Tu es Petrus

Students find purchase atop a glacial erratic in Central Park NYC.

Waiting in the lobby of the Austin Hilton, I glanced at my feet. I noticed that I was standing square atop a beautifully sectioned and polished Turritella embedded in the floor tile. Suddenly, the “pop-out”effect clicked in, an experience familiar to anyone who has searched for fossils, foraged for mushrooms or read Martin Hanford. Snail fossils began leaping out of the floor tiles left and right.

In an entire hotel full of paleontologists¹, how many realized that every time they went for a free refill from Starbucks were trodding across fossilferous strata? Well, one at least.

We are creatures of the crust, not just elements upon it. Our ancestors, immediate and ancient, have been tilled into the lithosphere, the lucky ones, and their remainders poke out here and there. We dwell in mud and gypsum pockets, build cities of marble and granite, aggregate and lime. We drive down ribbons asphalt impregnated river gravels, burning vintage carbohydrates cooked up in Tethyan lagoons. We draw wires and hone tools, set foundations and fire vessels. We exchange bits of metal for goods, labor, love and status. We place them with great speed into the cells and organs of our livestock and adversaries. We eat Total.

Look up. Chances are good that some mineral veneer hovers over your head. Nummulitic limestone, spun glass, reinforced concrete…it won’t hang forever.

Some 530 million years ago, give or take, organisms began to make shells like nobody’s business. Brachiopods in their crenulated valves and molluscs their tortured cones, arthropods in chitinous armor, corals and bryozoans in whatever condominimal style that suited. Echinoderms with pentameral beauty and, and of course, vertebrates with chunks of apatite scattered amidst the myomeres.

Like the Parthenon and Chichen Itza, the Great Wall and Gizeh, evolutionary monuments linger long after their utility has passed. Crinoids litter the ground. We found our creation musuems atop Paleozoic mausoleums and call it good.

Every step hits a grave, a million lives, five billion years, a living, dying planet. Where will you settle?

¹ - Granted, they were vertebrate paleontologists and most couldn’t have given a multituberculate’s ass about some snail shells.

EPILOGUE:

Funny how things resonate.  Nigel Hughes popped up this photo during a talk about Himalayan stratigraphy and noted that Mallory was “clinging to the Cambrian.” He said that a search of the rocks around the corpse would probably turn up ample trilobites.  An “old English dead” freeze-dried amongst petrified Cambrian seafood at the roof of the world.  How poetic?

Hallowmemesis

Here’s a scary hallowing story for you: continued atmospheric CO₂ elevation> increased soil acidification> nutrient-stressed plants> MAN EATING FLORA!!!

Don’t worry, Triffids are fictional. For now.

Thanks to Kevin Z from The Other 95% for the memetic inspiration, to Oberlin cult personality Curtis for turning me onto the Triffids and a Happy Halloween to all!  Proper blogging will resume when the @$!!% NSF application is done.

Ussher…He’s the one with the band-aid right?

While most of us were presumably present at the moment of our own birth, few can honestly say they can clearly recall it.  Even fewer had a good sense of the exact hour or day when this singularly important event took place, at least at the time.

While we tend to take knowledge of our own birthdate for granted (mine’s November 1 by the way, I know you’ve all been trolling my Amazon wishlist), we of course depend upon the memory of other interested parties, namely our parents.  Dial back several centuries or so, and most humans had only a very hazy idea of when the were born perhaps narrowed down to a particular season of a given year.

High-born Europeans, like James Ussher, were better off than most, and we might assume that his literate clerk father is responsible for the unusually exact record we have for Ussher’s birth (see image above).

As Primate of All Ireland, Ussher took it upon himself to calculate the exact birthdate of the Earth using the best documentary accounts of his time.  After considerable scholarly investigation Ussher deduced that the planet was created around nightfall on October 22nd, 4004 BCE.

Hearty chortles across the interweb today in response to the WorldNetDaily piece commemorating the 6010th [sic] birthday of the planet.  Anyone adhering to Ussher’s chronology in 2007 deserves a chortle.

However, it’s important to remember that Ussher himself was working in 1658 well before Jim Hutton, Chas Lyell, or Chuck D.  In building his chronology Ussher attempted to integrate historical records from different cultures across the “Middle East” (what’s the PC term for the fertile crescent anyway?), or what WorldNetDaily hilariously calls “secular sources.”  All hail secular Marduk!

Uh, anyway…go read Steve Gould’s classic “Fall in the House of Ussher” for an excellent account of how the Irish Primate should be a hero for modern academics and not reality-challenged young earthers.

Bobbing — Green Apple Falls

 

Funny that. Few things as wholesome as an apple. You know–a gift for the teacher on the first day of school, the perennial preventative medicine du jour, icon of baked Americana & c.Of course, peel away the glossy veneer and things get a little more complex. Ingest a cup full of cyanogenic apple seeds and rather than keep ol’ sawbones away you’ll earn yourself a quick trip to the emergency ward. Then there’s the tales of razor-blade filled apples telephoned across elementary school playgrounds this time of year, fueled by phobic parents and resentment against Halloween health nuts.

John Chapman, religious zealot and apple entrepreneur, probably did not actually walk around in a burlap sack and a soup pot hat. He probably did try, and fail, to invest in a child bride. He definitely eschewed grafting as an unholy act and thereby guaranteed that the vast majority of apples he grew found their way to the cider mill rather than the school marm’s desk.

