#Pygmy Mammoth
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31 days of pastel paleo critters (9-16)!
9. Waimanu
10. Procoptodon
11. Glyptodon
12. Dimetrodon
13. Simbakubwa
14. Drepanosaurus
15. Ichthyosaurus
16. Pygmy Mammoth
#paleontology#prehistoric creatures#Waimanu#Procoptodon#Glyptodon#Dimetrodon#Simbakubwa#Drepanosaurus#Ichthyosaurus#Pygmy Mammoth#mammoth
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Hey, since cloning technology is good enough for them to create mammoth meatballs but not the entire mammoth yet, which prehistoric animal do you feel like taking a bite of?
Given where I was born, and where @dduane and I currently live, I think some Giant Irish Elk venison would be about right.
Enough for the entire clan with plenty of leftovers and a Handy Thing To Hang Stuff From.
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Which leads via Memory Lane to a funny by John M. Ford, who used to post such things - along with witticisms, wise observations and poetry - on Making Light.
He produced these in the same way a bonfire produces sparks: random, unexpected, brilliant and without apparent effort - though like the graceful swan on the river, I bet there was a lot of work going on out of sight. Or maybe not. Mike was that good.
For instance, he wrote THIS just to comment on another post...
I saved everything I could find offline because You Can Never Tell about online stuff, and also because there was, for a time, doubt - happily, It Got Better - that ANY of his writing would ever be seen again.
(Dammit, just like Terry Pratchett I HATE having to refer to Mike in past tense...)
And now, the funny (original archived Here). I've been assured that This Recipe Will Work, though the assurance also came with a strong suggestion about reducing the ingredient quantities More Than Somewhat.
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Hot Gingered Pygmy Mammoth & Jumbo Shrimp Salad
Feeds your whole tribe.
1 pygmy mammoth, boned and cubed (about 1 ton)
1 ton jumbo shrimp, peeled and deveined (many many ordinary shrimps, or one Ebirah claw)
10 buckets sesame seeds
60 pounds bean thread noodles if you are an Eastern tribe, whatever your tribe uses for noodles otherwise. If you have not yet invented the noodle, this might be a good time to do so.
1 bucket vegetable oil
1 bucket sesame oil
Salt
10 buckets minced fresh ginger
6 buckets minced garlic
15 buckets dry Sherry
15 buckets rice wine vinegar
60 pounds sugar
60 buckets diced fresh mangoes
15 buckets chopped green onions
Big Snorgul's helmet full of red pepper flakes
10 buckets chopped fresh cilantro, plus 5 Big Snorgul's helmets fresh cilantro, garnish
1000 large heads lettuce, cored and leaves separated (a raid on the People Who Grow Stuff may be necessary)
30 buckets thinly sliced, peeled, seeded, drained cucumbers, or just chop up the damn cucumbers and say "Fie to thee!" a lot
All the chives you got
Preheat a giant turtle shell over a fumarole. A big giant turtle. Put some oil in there. Make sure no other giant turtles are around to see you do this.
On a flat rock, stirring with your Stick of the Dining God, dry cook the sesame seeds over medium heat until they are brown and smell good. Remove from the heat. Add the noodles to the turtle shell and fry fast until puffy and the color of sunrise. Remove from the oil and drain on non-itchy leaves. Throw salt. Set aside.
Sear the mammoth meat on the flat rock. Salt but don't overdo it, you remember what happened to the Chest-Clutching Tribe of the Plains. Drain.
Get a less giant turtle shell. Okay, think of this as a celebration dish for a good turtle hunt and shrimp catch. Make the vegetable oil and most of the sesame oil dance. Add the shrimp, mammoth, ginger, and garlic, and cook fast, stirring, until the shrimp are just pink and firm. Doom of Ten Thousand Wretched Canapés awaits those who overcook shrimp. Remove from the shell with pole weapons. Add the sherry and vinegar, and sing the Song of Deglazing over medium heat. Add the sugar and stir until it is one with the sauce. Cook until half the fluid is gone. Feed anybody who thinks this is waste to the giant turtles. Add the rest of the sesame oil, mangoes, green onions, and pepper flakes, and stir to warm through and wilt. No, this wilt is good. Tell the people it is the wilt of the Wilt God. You need all the mojo you can get. Remove from the heat and add the shrimp and ginger, and the cilantro. Stir to warm through and do the Highly Dramatic Ritual of Adjusting the Seasoning to Taste.
