Feb 242022
 

As a followup to THIS POST from 2019, scientists have determined that the asteroid or comet that struck the Yucatan around 66 million years ago, ending the era of the dinosaurs, hit during springtime:

‘Frozen in place’ fossils reveal dinosaur-killing asteroid struck in spring

A site in North Dakota shows a bunch of fish who had all died within 30 minutes of the impact, jumbled up with tree branches as whatnot due to the wave that rolled through and stirred everything up. I imagine there is, or will be, a hell of a market for fossils from that site; it’s one of the few places on the planet where you have fossils pointing to one exact, understandable and important moment in time. “This specific animal was killed by *the* impactor” is a heck of a notion.

 Posted by at 3:23 am
Nov 242021
 

Can’t speak to the plot, but it sure looks pretty:

Finally gave the t rex some fuzz.

At the end of the last movie, a bunch of dinosaurs were released in the forests of northern California. This would be a problem that would last a very short time: most of the dinosaurs seemed to be lone examples of their species, so breeding will be minimal. In this world, people have known about real live dinosaurs for decades, so there would not be a lot of time lost on disbelief. And once people found out that there are velociraptors and Tyranosaurs running around, every hunter in a 2,000 mile radius would race to the scene.

 

 Posted by at 9:24 am
Nov 172021
 

And a space program!

A few weeks ago the United Nations put out a video where an indifferently rendered Utahraptor goes before the United Nations and argues that he knows a thing or two about extinction, that extinction is a bad thing, and that humans should not subsidize their own extinction. Rather, humans should work *against* extinction. These are all good points. And the logical conclusion to draw from this is that mankind should, at once and without delay, convert the money currently being wasted on social welfare programs into industrial-scale efforts to develop gigaton-yield thermonuclear devices, deep-space comet and asteroid detection and tracking systems, fast and efficient interplanetary transport system. The nukes would be used to divert potential threats; the improved propulsion and power systems would have the secondary benefit of opening the entire solar system and its resources to exploitation and colonization. heavy industry and its pollution could be moved off-world; Earth could be converted into a garden. By doing so, mankind – and every species we choose to bring with us – would be rendered *almost* immune from extinction. Nothing else mankind could possibly do would have a hope in hell of being even a minuscule fraction as impactful.

 Posted by at 10:12 am