Category: Science/Technology

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F is for Fossil

Fossil of plant-eating teeth, Morrison museum, photo by kajmeister

Fossils never excited me. Skulls do, but I could never find the thrill of a 1000-year-old imprint of a leaf. Imprint of a 200-million-year-old feather? Now you’re talking. Yet we wouldn’t know anything about the world that came before, without fossils. Everything we know about dinosaurs comes from fossils. You don’t get to know what T-rex ate, how a diplodocus withstood attack, how hadrosaurs laid eggs, or where the sauropods walked — without fossils. Fossils are the artifacts, the archive as the historians say, which prove that there was life before humans.

And they’re not really even bones.

Theseus’ Paradox

There’s a famous Greek philosophy idea about Theseus’ ship. Theseus sailed out to the island of Crete and slew the minotaur in the maze, plus had many grand adventures, which is why Athens was named for him. The story goes that the ship of his odyssey (no, that’s another guy) was put on display as a monument. Over time, the wood rotted, so a plank was replaced here, then there, then the mast…. Over a long time, all of the wood in the ship was replaced.

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E is for Extinction

Cartoon by Bizarro.

The pop cultural perspective on extinction is filled with visions of failure. The extinction of the dinosaurs is frequently viewed through this lens. But consider the lengthy reign of dinosaurs on Earth. Dinosaurs spent more than 160 million years ruling Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. And technically, when you consider those modern dinosaurs flying around today, it means that dinosaurs have been around for more than 230 million years.

Kristi Curry Rogers, “Dinosaurs.”

Dinosaurs are often used as the definition of old, dead, extinct. Blackberries are now dinosaurs. Baby Boomers are dinosaurs with modern devices. The moniker is somewhat unfair. After all, dinosaurs did spread and thrive across the globe longer than any other type of creature. Fish lasted for about 60 million years in the “Age of Fish,” and mammals have also only been around about 65 million years. Dinos are extinct, but it took a rather dramatic way to take them out. (Well, technically crocodiles have been around since the dinosaurs, so maybe…)

Still, for what it’s worth, before we get overwrought about dinosaurs disappearing and the horror of species vanishing, we should get straight how extinction actually works.

Extinction causes from Firesafe Council.

Two Flavors of Extinction

First off, there are two kinds of extinction:

  • Background Extinction
  • Mass Extinction

Species go extinct all the time, and they always have. Background extinction refers to a one-off event, where a species dies off because it can’t adapt to the existing conditions. They lose their habitat or food source. Predators adapt more quickly than they do. Climate change has occurred countless times across the earth, multiple ice ages and warm ups and volcanoes spewing sulfur and CO2, plants gobbling it up. Every time there is a significant climate change, species go extinct–we’ve already had two Ice Ages in human history.

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D is for Diplodocus

Diplodocus casts in the Carnegie Museum, photo from Carnegie museum.

Diplodocus was one of the oldest dinosaurs discovered. Language is so imprecise, though. Were they the bones of a 120-year-old? Was he from the Triassic, the earliest dino-era? Nope. He was among the first dinosaurs found by the dinosaur hunters during the late 19th century. So Dippy–that’s what that first skeleton came to be known as–Dippy was famous because he was one of the first, but he became more famous for a bigger reason. Dippy was copied.

Diplodocus was one of those “big” dinosaurs I mentioned back with the letter “B.” He is classified as one of the sauropods, those giant, the huge, long-necked, long-tailed dinos who were vegetarian and too humongous to be messed with. The family tree of the Diplodocus, (or the clade called Diplodocidae) groups the Apatosaurs with the Diplos. Both groups had long necks and tails, but the Apatosaurs were stockier, whereas the Diplos tended to be skinny in the front and all the way to the back, with an almost whip-like tail. (Like Anne Elk said, if you remember *ahem* Anne Elk, they were thin to start with, then much much thicker, then thin again. *ahem*.)

diplo (double) + docus (beam)

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