Now your tribal status is on the thin edge of the cleaver. Have everybody bring what they eat off of. You know your tribe. Put lettuce on whatever they hold out and spread the hot stuff on it. Those who have no eating platters should be used to the drill by now. Arrange cucumber slices on top in whatever symbolic pattern seems propitious to you and sprinkle with the toasted sesame seeds. If you have a really tough tribe, yell "Bam!" until they get a groove going. Add fried noodles, cilantro sprigs, and chives, and watch for any signs of people keeling over that can't be blamed on strong drink.
#prehistoric animals#edible archaeology#irish elk#pygmy mammoth#john m. ford#gnu terry pratchett#recipes
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I did this sketchbook doodle while on a trip to the Channel Islands off the coast of California. It depicts one of the pygmy mammoths (Mammuthus exilis) that used to roam the islands, with a Paleoindian huntress standing next to it for comparison. I wanted the woman to represent the ancestors of the Chumash people who had settled on the Channel Islands in pre-Columbian times, but I didn’t have a reference handy (cell-phone reception on the boat and the island we went to was not great), so I admit her costume may not be that culturally accurate.
#channel islands#california#native american#native#indigenous#pygmy mammoth#mammoth#prehistoric#paleoart#drawing#traditional art#art
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Time Travel Question 7: Paleofauna/Megafauna II
These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration. I'm combining some similar ones, so some are going to be a little vague. I'm going to also split into a whole lot of different polls because there were so many good and creative ideas. (Seriously, I love the people of Tumblr).
Please add new suggestions for this category below if you have them for future consideration.
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The Bedrock Dispatch
And now for something completely different. This was another writing game/contest thing. I was given the theme and the "flash rule" a rule created on the spot that I needed to include in my story. Since the theme was Myths of the Near Stone age and I needed to include Dinosaurs, I was drawn to the Flintstones which I think technically makes this fanfiction? Neat. Anyway, it's completely different to what I normally write.
Theme: Myths of the Near Stone Age
Flash Rule: Must have Stampeding Dinosaurs.
1311 words.
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The housewife grabbed the vacuum cleaner and began to run it back and forth across the carpet in the living room. Its legs tied to a small wooden cart, the pygmy mammoth was forced to use its trunk to suck up the dust and dirt in the small, stylish living room.
Job complete, she put it into the closet with the other appliances. Only after the door was closed did the tiny mammoth cry.
Chores finished, she met her neighbor for drinks, cigarettes, and a shopping trip into town. The clothes washer had died; it had choked on a sock. How was she to know that it could choke on socks? The manual didn’t say anything about that. Her husband threw the dead washer out with the trash that morning and she needed to buy another. Her annoyance over the washer’s death was tempered by the excitement of another shopping trip with her friend.
****
The foreman stood at the edge of the quarry. He watched the animals place massive stones in their mouths, lift them, and then swing them over the edge of the quarry, letting the boulders drop with a heavy thud. Their teeth long ago ground away to painful nubs, the brontosauruses lifted and carried stones while people strapped in little cabins on their back used winches to help, and whips when the animals were too tired to lift.
The crane in the back - number thirty-nine - looked rough. Foam collected on the edges of its mouth and its head would shake as it tried to lift even small stones. The operator fought with the winch and when that failed, used the whip. The foreman frowned and stubbed out his cigarette on the ground in front of him. He was going to have to kill it tonight and get another. He lamented the loss in productivity. It was necessary though. The quarry owner had decreed that production would not slip this month. While he cast his eyes to the other animals in the quarry, a bird tied to a perch a foot above his head watched the sun nervously. He shook silently in fear, but the foreman didn’t notice.
Soon, it was the end of the day. The foreman, watching a sundial on his wrist, pulled hard on the tailfeathers of the bird above him. The bird’s scream of pain signaled the end of the day. A man in the quarry shouted in joy and slid down the tail of his brontosaurus and ran to his car, the animal forgotten or ignored. Someone else would take care of it. If they didn’t? There were plenty of brontosauruses around. They’d just get another.
