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Fossils and the people who love them

@jurassicsunsets / jurassicsunsets.tumblr.com

"How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away?" —U.K. Le Guin A blog about palaeontology from the studio that brought you PalaeoFail.
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Reblogged raptorcivilization
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This was the museum I went to often in my childhood. I'm no longer able to visit unless I visit family, but this place holds a special place in my heart.

As stated in the article, they hold around 7 million artifacts- many of which are orphaned fossils, with the museum taking in collections that otherwise would have been trashed.

Please consider buying a Paleozoic Pal, but I'll also leave a direct donation link as well.

Donate — Paleontological Research Institution
Paleontological Research Institution
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THE GIANT EURYPTERID BODY PILLOW IS BACK IN STOCK

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Reblogged raptorcivilization
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It's weird how geological time works. Eras start and end bit by bit over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. That sounds like a big uncertainty but that sort of timescale, on which the climate can overhaul itself completely and entire species rise and fall, is instantaneous compared to the age of the earth. Any hypothetical sentient creature would have no idea it was living through a major turning point. The Silurian slid into the Devonian as land plants became A Thing and insects started to wonder if 'pilot' might be a good career path, but there was no one moment when one thing ended and another began. That's not how that works...

... except for the Cretaceous. The Cretaceous had a Last Day and it was probably in April, and then the next day it was the Paleogene.

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So, fun fact: The Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary is defined, specifically, as the layer of the iridium anomaly. In other words, the roughly geologically synchronous event where the space dust rained out of the atmosphere.

Only....that's not the instant the asteroid hits. When the asteroid hits, the Earth's crust melts and freezes to glass, tidal waves flood continents, wildfires rage, and vaporised bits of Earth and the Chicxulub impactor are thrown into the air. This condenses and freezes to dust, which circulates in the atmosphere.

How long does that dust circulate before officially ringing in the Cenozoic by raining down onto the sediments of Earth? A few days. What's more amazing? On top of the fused glass of the crater, but below the iridium anomaly, are fossils of bacteria. Nothing is truly barren for long. Life's recovery begins instantly.

[Source]

#in some ways it is more poetic for the cenozoic to begin at the millisecond of impact#but alas
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Some protorohippuses around town! This early horse was found in this little town (I mean…they find a lot of fossils here, just, this is probably the coolest)

Now it’s in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History!

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I feel like it's my responsibility as a semi-popular scicommer here to remind everyone:

Adult mosquitos do not eat blood; they only suck blood if they are pregnant as their babies need it to grow.

Adult mosquitos are herbivores, and use those same biting mouthparts and proboscis to suck juices out of plants. This includes nectar—mosquitos are important pollinators. In some ecosystems—the tundra, for instance—mosquitos are the predominant pollinators, since they are hardier and can withstand more climactic extremes than other pollinators.

Mosquitos are also crucial links in the food chain, providing food for spiders, dragonflies, wasps, hummingbirds, and tons of other organisms. And not just on land—since mosquito larvae live in water, they help transfer nutrients between aquatic and terrestrial realms, and feed fish, frogs, bugs, and more.

With all that said—even if none of the above is true, mosquitos are still living things, and life has an inherent value.

Yes, the diseases that mosquitos can carry cause great human suffering, and we need to work to eliminate those diseases. But the idea that eradicating mosquitos is a good idea or something humans have the right to do is arrogant misguided ecological meddling of the highest degree.

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Image description: photo of a brown sign with white text that reads: "You can't save everything cute, eat everything that tastes good, and kill everything you're afraid of and expect a working ecosystem to come out of it." -- Flip Nicklin, wildlife photographer

Image source: photograph by op

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Here the results from a stream we had some time ago where we speculated about dinosaur reproductive behaviors. A topic that I think is rather fascinating but is rarely touched upon (cowards!).

You see here six genera in the act.

Utahraptor, Turiasaurus

Hesperosaurus, Therizinosaurus

Spinosaurus, Gastonia

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STOP drawing dinosaurs fucking!!!

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I refuse, it's an essential part of most multicellular life. Shying away from this is just childish.

#good art tag
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The Strange and Dangerous Right-Wing Freakout Over Ancient Apocalypse
How a Netflix series about the hunt for the lost city of Atlantis became yet another front in the culture war—and the latest example of elite conservatives going weird.
newrepublic.com|Jason Colavito

I don’t normally post on archaeology, but this is something I feel is relevant and that I’d like to spread awareness of. 

Misinformation is not harmless, and this kind of anti-intellectual, conspiracy theory-peddling is becoming more prominent. It’s dangerous and encourages anti-science attitudes that make people more susceptible to fascist manipulation.

#i this kind of stuff on tumblr all the time—anything I can do to combat those attitudes is effort well spent i think#as someone once said: there are only 2 types of conspiracy theories—things the US government admits to doing in the cold war or antisemitism#not palaeontology
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