The city of Rotterdam plans to prohibit people from feeding bread to ducks. The news organization NRC reports, on April 7, 2022, about the pushback on that, especially from the city’s most eminent duck biologist. Here is a machine translation (into English) of that report: Doubts in Rotterdam about the usefulness of the ban on […]
Cormorants are showering shit upon limousines that park unwisely in one particular spot in Rotterdam. Kees Moeliker, ornithologist, director of the natural history museum in Rotterdam, and Ig Nobel Prize winner (for discovering homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck), writes about it in the Dutch newspaper NRC. Here is a machine-translation into English: Full layer […]
Pokémon scholarship reached its height with the study “A Phylogeny and Evolutionary History of the Pokémon“, by Matan Shelomi, Andrew Richards, Ivana Li, and Yukinari Okido, which was published in the Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 18, no 4, June/July 2012. Here’s a bit of detail from that study (click on the image to see the entire […]
It was 20 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to— No. That’s not what happened. What happened 20 years ago today is that a duck died, in spectacular fashion, and a scientist noticed how it happened, and took notes and photos to commemorate the discovery. Today, Friday June 5th, 2015 is the 20th […]
A provocative discovery: the first hyena dropping dredged up from the North Sea. See the announcement & photo (well, you can see the photo reproduced here) from Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam. This humble, yet inspiring fossil is now on display at the museum. BONUS: Further detail and thoughts, from the Wall Street Journal, with a photo […]
Tomorrow, June 5, is Dead Duck Day. On June 5, 1995, a mallard duck slammed into the window of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, the first big step on its journey into history. Kees Moeliker, the museum’s curator, subsequently published the first scientifically recorded description of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck (click here […]