1. The first sauropods discovered were misinterpreted as giant sea creatures, just due to their immense size. People didn’t have a reference point of something that big living on land, but they did know of things that big in the water.
2. “Mummified” hadrosaurs were found, which showed soft tissue connecting the fingers. This was interpreted as a flipper (though in fact, it was a mitten-shaped hoof type structure)
3. On a more meta level – naturalists of the time viewed dinosaurs as primitive. The thought process was that since Man™ (specifically, Christian White Man™) is the Highest Of All Creatures™, that others logically must be lower. Reptiles specifically were “lower”, and creatures of the past were EXTRA “lower” because clearly evolution means that everything gets better over time (This, of course, is not how evolution works. Evolution is just selecting for characteristics that improve chances of making copies of DNA). These combined to form a picture of dinosaurs as sluggish, cold-blooded creatures that could not support their own weight and were relegated to (presumably disease-infested) swamps with the other Lower Creatures.
In order to justify this, any feature of dinosaurs was interpreted as evidence of aquatic life. Sauropod nostrils were for snorkels. Hadrosaur crests were for holding air. Long tails were for swimming like crocodiles, and evidence be damned if it showed that they couldn’t scull their tails or that the amount of air that could be stored in a hadrosaur crest was negligible. This line of thinking is also what led to the tail-dragging, cold-blooded, stupid dinosaurs of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Fascinatingly, this was not the original interpretation. Fresh off the publication of On The Origin of Species and the discovery of Archaeopteryx, researchers like Cope and Marsh were resurrecting active, terrestrial dinosaurs – even sauropods, after they realised they were not giant mosasaur-like things. Indeed, the dinosaurian ancestry of birds was recognised in the 1860s!
Later, however, this actual science became warped by the views of so-called “progress” noted above, and scientists formerly in favour of active, terrestrial dinosaurs recanted and relegated them to the primitive swamps. This is maybe best illustrated by the palaeoart of the time:
You’re likely familiar with one or both of these pieces. What you might not, realise, however, is that they are by the same artist – Charles R. Knight – and that the former, active one was painted decades before the latter, tail-dragging one. You read that right – after forty years, the artist was painting dinosaurs as much less active and accurate than he was before. This wasn’t just him, either – it was a reflection of larger trends in palaeontology and (you could argue), society.
it’s crazy that im alive to witness major effects of climate change. like it always seemed super vague and it was always ‘the polar bears won’t have anywhere to live’ but this shit is going to fuck everything up bigtime.
Most people don’t realize how serious it is. We’ve only got 50 years worth of resources left, if we keep going the way we are, and honestly, that’s optimistic. Aside from that, we’ve already gone over the calculated “point of no return”, so even if we immediately start sucking gasses out of the atmosphere and stop all transport and agriculture, we’re going to see oceans rise, sea life die, we’re going to be crammed into smaller land areas, places like Melbourne will be underwater, and the fallout will probably send us into an ice age anyway (long story, but basically the ice melts, cold water sinks, the ocean flow responsible for thermoregulation of the planet is interrupted, cue ice age).
I can already see it now. Forget the hurricanes for a moment:
-Hay isn’t growing at the right time. Last year, no one got good hay where I live, because the weather (which has been in the same pattern during hay season for as long as I’ve been alive) was whacked out.
-None of my animals grew coats correctly, because the weather is just all wrong, and they don’t know what season they’re in.
-We’re getting new temperature records globally; basically, all weather is starting to change already
-Where I live, there are always two weeks where we see echidnas everywhere, and then we don’t see them the rest of the year. that is, until last year, when we barely saw them, spaced throughout several months.
-Let me reiterate, the animals cannot tell what season it is because climate change is altering weather patterns that have been here for as long as anyone can remember
-We also have more acidic rain due to all the gasses, which is why we’ve got so many statues and whatnot corroding even though they haven’t changed for thousands of years
-We had a tornado start to form in Melbourne. That’s unheard of.
We have the technology to slow down climate change. If we want to survive for more than 50 years, we need to act now. NOW. We need to put in place all the technologies we have, and pour money into more scientific research.
And why haven’t we? Because politicians earn money from oil companies and don’t care about the future of the planet, because they’re not going to be here in 50 years anyway.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/ is a great website that debunks common myths about climate change! check it out! it has a wealth of information that’s super easy to understand and even comes in different levels in terms of learning.
i just recently sat in a climate change presentation and the physicist who gave the presentation talked about how if in the next 30 years we (not just Americans, but humans all over the world) do not cut down on carbon emissions (and this honestly boils down to policy changes that MUST be made amongst industrialists in “developed countries” but that’s a whole other conversation) climate change will ultimately become irreversible.
30 yearsy’all. that’s within all of our life times. and these effects are going to be pretty much the end of human civilization as we know it.
illiterate dairy maid in 1750, hundreds of years before germ theory was even thought of: because of my exposure to cowpox, im immune to smallpox. if we expose people to cowpox, they won’t die of smallpox
upper middle class college educated mother with internet living in the year of our lord 2018: vaccines are the devils handiwork and a conspiracy i’d rather my child die of polio than be the autism
The other day I got a bug up my ass about lake Natron, because I’ve seen the photos of the calcified remains of animals that took a dip in the lake on accident, but I’ve only seen those photos in black and white. I’m sure you’ve seen them.
I thought, you know, calcified remains should be really interesting to see in color, so I tried to find some that had been taken by others, in color. It was not nearly as visual stunning, they were just white rotting remains, I won’t scar anyone by posting them.
But what caught my eye wasn’t the dead. It was the fucking lake.
It’s BLOOD fucking RED.
It’s super alkaline (deadly), blood fucking red (terrifying), and oh, it gets to be 106F/41C in the water. Red spirulina algae thrives here and provides food for the main denizen of the lake…. fucking lesserflamingos.
Look at their fucking mud nests!
You need to leave!! You have found flamingo Silent Hill!! What are you still doing here!! I’ll tell you!! They’re still doing there because literally the death lake protects them from predators, nothing big enough to be a threat to them gets across the lake to get them. There are millions of them living there safely.
What the fuck. what the FUCK nature. This is some of the most amazing shit you’ve ever pulled and hardly anyone knows about it. I’m on to you. I see your blood lake with your pink goth bird decorations. I see you.
the first space fact i ever learned was when i was really young (younger than 5yrs?) and it was either:
spaghettification – the act of objects being pulled into a line of atoms when being sucked into a black hole
how Charon, one of Pluto’s moons, was ripped apart by an impact with an object and it managed to pull itself back together like some amazing franken-moon
i can’t remember which i learned first, but i know it was one of those two
The mandarinfish is a small, brightly colored member of the dragonet family, which is popular in the saltwater aquarium trade. The mandarinfish is native to the Pacific, ranging approximately from the Ryukyu Islands south to Australia. To date, S. splendidus is one of only two vertebrate species known to have blue colouring because of cellular pigment. Mandarinfish are reef dwellers, preferring sheltered lagoons and inshore reefs. While they are slow-moving and fairly common within their range,
they are not easily seen due to their bottom-feeding habit and their
small size (reaching only about 6 cm). They feed primarily on small crustaceans and other invertebrates.
This is the other species of vertebrate with blue cellular pigment, the Picturesque Dragonet! (They’re very closely related to Mandarinfish). If you want to know more about why any animal not one of these fish only appears to be blue, here’s a great article!
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