He made his way home, walked into the house, and kissed his wife as she met him at the door. She handed him a drink and a cigarette. As he passed through the kitchen, he finished his drink and poured another from the iced pitcher on the counter. He glanced at the empty spot in the kitchen where the washer was supposed to be and frowned. He made his way to his backyard and saw his friend and neighbor. “Another beautiful day, eh friend?” He made his way to a comfortable chair under a tree, near the low fence.
“You said it, Fred. Another day in paradise.” The neighbor leaned on his fence. “Hey, I heard that your clothes washer died, did your wife manage all right today?”
Fred took a drag on his cigarette and frowned. “Darned thing choked on a sock; can you believe it? A washer that can’t wash socks. I tossed it with the trash and Wilma went into town and bought another. Probably thirty other things to go with it too.” Fred took a sip of his cocktail and finished his cigarette. He lit another automatically. “Barn, how do you do it? Betty doesn’t seem to run through your paycheck before you even earn it. I feel like I’m paid on Thursday and broke by Sunday.”
Barney hopped the low fence, not spilling his drink or dropping his cigarette and joined Fred at another chair in the yard. “I gotta tell you Fred, the secret is to set some aside before you hand it over. Give her half, you take half. Keep it in the bank, stuff it in your sock drawer, whatever it takes.” Barney sipped his cocktail, a Bourbon old fashioned. “It’s just how they are. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
While Fred and Barney talked, Fred’s lawn mower started screaming. The howling of the mower was loud even though it was in the shed. Fred and Barney got up slowly and slightly unsteadily and made their way over to his shed. As he opened it, he saw the mower, still tied to the little cart, screaming and crying. Its mouth was red and inflamed and blood poured from multiple wounds on its legs. It looked like the mower was trying to bite their legs off. Fred reached down to touch the mower’s legs and it snapped at him. Fred yanked his hand back.
“Did you see that? It tried to bite me!” Fred tipped his rocks glass back and finished his drink, a tom collins. The ice clinked.
Barney sighed and shook his head. “Just goes to show you, things aren’t like they were when we were younger. Once it’s dead, we’ll head to Gimblestones and pick up a new one. Folks have to go further and further out to find new appliances and they never last as long as they used to.” He patted his friend on the back. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll fix it in the morning.”
Fred stared at the lawn mower.
At the dying animal.
At the lawn mower.
At the dying animal.
“No.” Fred shook his head. “This isn’t right, Barn. It’s a living thing. Look at it, it’s screaming. I have to help it.” He reached for the mower again.
Barney put his hand on Fred’s arm, stopping him. “Fred. This is the way of things. This is how things are. This-“ He pointed at the mower. “-is how we have all this.” Barney gestures behind him towards suburbia, towards the rows of small houses with manicured lawns. “Your mower? Your washer? Those are the price we pay for progress.” He let go of Fred’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go have another drink. After, we can head to the lodge. By the morning it’ll be gone, and we can go shopping and get another.”
Fred looked at the mower.
At the dying animal.
At the mower.
He turned away from the mower and looked at Barney. “You’re right Barn. Let’s go get a drink and head out. This is a tomorrow problem.”
Fred closed the door to the shed and walked back inside.
****
The young man stood outside the city. He watched a herd of Brontosaurus thunder across the plain. His partner had spooked them and as expected, they stampeded. Soon they would tire, and he could swoop in. If he was able to capture four of them alive, they could be repurposed in town, and he would make enough money to support his brothers and sisters for another month. He watched them carefully. The quarry. The quarry would buy them.
His stomach growled. He had skipped breakfast and lunch to save money. One meal a day was enough, he told himself.
There. Those four. Two adults and two calves lagged behind the rest. He had hoped for four adults, but this was better. He’d get half again more for the calves. They lived longer, took to the yoke better, lasted longer. He kicked his heels on the ground and the jeep took off. Steering towards the animals, he readied his tranquilizer gun and leaned out the window. Today was turning out to be a good day after all.
