Tag: #Dinosaurs

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The Dino-calypse: Mexican, Ukrainian, or the Hindu God Destroyer?

The traumatized pachycephalosaurus! Photo from cdn.mos.

If you think I’m nuts about the Olympics, you should hear me talk about dinosaurs. All anyone needs to say is “antorbital fenestra,” and I swoon. Or “Chicxulub crater,” which is the impact site for the theoretical asteroid that hit 65 million years ago and wiped out most of life on earth, except for the tree shrews, from which all of us are descended. (We’ll have to save the tree shrews for another time.)

So you can imagine my excitement upon learning of the controversy between the Boltysh crater and the Chicxulub crater. Which came first? Apparently, there’s big money in being first because scientists from India are also claiming precedence.

Also, I learned the word “palynological,” which satisfies my Weird-Word-of-the-Month fetish.  It means “the study of live and fossil spores, pollen grains, and similar plant structures,” from the Greek palunein, which means “to scatter” as in dust or “pollen.”  Fern spores are very much in play here. And, for those of you with allergies, you now know that they are palynological.

Ok, so these dudes back in 2010 noticed this crater in the Ukraine called the Boltysh crater. The crater was “roughly” the same age as Chicxulub, and when we’re talking 65 million years, roughly can be mean +/- a million years, right? They were trying to be a bit more precise—in the 10,000 year range maybe—to see whether Boltysh came before or after Chicxulub.

There’s fame and fortune in the Dinosaur Demise!

Continue reading “The Dino-calypse: Mexican, Ukrainian, or the Hindu God Destroyer?”
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The Land of Rock and Cactus, Part II: Canyons and Culture

Owachomo Bridge, Natural Bridges National Park, Utah

This second week of our trip finds the intrepid southwestern travelers braving the trails through Santa Fe and northeastern Utah. I thought about entitling this Canyons, Cuisine, and Conversation because we had the chance to visit with so many good friends and eat good food… or Canyons and Chiles … or Canyons and Calderas … or Canyons and Calamities, but I couldn’t think of a good “C” word for the art. And Santa Fe had so much art!

Santa Fe: More Artists per Capita

According to something called the Location Quotient at the website Citylab, Santa Fe is the second largest mid-sized U.S. city for art. In other words, there was an awful lot of art for a city of only 85,000. So much art that every other building downtown is a gallery. The famous Canyon Road boasts over 120 galleries along its six blocks. The community garden across from our hotel entrance began with an arch made out of wheelbarrows, and the nearby railroad stop was fronted by a football field-sized canvas with twenty separate photography exhibits. So much art that even the orange traffic cones are turned into artwork. Continue reading “The Land of Rock and Cactus, Part II: Canyons and Culture”

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The Past Is Not What it Used to Be

Suppose you are looking at dinosaurs…

What do you mean you have not seen any dinosaurs recently? Do you not have any children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or little neighbors, or do you not know someone else who has children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews or little neighbors? Surely, you know someone who has access to a young person, and it is summertime, therefore, you can take them to a science museum or natural history museum or for heaven’s sake a Toys-R-Us to look at some dinosaurs.

As I was saying…

The collection you are looking at is probably not all, in fact, dinosaurs. As a general rule, dinosaurs in the Mesozoic age, aka the “Age of the Dinosaurs,” did not swim or fly. Those giant things in the water that looked like a turtle crossed with a giraffe? Or had teeth and flippers bigger than your head? Not dinosaurs. The thing with the membrane stretched across one finger, depicted gliding across the hundred foot fern trees? Not dinosaurs.  This is true, even though most museum exhibits and reference books will include pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mososaurs.  They might as well have included crocodiles or gekkos while they were at it. Continue reading “The Past Is Not What it Used to Be”

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