Skeptophilia

My office window looks out over our raised-bed gardens and into our front yard.  It's still chilly early spring here in upstate New York...

In 1904, biologist Joseph Grinnell formulated what has since become known as the Competitive Exclusion Principle : if two species overlap i...

252 million years ago, the Earth was hit by a confluence of Very Unfortunate Events. First, most of the large continental land masses locked...

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia  that I have a fascination for considering how the terrain of the Earth has c...

Back in 1859, renowned British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote a paper about a peculiar phenomenon, which has since been called Wal...

I've heard it said that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the deep oceans on the Earth. I've never serious...

Just about anywhere you are in the world, you are confronted constantly with invasive species. Some are so ubiquitous we've stopped even...

One of the (many) ways people can be shortsighted is in their seeming determination to view non-human species as inconsequential except inso...

Humans have amazingly short memories. I suppose that there's at least some benefit to this.  Unpleasant events in our lives would be far...

I used to ask a question to my biology classes, during the unit on ecology: what are the only two commonly-eaten fruits that are native to N...