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	<title>Brian Switek</title>
	<link>http://brianswitek.com</link>
	<description>Musings on Evolution, the Fossil Record, and the History of Science</description>
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		<title>Dirty Browsers &#8211; Determining a menu for North America&#8217;s fossil camels</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Even with the young politician Jefferson Davis behind their adoption by the military, camels were a hard sell to the U.S. government. Along with other military men, Davis was convinced that camels could replace horses as the standard beasts of burden used by cavalry on the ever-expanding western frontier, but most congressmen and senators balked [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/09/dirty-browsers-determining-a-menu-for-north-americas-fossil-camels/</link>
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		<title>It&#8217;s just a little pre-digested; it&#8217;s still good, it&#8217;s still good.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you want to know about the life and habitat of a woolly mammoth, there is scarcely a better place to look than in its dung. Found frozen in the permafrost or extracted from the intestines of well-preserved specimens, mammoth coprolites are fecal records of the plants which existed in the animal's local environment and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/its-just-a-little-pre-digested-its-still-good-its-still-good/</link>
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		<title>The Usefulness of Dolphin Snot</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For years marine biologists have relied on dart biopsies – small portions of tissue obtained by shooting a dart into an animal – to study the genetics of dolphins in the wild. The trouble is that this method can’t be used on very young animals for fear of harming them, and concerns about injury to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/the-usefulness-of-dolphin-snot/</link>
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		<title>Of Pronghorn and Predators</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Capable of reaching speeds exceeding 70 kilometers per hour, the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) is one of the fastest mammals on earth. No large North American carnivore can match it for speed - some conservationists have go so far as to suggest importing cheetahs to special parks to reinstate the evolutionary race between pronghorn and extinct [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/of-pronghorn-and-predators/</link>
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		<title>Know your monsters: Graboid</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Monstrous Wildlife from Frank Robnik on Vimeo. I can't say that all the "science" in the short is sound (Graboids are reptiles? Really?), but it's a fun look at the stars of the Tremors series.]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/know-your-monsters-graboid/</link>
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		<title>Repost &#8211; Fossil feces from an Indiana sinkhole preserve traces of a meat-eater&#8217;s meal</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Time and again I have stressed that every fossil bone tells a story, and, in a different way, so do coprolites. Fossilized feces are small snapshots of the lives of prehistoric organisms, often preserving bits of whatever they had been eating, and while coprolites may not get top billing in museum halls, they are among [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/repost-fossil-feces-from-an-indiana-sinkhole-preserve-traces-of-a-meat-eaters-meal/</link>
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		<title>Repost &#8211; Unique Fossils Record the Dining Habits of Ancient Sharks</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Shark attacks are events of speed and violence. When they have locked-on to a prey item, sharks seem to come out of nowhere, and though they can be quite gentle with their jaws (as on occasions when they are unsure about whether something is food or not) their ranks of serrated teeth can inflict a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/repost-unique-fossils-record-the-dining-habits-of-ancient-sharksunique-fossils-record-the-dining-habits-of-ancient-sharks/</link>
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		<title>Creeping Closer to Publication</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Things have been a little slow here this week, but for good reason. A few days ago a large package arrived at my door and I opened it up to find... ... the galley copies of Written in Stone. These are the uncorrected (but near-final) versions of the book which will go out to magazine [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/creeping-closer-to-publication/</link>
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		<title>Mother Tigers Pass Down Territory to Their Daughters</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For female Amur tigers, defending your territory is not just about acquiring enough food to survive; it's also about passing down real estate to your daughter. As described by a team of scientists led by the Wildlife Conservation Society's John Goodrich in the latest issue of the Journal of Mammalogy, a 14-year study of Amur [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/mother-tigers-pass-down-territory-to-their-daughters/</link>
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		<title>The Bite of the Bear-Dog</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Between 23 and 16 million years ago, just outside of where the city of Lisbon, Portugal sits today, there lived a unique mix of mammals which would have seemed both strange and familiar. From bones and footprints left in fossilized feces, paleontologists have found that rhinoceros, deer, horses, antelope, and elephants browsed and grazed in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/the-bite-of-the-bear-dog/</link>
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