Sir David Attenborough recording a chorus of frogs in 1954. Photo courtesy of wildfilmhistory.org, a fantastic site

Given that we are all living in the 21st century together and through the good advice of trusted associates of mine I have started a blog.  I shall retro-act a New Year’s resolution of creating one and then cross it from my list.  I am not at all entirely sure what this will always consist of or where it will go in the future.  My guess is that it will just provide more filler for me to work on instead of actually doing work for my classes.

I am working towards a Master’s degree in history.  My main research focuses on live animal collecting for zoos.  There is also some tangential work being done on specimen collecting for museums.  I have three minor’s in Anthropology, Geology, and Earth Sciences.  I am a Natural Historian of the 19th Century vein.  Not unlike Porthos who claimed a beheading axe a gift from the Tsarina of America, I  self proclaim my college hours and experience to be a Bachelor of Science in History.  I can do that, its my blog.

What I hope my followers (all both of you) will get out of this is a concise inclusion of things that are going on in the science world presently. I confess many issues will include links to BBC news.  I also hope to enlighten some about what went on in the world of science in the past.  We all grow up with iconic images of famous people, I shall use Darwin as an example. In our mind’s eye we see him old and white-bearded, about 23.

However this is not the Darwin that sailed on the Beagle. It was a younger man (Darwin really wasn’t 23 with the white beard) that lost his cookies over the Beagle’s railing explored Argentina, and ate large flightless bird over a campfire.  A specimen which turned out to be a new species, upon that realization Charles went around gathering up everyone’s table scraps to make another scientific contribution via Richard Owen’s descriptions.

Those are the stories I want to share. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I, but if you do not I will also fill updates with reviews of books I have had to read for class and the ones I have chosen to read for pleasure, they are seldom the same. Some movies we go to, but that is infrequent, as well as reviews for a few theatre performances, and local symphony happenings.

I will also try and highlight anything I do along the way to a PhD somewhere over time’s horizon.  I am notorious for visiting a city and really only going to two places: the zoo and their Natural History Museum. I will try and keep these things brief enough to read between laps your boss makes in your office, but some will require a bit more page time.

Updates will be infrequent, and sometimes more than once a day. I look forward to constructive comments from my captivated and attentive audiences as well as any questions that you guys have. I will try to cite sources that I use, even though the one for the above Darwin anecdote escapes me at the moment.

So, for a brief semi introduction, this will have to suffice.  Once I get my blogging sea legs under me, I will go into more detail about why I call this blog The Platypus and the Dodo and maybe some back history on me that could be found in the about me section, if you are inclined to give a fig about who I am. Most of you do, and the only reason you will check the “About Me” section is to see if I have lied.