****
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Spooky Species I: Vampire Bats
(first row: Common vampire bat, hairy-legged vampire bat, white-winged vampire bat; second row: Desmodus draculae in a ground sloth-cave (art by Daniel Boh), Desmodus stocki feeding on pygmy mammoths (art by Hondari Nundu); third row: vampire bat feeding, skull of a common vampire bat)
It‘s Halloween season, my favorite time of the year! What better way to celebrate than with spooky animals, and few are spookier than the vampire bats.
Since they are creatures of the night, bats have been associated with vampires and other monsters of myth and folklore for about as long as those legends have existed. However, it was Dracula, the most famous of all vampires, and his transformation into a giant bat, that really popularized the connection. When real blood-drinking bats were discovered in America in the early 19th century and their blood-based diet became known to the Europeans, this of course only solidified the association between the animal and the monster and inspired new myths surrounding them (Dodd, 2019).
The real vampire bats might not be as frightening as the fictional ones (although they can carry rabies, so argueably they are even more frightening), but they are still some of the weirdest and most specialized animals out there. First of all, they are amazing in the same way that all bats amazing: Bats are the second-most diverse group of mammals with more than 1,400 species, only surpassed by rodents. They are the only mammals that have evolved powered flight. They echolocate. For their small size they have ridiculous long life spans (up to 30 years and more). What is not to love?
The thing that separates the three species of vampire bats from all other bats (and other mammals), is obviously their blood-feeding. Unlike their fictional counterparts, they don‘t actually suck blood. Instead they create a small wound with their horrifyingly shaped incisors and then lick up the blood. While they do that, a substance in their saliva keeps the blood of their victims running and the wound open. Once the bats start feeding, their kidneys have to work overtime to quickly extract as much water from the food as possible. Otherwise they would get to heavy to fly away.
Other adaptions for their lifestyle include heat sensors on their nose, that basically give the bats infrared vision and help them find the best spots to drink from on their victims, and the fact that vampire bats, especially when compared to other bats, are very agile on the ground. On a little side note: They are also known to share blood with each other: If one bat had an unsuccessful hunt, another bat in the roost might help them out by regurgitating some blood and letting them feed on it - which somehow is both adorable and absolutely disgusting at the same time.
(Common vampire bat walking, running and jumping)
As a paleontology obsessed person, my question now is of course: How the fuck did this happen? What lead to vampire bats having such a specialized lifestyle? This is not an easy questions to answer, mostly because we don‘t have a very good fossil record of bat evolution.
There are many hypothesis that could explain the transition to blood-feeding: They could have fed on insects (or other parasites), that were attracted to the wounds of bigger animals (or caused them), so the bats eventually started feeding on the bigger animal. They could have evolved from already vertebrate-hunting ancestors. They could have started out as nectar-feeders that switched to another liquid. They could have evolved from fruit-eating bats that already had weird teeth for opening fruits (Riskin, 2023).
It does not help that the family vampire bats belong to, the New World Leaf-nosed Bats, are among the most diverse among all mammals, at least in terms of feeding strategies: There are carnivores, omnivores, frugivores (fruit), nectivores (nectar), insectivores (insects), and of course sangivores, the blood-eating vampire bats. In the diagram below you can see how diverse they as a group really are (even just their skulls differ so much from each other), as well as what each bat feeds on.
(family tree of the New World leaf-nosed bats. It is believed that the first 8 branches (Macrotus-Trinycteris) had a common ancestor that look similar to Macrotus/Micronycteris and primarily ate insects and some plant material. The symbols show the main food source for the group (moth = insects; droplet = blood; opossum = vertebrates; flower = nectar; cherry = fruit). (Baker et al, 2012))
Since fossils are rare, scientists look at the species still alive today and compare their DNA with each other. By doing this they can estimate how much time would be needed for all the changes between species to occur. Basically they can look at a family tree like the one above and for each of the branches they can give you a more or less accurate time for when the split happened.
The position of vampire bats in these family trees suggests, that they most likely evolved from an insect-eating ancestor, and all the other feeding strategies evolved after they split from the rest of the group about 26 million years ago. So right now the most likely hypothesis for how blood-feeding evolved is the idea of the bats originally feeding on parasite/insects attracted to the wounds of bigger animals, then deciding to cut out the middleman and go for the bigger animal directly (Raskin 2023, Baker 2012).
