Species are everywhere, but they don’t exist: Wherein we discuss different methods of defining species, the purpose of separating living things into categories, why it seems like species exist, and why, ultimately, they may not. If species don’t exactly exist, is the concept still meaningful? Yes. Find out why on the Quest podcast.
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The voices:
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Danaan DeNeve – Evolutionary ecologist, PhD candidate at UC Merced
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Nate Fox – Paleontologist, PhD candidate at UC Merced
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Taran Rallings – Paleo food web modeler, PhD student at UC Merced
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We will update this blog post with some exciting accessory information very soon
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Next up:Models and Data Collection: the methods, the tension, and the search for reality
Wherein we discuss such things as how science & nature documentaries present research (and nature!), a bit about why QuestX does what it does, some of our thoughts about our respective fields, sciencing, how we got into sciencing, and some other fun stuff.
The voices:
<– Danaan DeNeve– Evolutionary ecologist, PhD student at UC Merced
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<–Morgan Barnes– Soil scientist, PhD student at UC Merced
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Nate Fox– Paleontologist, PhD student at UC Merced –>
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(with friends ;p )
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We discuss several things in this podcast which might benefit from the aid of a visual guide, which we have attempted to provide below, along with some helpful and exciting links:
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We start off our magical mystery tour through several grad students’ brains with aplodontids…
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This is a mountain beaver. They are rodents, but they are not beavers. Mountain beavers are the sole surviving members of the Aplodontid family, which notably included the only horned rodents ever known to have existed.
Here’s a timeline showing where aplodontids fall in relation to the rest of the rodent family.
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An unexpected foray into reptiles…
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So apparently when you Google “horned rodent” sometimes armadillo lizards come up too. They migh be even better than aplodontids, if a little hard to be.
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Other podcast mentions include:
Oreodonts were giant pig-sheep-things of the Miocene and Oligocene. Wikipedia has some good starting information about these guys:
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Entelodonts were some pretty wild critters too!
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And then of course there’s Synthetoceras, another strange Miocene artiodactly (deer-like animal).
For reference, a lovely geologic era timeline by Ray Troll. Please note this is a very simplified timeline and is NOT TO TEMPORAL SCALE
(we’ll have a better geologic time scale available soon!)
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