Of course, as well as being a good stimulant for conviviality in climates too cold for wine grapes, apple jack has a lower freezing point than water, making it a refreshing winter beverage not requiring thawing or indoor storage. You can’t get more Americanically pragmatic than that.

I like to see the whole grand narrative of Johnny Appleseed’s pragmatic American idealism in these [warning: Ultra-non-worksafe for reasons of intense intoxic subculturalism] glassy-eyed dryads. To wit, “Or, if you’re in the woods you can use a stick”

Of course, there’s a grand tale behind all of this: with Scythians and proto-griffins and archaic apple and Alma-Ata gold cultivars. But I’ve said too much already.

Happy Autumn.

Pluvialis has been enjoying the Autumn harvest as well. Of apples, I mean, of course.

Is That a Moustache?

I bought Paul Sereno a beer.  It was a Shiner Bock.  I also participated, peripherally, in a scheme to get him to pose for photo shoot…well, perhaps I shouldn’t go into that.

And I saw some college bros try to get Bob Bakker to come to their party.  Ah, the mania that is SVP…

I also got to head over to the Hartman Prehistoric Garden with Julia and Lorin this afternoon.  The butterflies were AMAZING, and me without the camera–damn it!

Julia got some photos though, some of them were appropriately enough, of Julias (Dryas julia) although I didn’t realize that at the time.  We also saw Monarchs, Zebra Longwings, and several different Swallowtails including a Pipevine.  Lots of little butterflies, moths, dragons and damsels too although I have no idea what they were, and a huge-ass, er abdomen Argiope orb weaver.

We saw lots of verts too and Chickadees of some type, lots of Great Tailed Grackles (the local weed bird), a Red-Shouldered Hawk being mobbed by some Blue Jays, Squirrels and Turtles.  Snap!

Oh yeah, and there’s some pretty awesome science going on to, but my head is spinning way too fast to write about any of it.  And the night hasn’t even begun yet…

Okay, off to see some bats.

The Squid and the Bus

Okay, I’ve been sitting on this one for awhile, waiting for:

a) BBC to run another squid story, and

b) The chance to stage a photo holding an uncooked calamari squid against one of Davis’ infamous (and hazardous!) double-decker buses

Lo! Much as Darwin was forced to rush his theory of natural selection to publication after a few short decades of musing, I’ve been goaded into action by an irresistible outside force that demands my immediate attention.

So in honor of the First Annual Cephalopod Awareness Day (!) please enjoy this ‘brief abstract’ of which I will someday provide a deep and thorough elaboration upon more befitting the quality writing you’ve come to expect here at microecos. Just think of it as my personal Origin .

Without any further ado, then, let us explore the evolution of the BBC’s celebrated Mesonychoteuthis v. London Double-Decker Bus diagram or as I like to call it, “The Incredible Shrinking ‘Colossal’ Squid”:

BBC NEWS, 2 April 2003 — “Super squid surfaces in Antarctica“

That Sperm Whale looks freaked out.

 

BBC NEWS, 8 January 2004 — “New giant squid predator found“

Oooh-look a border! Hey, where’d the whale go? Oh, eaten by a sleeper shark no doubt.

BBC NEWS, 28 September 2005 — “Live giant squid caught on camera“

Wait, maybe the whale ate the shark. Giant and ‘Colossal’ both get downsized, and makeovers. Who’s the little guy?

BBC NEWS, 28 February 2006 — “Giant squid grabs London audience“

New color scheme! Whale shrinks, Colossal grows back to ? size. Ominous caption: “Scientists admit they know little about the largest of the squid”

BBC NEWS, 14 February 2007 — “Large squid lights up for attack“

Little guy’s back…actually mentioned in the text this time. What he lacks in brawn he makes up for in special effects, apparently swimming the wrong way though.

BBC NEWS, 15 March 2007 — “Colossal squid’s headache for science“

Stasis…

BBC NEWS, 22 March 2007 — “Microwave plan for colossal squid“

“Arghhh! They microwaved me down to shark bait!” Shouldn’t the mass figures be expressed in elephant equivalents?

And just to prove that everything is scarier in Russian:

Hmm, so if ?=20 and ???=25 then ??=uh, carry the one … invert the denominator … cross multiply. Damn, I never was any good at algebra.

Fortunately there’s a handy online calculator that allows me to convert any length into london-bus equivalents: the Size of Wales calculator!

An inky Cephalopod Day to all, go check out the tentacley goodness over at Cephalopodcast.

Whenever I Get Dressed Up…I Feel Like an Ex-Con Trying to Make Good

I wonder if by ditching the (smog) moniker, Bill Callahan is suggesting that he has in fact finally made good?

Yesterday afternoon, as I was biking down to the garden to fetch some oregano for the posole, a gigantic male raccoon came waddling up beside me.

“Hey!” I shouted, bringing the bike to a squeaking stop “What are you doing out this time of day?” The raccoon gave me a sneer then loped across the street and disappeared into a storm drain.

I rode over to the drain and peered down through the metal grate. I could see a pointy nose, and two beady eyes staring back up at me for a moment then they disappeared and I heard him clamber down the culvert.

“See you at the Bill Callahan show!” I shouted into the drain.

POSTSCRIPTO:  Sad news, the little bugger didn’t make it.  We saw him creamed on the center-line of Turk street.  All the way from Davis to San Francisco…so close, so far, so it goes.  The show was amazing though.

Photo: Cynthia Dall nicked from here.