Lastely, even though I didn‘t talk about fossils too much, there are some fossil vampire bats that we know of. Most famous is probably Desmodus draculae from the Pleistocene, the biggest known vampire bat ever with a wingspan of about 50 cm - named after the most famous vampire of all time.
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Eternally mad that I will never get to see a Channel Islands Pygmy Mammoth.
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The Alchemist's Journal: Ingredients
This year, I'm going to make progress on the Skyrim Alchemist's Book if it kills me. This is a complete list of alchemical ingredients, including ones from the Anniversary Edition Creation Kit add-ons (but NOT including Berrit's Ashes, which are a single use item identical to Bone Meal).
As I complete pages of the book, I'll scan them in and link to them here.
Abecean Longfin
Alocasia Fruit
Ambrosia
Ancestor Moth Wing
Angelfish
Angler Larvae
Ash Creep Cluster
Ash Hopper Jelly
Ashen Grass Pod
Aster Bloom Core
Bear Claws
Bee
Beehive Husk
Bittergreen Petals
Bleeding Crown
Blind Watcher's Eye
Bliss Bug Thorax
Blister Pod Cap
Blisterwort
Bloodgrass
Blue Butterfly Wing
Blue Dartwing
Boar Tusk
Bog Beacon
Bone Meal
Briar Heart
Bungler's Bane
Burnt Spriggan Wood
Butterfly Wing
Canis Root
Charred Skeever Hide
Chaurus Eggs
Chaurus Hunter Antennae
Chicken's Egg
Chokeberry
Chokeweed
Coda Flower
Comberry
Congealed Putrescence
Corkbulb Root
Creep Cluster
Crimson Nirnroot
Cyrodilic Spadetail
Daedra Heart
Daedra Silk
Daedra Venin
Daedroth Teeth
Deathbell
Dragon's Tongue
Dreugh Wax
Dwarven Oil
Ectoplasm
Elves Ear
Elytra Ichor
Emperor Parasol Moss
Eye of Sabre Cat
Falmer Ear
Felsaad Tern Feathers
Fire Petal
Fire Salts
Flame Stalk
Fly Amanita
Frost Mirriam
Frost Salts
Fungus Stalk
Garlic
Giant Lichen
Giant's Toe
Glassfish
Gleamblossom
Glow Dust
Glowing Mushroom
Gnarl Bark
Goldfish
Gold Kanet
Grass Pod
Green Butterfly Wing
Hackle-Lo Leaf
Hagraven Claw
Hagraven Feathers
Hanging Moss
Harrada
Hawk Beak
Hawk Feathers
Hawk's Egg
Heart of Order
Histcarp
Honeycomb
Human Flesh
Human Heart
Hunger Tongue
Hydnam Azure Giant Spore
Hypha Facia
Ice Wraith Teeth
Imp Gall
Imp Stool
Ironwood Fruit
Jarrin Root
Jazbay Grapes
Juniper Berries
Juvenile Mudcrap
Kagouti Hide
Kresh Fiber
Large Antlers
Lavender
Lichor
Luminous Russula
Luna Moth Wing
Lyretail Anthias
Marshmerrow
Minotaur Horn
Moon Sugar
Mora Tapinella
Mort Flesh
Mudcrab Chitin
Namira's Rot
Netch Jelly
Nightshade
Nirnroot
Nordic Barnacle
Ogre's Teeth
Orange Dartwing
Pearl
Pearlfish
Pine Thrush Egg
Poison Bloom
Powdered Mammoth Tusk
Purple Butterfly Wing
Purple Mountain Flower
Pygmy Sunfish
Red Kep Gas Bladder
Red Mountain Flower
Redwort Flower
River Betty
Rock Warbler Egg
Roobrush
Rot Scale
Sabre Cat Tooth
Salmon Roe
Salt Pile
Saltrice
Scalon Fin
Scaly Pholiota
Scathecraw
Screaming Maw
Scrib Jelly
Scrib Jerky
Silverside Perch
Skeever Tail
Slaughterfish Scales
Sload Soap
Small Antlers
Small Pearl
Snowberries
Spadefish
Spiddal Stick
Spawn Ash
Spider Egg
Spriggan Sap
Steel-Blue Entoloma Cap
Stone
Swamp Fungal Pod
Taproot
Thistle Branch
Thorn Hook
Torchbug Thorax
Trama Root
Troll Fat
Tundra Cotton
Vampire Dust
Void Essence
Void Salts
Watcher's Eye
Wheat
White Cap
Wild Grass Pod
Wisp Stalk Caps
Withering Moon
Wisp Wrappings
Worm's Head Cap
Yellow Mountain Flower
#the elder scrolls#the elder scrolls v: skyrim#skyrim#video game meta#the alchemist's journal#skyrim references
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it is actually very funny to me that one of the biggest plots of fallout 76 is that the entire region is being terrorized by mammoth sized mutated pygmy bats that spread viral plague that turns people into zombies
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the one thing i have been drawing though are little bits of worldbuilding for nassim's backstory!!! extremely low-effort, comments below cut. it's kind of long kfjdhjfhfjd
anyways all of this is. super handwaved. magic bioengineering.
