#FOWC Archives – Page 26 of 104

April 9, 2024April 9, 2024

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.

April 8, 2024April 9, 2024

E is for Extinction

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.

April 6, 2024April 9, 2024

C is for Clade

Dinosaur clade with timeframe, graphic from Fossil Wiki.

It’s all about the family trees. Today’s dinosaur-themed post is about how the dinosaur world is organized.

I know some of you are thinking, geez, don’t you know the names of any dinosaurs? Why isn’t A to Z going to be about Ankylosaurus to Zupaysaurus? I will have a few posts dedicated to specific dinosaurs, especially my favorites. But you can look up tons of dinosaur lists A to Z. There are kid’s alphabet books that do that. I promised to give you “all about dinosaurs,” not all about 26 dinosaurs. We need to round out this paleontological survey a bit more in order to achieve that goal.

How paleontologists organize the dinosaurs is quite important because it helps us understand how dinosaurs did what they did. As I mentioned in post “A,” the ankle bone structures differing from those of crocodiles urged scientists to think about why, and why was because dinosaurs stood upright. Hip-bone differentiation helped identify the two big groups — wait until letter “H”! And then… the birds. But we’ll get to that.