Hey kids, now you can eat like Darwin!

This just released: "Mrs. Charles Darwin's Recipe Book" by Dusha Bateson and Weslie Janeway, a delightful and high-quality update of Mrs. Darwin's handwritten personal cookbook. I just got my copy yesterday and am scouring it for snacks I can serve at our Darwin birthday party. Looks like some very tasty stuff -- with the added attraction that it's exactly what our man probably ate at the Down House family dinner table. Nice.

An aside on Emma Darwin. She married Charles in 1839 at the age of 30, and went on to bear ten babies, the last one in 1856 at the age of 47. That's a kid roughly every year and a half for 17 years, and not exactly in the springtime of life. How she did not die from sheer exasperation is beyond me. How she managed in addition to make Turnips Cressilly (p.110) or Gooseberry Cream (p. 136) now and then is nothing short of miraculous. Here's to Emma and her vast reproductive capacity.

The most imaginative Darwin Day celebration ever!

In the last few weeks, fresh waves of new events have washed over the official Darwin Day listings. I love reading them -- the serious academic seminars, the sloppy happy birthday parties with cake and songs, the lonely calls for something to happen in a certain city, and best of all the unexpected funky weird happenings.

Here's my favorite in that funky category, in Ormond Beach, FL:

200 sea turtle sculptures to mark each year since Charles Darwin's birth. We will attempt to make 200 sea turtles each one in a 10 ft diameter circle and each circle 16 feet apart in a straight line stretching 1 mile long on the beach near the latest high tide water mark. The idea is watch them disappear into the next high tide thus marking the end of Charles Darwin's birthday.

I think it's gorgeous, and Steve Robinson, whoever you are, mazel tov on your great idea. Please take lots of pictures!

They're here! New kids' books on evolution.

Nine new books for children on evolution and Darwin are slated for release in 2009 (see our bibliography), and we've now got our greedy little hands on five of them:

What Mr. Darwin Saw by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom, ages 4-8
What Darwin Saw by Rosalyn Schanzer, ages 9-12
Evolution Revolution by Robert Winston, ages 9-12
The True Adventures of Charley Darwin by Carolyn Meyer, ages 12-adult
One Beetle Too Many by Kathryn Lasky and Matthew Trueman, ages 7-12

I haven't had time to do more than just flip through them to ooh and aah. My kids have devoured the ones for younger readers. Our reviews (and better images of the covers!) are coming soon. They're all for sale on Amazon if you'd like to jump in.

I've also been asked by the National Center for Science Education to write a review of One Beetle Too Many for their newsletter, NCSE Reports. I'm delighted to do it, and will keep this blog posted when it appears.

One final thought: check out the nearly identical titles on the Schanzer and Manning books. They're from different publishers, one in the UK, one in the US. There's another book called Animals Charles Darwin Saw coming out in April from Chronicle Books. Hmm. Was this planned or is someone having a heart attack in a publishing office somewhere?

Dear Overseas Customers: Please Try Again!

Recent discovery: some folks have had trouble using a credit card on my site if the card is issued by a foreign bank. Yikes, Authorize.net has some deep and obscure settings on that. I've now changed them to be much more accepting of foreign cards.

So if you're outside the States and have had your card declined on www.charliesplayhouse.com, try it again! I'll be keeping my eye on it from now on.

If it still doesn't work, please don't hesitate to contact me at kmiller@charliesplayhouse.com to figure out some other arrangements.

PS. I know PayPal would solve all these problems. Am working on that -- look for a website redesign in the coming weeks.

BONC#4: A goose and a half

Imagine this. It's 50 million years ago, and you are having a nice day on the beach in the south of England. A giant shadow passes over the sand castle you're building. You look up to see... a cloud?... a plane?... no, it's an absolutely gigantic GOOSE!

Behold the Dasornis, an ancient waterbird whose wings were 16 feet across. Holy cow, that's big. Scientists think it is an ancestor of the geese we see today.

But it gets weirder. A new fossil shows that Dasornis had sharp teeth along its huge beak.

Wait. Teeth!? A monster goose with teeth? This takes some explaining.

You probably know already that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and that dinosaurs could have some pretty ferocious teeth. But as birds evolved they lost their teeth, probably to save weight so they could fly better. By about 100 million years ago, ancient birds had no teeth at all, and their descendents still don't today. But this guy, Dasornis, later RE-evolved sharp spikes in its beak to help it catch fish by skimming along the water. These spikes looked like teeth and acted like teeth, though they aren't made out of bone. Like the Dasornis' whole beak, the teeth were made of keratin, the same stuff your fingernails are made of.

I guess teeth are pretty handy for some animals, and they'll evolve 'em out of whatever they can!

The illustration is from the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum.

I got the movie wrong. Ack.

Thanks to all for your kind words about our new bibliography of children's books about evolution and Darwin. Glad to hear it's useful.

Special thanks to Ian for pointing out a mistake in the bibliography. The upcoming movie "Creation" is not based on the book "Charles and Emma" by Deborah Heiligman but rather on Randal Keynes' biography of Darwin titled "Annie's Box." I fixed the bibliography and re-posted.

Dept. of Tooting Our Own Horn

Got this email the other day. Yes, it made me cry:

Just wanted to let you know that my 7 year old son LOVES LOVES LOVES LOVES the timeline. He has spent so much time reading it, playing with it, walking/running on it. It is by far his favorite Christmas gift and by far the best thing we've purchased in a long time! THANK YOU!!
From Alison, Colorado

89 children's books on evolution, yee-ha!

Recently, we here at Charlie's Playhouse looked deep into our bookshelves and dragged out all the kids' books on evolution we could find. That was about thirty titles, and when we checked around online and at libraries, we found a whole bunch more. We ordered them all.

Altogether we found 89 books, some old, some forthcoming, some in Spanish, some coloring books, some activity books, and so on and so on. What a bonanza!

To celebrate the arrival of the Darwin bicentennial, we've put them all into an annotated bibliography, including our reviews for the ones we have, our "top twelve," and some "recession busters" -- good old books on sale cheap.

Take a look at it here!

Happy reading!