so, according the the core rulebook nassim's class has this cybernetic thing called 'weatherproof', which halves metabolism and water intake. I super duper cannot see how this is a cybernetic and not bioengineering (called 'humanites' in-game), so I've been fiddling with a homebrew species! even if the only mechanics that apply to the game are metabolism/water conservation/cold resistance, it's still fun to rotate borais around in my head as a race (species?) of bioengineered humans that are highly adapted to a specific environment.
we settled on polar-adapted humans! so, nassim is more or less cold-blooded. technically heterothermic with a countercurrent blood flow, but to the touch he's ambient temperature! i'm saying this is why he doesn't need to eat much. bc he doesn't expend nearly as much energy as baseline humans maintaining his body temperature. i know this would fuck up reproduction i KNOW just. ignore it. borais tend to be larger and heavier than most humans- despite being 6'2/188cm tall, he's on the shorter side compared to the rest of his tribe.
i think he's fairly diluted from his full-blooded Borais ancestors. he's got congenital generalized hypertrichosis, so he's pretty hairy compared to baseline humans. Full-blooded Borais, however, I think would be completely furry! kind of like a yeti, haha. they've also got creepy husky eyes that are adapted for Algolan polar winter, where the only sun in the sky is a distant red star, as well as adapted to ignore snow glare.
Nassim doesn't have creepy husky eyes, so he wore a snow visor as a kid. He doesn't see well in the upper level of the visible light spectrum, though! so purples and violets don't really show up to him.
the fur and eye mutations are both recessive, so furry borais are extremely rare.
the borais are separated into two different groups- the tundra and the boreal borais. tundra borais are pretty wealthy and own several silver mines, and work in close connection with Algolan rebels. Nassim's tribe, the boreal borais (haha) is much less wealthy- they're mostly loggers, and their culture revolves closely around a species of algolan pine with hard wood and distinctive scarlet, sweet-scented sap.
algol's poles are very geothermically active, with tribes taking full advantage of scattered hot springs during the frigid winters.
before the Long Night a century ago, both tribes were wealthy and had huge, sprawling cities. Orbital bombardment of Algol destroyed all of that- the boreal borais have since adapted to live in loose, migratory groups. A mother will have and nurse their child(ren) for around four years before rejoining the workforce, leaving the kid to be raised almost entirely by other children. nassim and his family grew up in the early years of the Zenithian occupation of Algol, and were spared from the conflict because of physical distance. He didn't see a non-Firstcome Algolan until he left the planet with his peers to join an algolan guide group, although he was involved in trafficking rebellion supplies.
algol is known for its huge variety of bioengineered elephant species. borais have two main varieties of elephant- the giant tundra war mammoths, and the tiny boreal pygmy mammoth. only a couple hundred war mammoths still live in the poles, but before the orbital bombardment and before the zenithians arrived, war mammoths were common across the entire planet. They're treasured and long-lived, and a war mammoth can fight for its tribe for decades before being given an honored retirement.
pygmy mammoths are much more common. Bred for their labor value rather than their intelligence and size, the boreal tribes use pygmy mammoths to assist in logging. nassim always thought they were very cute!
