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Halbred's Paleo-News Thread
TheBlackCat:
Russel's Tea pot: Bertrand Russel used a teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars to explain why he rejected religion. I can't say more without violating board rules. The Wikipedia article on the subject is good.
Invisible Unicorn: The Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is a parody religion, similar to Russel's teapot in principle but put in a form more similar to real religions. There is a link to the article on it, and several similar parody religions, on the Russel's teapot wikipedia article above.
The Four Humors: It was thought that the bloodstream was composed of four humours, or fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Disease was thought to be due to an imbalance in the humours, and bloodletting was intended to restore this balance. Despite being the dominant medical system in Europe for thousands of years it doesn't actually bear any resemblance to reality in any way.
Classical Periodic Table: It was known for a long time that light was composed of waves, but since all other known waves were distortions in a medium (like sounds wave are distortions in air), it was thought that light was a distortion in a medium called "Ether" or "Aether". However, very sensitive experiments were unable to detect it. Massless aether and quantum mechanics made the same predictions, so aether was abandoned as unnecessary (see Occam's razor).
Time Cube: Time cube is possibly the most deranged crackpot site on the entire internet. It is also unintelligible, racist, and genocidal. For instance, the guy who is behind it thinks everyone who won't accept it (which is pretty much everyone in the world) should be killed. He even reject basic arithmetic, claiming that the idea that -1*-1=1 is the result of a conspiracy. "Timecubes" is a unit of measure for how nutty a crackpot idea is, with values ranging from 0 to 10.
& is the Alchemy one Lead --> Gold?: Correct
Halbred:
I have several a few T-shirts from that website! Two are "Teach the Controversy" shirts. One has a picture of a human using a Triceratops to plow, and another has the devil burrying dinosaur bones. Then I have one of a pterosaur picking up a car, and it says "F*cking Pterodacyls." Soooo great.
Brusatte et al. just published a paper about tyrannosaurs in general...I'll have more to say once I've read it!
ThePerm:
also, to note, medical technology has had its up and downs. During the dark ages "physicians" got really dumb, but during the classical period before it there were pretty competent doctors.
i would totally buy all the Sir Critter shirts if i could afford it.
Halbred:
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plosone.org%2Farticle%2Finfo%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0012292&h=eb74c
Two brand-spanking new chasmosaurine ceratopsids from Utah: Utahceratops and Kosmosaurus. The former is a sister taxon to Pentaceratops while the latter is a sister taxon to Vagaceratops.
Utahceratops is unique in having a teardrop-shaped nasal horn that sits almost entirely behind the nasal opening. This gives it a very long snout. Also strangely, the brow horns are small and laterally-directed rather than pointing forward. The frill is similar to Anchiceratops and Pentaceratops. It is a large chasmosaurine, and much of the post-cranial skeleton is known.
Kosmoceratops is smaller than Utahceratops but unbelievably wierd. It has a short, blunted nasal horn and it also has laterally-directed brow horns that actually grow in arcs along their lengths! The frill is very short for a chasmosaurine, and the parietal fenestrae are small. Most amazingly, eight finger-like projections overlay the dorsal margin of the frill (like bangs), and a large hook-like spike originates at each upper corner of the frill. Kosmoceratops has the most decorative head of any dinosaur ever!
Almost more importantly, the two genera add to an increasingly clear picture of ceratopsid radiation and evolution in North America. During the Late Cretaceous, a giant shallow sea--the Sundance or Western Interior Seaway--split North America into two distinct landmasses. The western half was basically just a ribbon of land with young mountain ranges on the western coast and beachfront property on the east cost. Most of North America's dinosaurs, including all known ceratopsids (with one Chinese exception) roamed this strip of land.
But what's especially odd is that this strip of land was about a third the square footage of Africa, and probably smaller at times. And yet we have multiple large herbivores living at any one time, all of which were about the mass of an elephant, being pursued by large carnivores. Each distinct time period seems to be marked by a unique community of herbivores: two kinds of duckbills, two kinds of ceratopsids, and an ankylosaur or two. Each species is replaced, possibly through anagenesis, over millions of years. No species lived much longer than a million years, and there are very few cases of overlap between communities.
It's very strange, especially when you take home ranges and plant resources into consideration. It implies that these herbivorous dinosaurs had lower metabolic demands than modern herbivores, or the plant life was more sustainable and lush, or both.
Even better? The southern and northern communities of this strip of land are quite different, and there is no overlap. That is, you don't find any Pentaceratops in the north AND the south. This division persists until the latest Cretaceous, when Torosaurus pops up in Utah and Montana. Theoretically, that means there was some kind of environmental or geographic barrier preventing faunal exchange between the north and the south, but we don't know what that is yet. It's possible that a persistent river system or an expansion of the Sundance Sea divided that strip of land, but there isn't evidence for it...yet.
Download that paper (it's free) and give it a read. Fascinating stuff!
BlackNMild2k1:
Size 8.5 Happy Feet?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/photogalleries/100930-new-species-giant-penguin-red-science-feathers-pictures/
--- Quote ---The 36-million-year-old giant penguin species Inkayacu paracasensis stood nearly as tall as a man and sported shades of red and gray (pictured in an artist's reconstruction), scientists announced Thursday.
--- End quote ---