2011 conference was dedicated to the technical geology presentations. We got an update on the Coconino sandstone project from John Whitmore, and we had a lively session on the Flood/post-Flood boundary. Since we had a few talks cancelled, we decided to use the extra time to tour the Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. We closed the day with John Morris's reflections on The Genesis Flood . That was a great opportunity to recall the importance of the book, and we learned that Walter Lammerts was tough to sit next to in the car. Who knew? At our business meeting, we voted in a new member of the Executive Council of the Creation Biology Society: Tom Hennigan. Welcome, Tom! We also announced next year's conference venue, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, VA. We've got one more day of the conference, beginning with my plenary on "Frontiers in Creation Biology." Feedback? Email me at to...

The first day of Origins 2011 was a great success! The technical talks sparked a lot of interesting discussion and debate, and Art Chadwick's plenary on his dinosaur dig at the Hanson Research Station was well received. The crowd was also one of our biggest. Of special interest to me was Lantzer and Daniels's survey of Christian high school biology textbooks. They argued (shockingly) that when discussing origins (i.e. creation/evolution), Christian texts spend too much time on apologetics rather than science. Remedy? Talk more about science. What a brilliant idea. I'm looking forward to seeing their full paper. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

I went on my first geology field trip today, which was fascinating. Perhaps more culturally fascinating to me than scientifically fascinating, but I still enjoyed myself. (I admit that a lot of the geological detail was over my head.) Here we are at an outcropping of the "Great Unconformity:" Speaking as a biologist, I thought the Unconformity was pretty good. I don't know about "great," but that's probably because I haven't seen it across most of the continental United States, which I guess would make it pretty great. Steve Austin interpreted the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon as the onset of the Flood, where the initial Flood waters eroded off the existing rocks from the pre-Flood world. Meanwhile, the conference abstracts are available at the JCTS website , along with a short editorial from Tim Clarey on the launch of JCTS Series C: Earth Science . Creation Biology Society 2011 Abstracts Creation Geology Society 2011 Editorial an...

Despite an unscheduled 24-hour layover in Chicago, I have safely arrived in Rapid City for Origins 2011. It's a little overcast, but otherwise fairly pleasant. In about two hours, I will head off to the Black Hills to look at rocks with a bunch of geologists, which I think will be more fun than it sounds. Check back later for a brief rundown of the field trip, and then tomorrow we start the conference. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

Regular readers might recall my interest in carnivorous plants (see posts on toilets , bacteria , and tiny frogs ). If the world was originally created with plants to provide food for immortal animals, how did we end up with plants that actually eat animals? That's a great question that I can't yet answer definitively, but I am becoming more and more intrigued by reports of unusual functions of Nepenthes pitcher plants. I previously noted the report of tree shrews using Nepenthes as toilets , with the plants getting nitrogen from the feces. Normally, pitcher plants get their nitrogen from digesting insects. Recently, there a new report of what appears to be a symbiosis between Nepenthes rafflesiana elongata and Hardwicke's woolly bat ( Kervoula hardwickii hardwickii ). According to the report by Grafe et al., the pitchers of Nepenthes rafflesiana elongata are pretty poor at catching insects. They also have an unusually elongated structure, and they don't hav...

I was just reading yesterday a creationist paper skeptical of warm-blooded dinosaurs, and today, there's a new paper from Science providing yet more evidence that dinosaurs could regulate their body temperatures. From the abstract of Eagle et al.'s Dinosaur Body Temperatures Determined from Isotopic ( 13 C- 18 O) Ordering in Fossil Biominerals : We used clumped isotope thermometry to determine body temperatures from the fossilized teeth of large Jurassic sauropods. Our data indicate body temperatures of 36° to 38°C, which are similar to those of most modern mammals. This temperature range is 4° to 7°C lower than predicted by a model that showed scaling of dinosaur body temperature with mass, which could indicate that sauropods had mechanisms to prevent excessively high body temperatures being reached because of their gigantic size. Now I'm off to South Dakota for a short vacation before the Origins 2011 conference. There's still time to register if you are interest...

Well, this was unexpected. I was working on my plenary talk for Origins 2011 the other day, and I stumbled across a book called Bara Min! , written by Lin Hallberg. Oddly enough, the book is not about creationist biology. Google Translation tells me it's about: Santos is ridskolans unruly horse. But Sofia loves him! She is saving money and fantasize about the lonely, derelict little barn by the hands cottage. What if she could buy Santos and having him there. One day an ambulance outside the indoor arena. Santos was thrown by a student and ridskolechefen talking about the slaughter ... Sofia's dream is suddenly about life and death. She must save Santos! Apparently the title is Swedish for "Just Me!" or so says Google Translation. And you know how reliable Google Translation is. Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.