algolan guides are one of the safer ways for an algolan firstcome child to leave their tribe. of course, safer is extremely relative. it's better than working in the mines and factories near the equator, but algolan guide groups aren't known for having a high survival rate. Nassim was the only one of his group of friends/family to survive long enough to escape. He doesn't think badly of his guide company, however! kaveh was never able to convince him that exploitative labor wasn't worth it to get off Algol. other than the loss of his peers, the algolan guide company nassim 'worked' for gave him one other gift- botched water-conserving cybernetics. It worked in that he needs significantly less water than other people, but also they fucked up and he doesn't sweat anymore, which causes him to get dangerously overheated. when he was with kaveh, he had a mechanical cooling system he could put on beneath his coat, but he lost it in the caves.
#jazz hands. this is like. the only thing i've drawn over the past two months.#coriolisposting#ignore the goofy ass mammoths. idk how to draw guns. idk how to draw elephants. idk anything. actually.
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🌻 the picture is me bc i loooooove know ledge‼️
One of the largest pterosaurs is Hatzegopteryx from the cretaceous period Hateg island formation of modern day europe. Europe at the same time was a bunch of tropical islands. Hatzegopteryx is interesting because it evolved due to fosters rule otherwise known as island gigantism and dwarfism. Essentially if a smaller animal arrives on a island or other kind of isolated environment they will often have no predators and ressourse abundance and grow to large sizes. More well known examples being the dodo bird and the kakāpō. The reverse also being true when a large animal reaches a isolated area with less space elephants for example pygmy elephants and mammoths. The Hatzegopteryx was descended from a small little guy who grew to be the apex predator of a island.
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Today, there is a veritable boom of thinking about inequality: since 2011, ‘global inequality’ has regularly featured as a top item for debate in the World Economic Forum at Davos. There are inequality indexes, institutes for the study of inequality, and a relentless stream of publications trying to project the current obsession with property distribution back into the Stone Age. There have even been attempts to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Palaeolithic mammoth hunters (they both turn out to be very low). It’s almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies ‘everyone was equal, because they were all equally poor.’
The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality, like the use of the term ‘inequality’ itself, is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history’s broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’s population by something like 99.9 per cent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.
A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. Strangely enough, though, this is often seen as a reactionary move. ‘So are you saying true equality has never been achieved? That it’s therefore impossible?’ It seems to us that such objections are both counterproductive and frankly unrealistic.
First of all, it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that? Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.
From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow
#history#world history#archaeology#anthropology#equality#sociology#prehistoric#prehistory#rousseau#philosophy#inequality#anarchism#the dawn of everything#quote#quotes#books#david graeber#david wengrow#social science#humanities
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In a shocking discovery, scientists have found evidence of mammoths and a little-known animal living side-by-side in the ancient tundra.
The ancient frozen remains of a mammoth and a tiny animal, thought to be a predecessor of the modern hedgehog, were found preserved in the icy ground of Siberia.
The discovery, which was made by a team of Russian scientists, provides a unique insight into the interaction between the two species.
The mammoth, an enormous beast weighing in at around 6 tonnes, would have been a formidable predator in the ancient Arctic environment.
The smaller animal, known as a pygmy hedgehog, was much less imposing, weighing in at just a handful of kilograms.
However, the researchers believe that the two animals may have lived in harmony, with the mammoth providing protection for the hedgehog from other large predators.
The researchers also noted that the two animals lived in the same area, suggesting that the mammoth may have had a more nurturing nature than previously thought.
The findings, which were published in the journal Nature, provide a unique glimpse into the evolution of the Arctic environment and the behaviour of animals within it.
It is the first time that evidence of a mammoth and a small mammal living in such close proximity has been discovered.
The discovery is a remarkable one, providing a fascinating insight into the relationship between the two animals and the environment they lived in.
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The Solar Eclipse By Rakesh Chandra
The Solar Eclipse
I’m still so big that I can cover
A sizeable chunk of the expanding sky;
Mammoth buildings and large ships look
Pygmy in my presence; I can never
Be eclipsed, either totally or partially;
The sprawling oceans and seas are ready to
Gobble me up in their huge bosom, even in
My truncated form, in the dusk; before that, I’ll
Be forced into oblivion by the celestial powers
Into the…
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Island Weirdness #61 — Tiny Elephants On Parade
Part 6: Eastern Mediterranean
Alongside the weird deer, otters, and owls, the island of Crete also had dwarf elephants — and much like Sardinia to the west the Cretan elephants were actually descendants of mammoths rather than the Palaeoloxodon seen in the rest of the Mediterranean.
Mammuthus creticus was originally thought to also be a palaeoloxodontine, but more recent studies of its anatomy and ancient DNA have confirmed it was indeed another tiny mammoth. It was probably descended from either the Southern mammoth or Mammuthus rumanus, which would have arrived on Crete during the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene between about 3.5 and 1 million years ago.
Isolated on Crete, with no predators and living at a time when the island was much smaller, it quickly dwarfed and became the tiniest known mammoth to ever exist, standing just 1.1m tall at the shoulder (3'7"). Not much is known about its ecology, but its teeth suggest it was a browser feeding on leaves and shrubs, possibly filling a similar niche to the mid-sized deer that came later.
This mini-mammoth seems to have gone extinct by the mid-Pleistocene, about 1 million years ago, around the time when rising sea levels during an interglacial phase may have submerged so much of the smaller proto-Crete that its population could no longer be supported.
Later in the mid-to-late Pleistocene, after the sea level dropped again and tectonic uplift brought Crete close to its modern dimensions, the small mammoths were replaced by both newly-arriving deer and Palaeoloxodon elephants, which evolved into the much more moderately dwarfed forms of Palaeoloxodon creutzburgi and Palaeoloxodon chaniensis.
The the north and east of Crete the Cyclades and Dodecanese islands had endemic dwarf elephants on at least eight islands, with the best known being the species that lived on Tilos.
Palaeoloxodon tiliensis stood about 1.8m tall (5'11"), on the larger side for a dwarf Mediterranean elephant but still one of the smallest palaeoloxodontines in the Aegean region. Several thousand specimens have been found, and radiocarbon dating shows it was a fairly recent evolutionary development, appearing just 45,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene.
This dwarf elephant was also the very latest surviving of its entire kind, living well into the Holocene until at least 4000 BCE. This is several thousand years after humans first arrived on Tilos, suggesting it was a rare case of an island elephant that managed to endure the effects of a human presence for quite some time.
In fact there's some speculation that Palaeoloxodon tiliensis (or a similar unknown species) may have survived for even longer than that, since one Ancient Egyptian tomb from around 1480-1400 BCE contains a painting depicting traders with exotic animals, including what appears to be a small hairy elephant with slender limbs and thin upward-curving tusks. We may never know for certain if this was actually a late-surviving dwarf, a mutant modern elephant, or just artistic license with scaling, but the possibility is still intriguing.
Over on isolated Cyprus further to the east, the only native large mammals were the miniature hippos and an equally miniature elephant.
Palaeoloxodon cypriotes was smaller than the Aegean palaeoloxodontines, about 1.4m tall (4'7"), and much like its cousin on Tilos seems to have evolved very recently towards the end of the Pleistocene, sometime around 20,000 years ago.
It wasn't the first dwarf elephant on Cyprus — there was a larger, earlier species known as Palaeoloxodon xylophagou at least 200,000 years ago — but it's not clear whether these two species represent a single evolutionary line or two entirely different colonizations of the island.
Similarly to the hippos it lived alongside, Palaeoloxodon cypriotes disappeared shortly after humans arrived on Cyprus, between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago. Collections of its bones have been found in a rock shelter with evidence of having been burnt, suggesting that it was being actively hunted and cooked.
And that's all for the Island Weirdness series! Even over two months there are still plenty of species I didn't have time to feature, so this definitely won't be the last we see of strange endemic species.
Thank you for following along — with a shoutout to my Patreon supporters! — and regular weekly art posts will resume here next Monday.
#science illustration#island weirdness 2019#paleontology#paleoart#palaeoblr#mammuthus#pygmy mammoth#mammoth#palaeoloxodon#elephantidae#elephant#elephantiformes#proboscidea#mammal#art#insular dwarfism#crete#tilos#dodecanese#aegean#cyprus#mediterranean#holocene extinction#island weirdness 2: endemic boogaloo#tiny elephants on parade#long post
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