Here’s an effective productivity-blaster… a website that shows a rotatable globe of the Earth at dozens of points in its history back to the Cryogenian period 750 million years ago. You don’t have to go back too far (well, relatively) for Earth to become wholly unrecognizable.
https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth
An interesting and informative video describing some of the creepier volcanic disasters that have struck the Earth. These incidents made even a Yellowstone Supervolcanic eruption seem meager in comparison.
I woulda gone for whatever the Latin is of “Elder Things” or maybe “face hugger,” but that’s just me. A new species has been described… the fossil of a 430 million year old sea cucumber-ish critter with more than forty “tentacles.” Not exactly a giant: the tentacles/legs/whatever seemed to reach a maximum length of about 14 mm.
A much longer and more detailed and generally just plain interesting story about the discovery in Hell Creek:
The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. About three inches in diameter, it appeared to be a crater formed by an object that had fallen from the sky and plunked down in mud. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. As DePalma shaved back the layers to make a cross-section of the crater, he found the thing itself—not a hailstone but a small white sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameter—the fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. As he continued excavating, he found another crater with a tektite at the bottom, and another, and another.
SHAZAM!
Finding not only the tektites but the *craters* they made in the mud? That. Is. AWESOME.
Can you imagine what one of those little fossilized mud craters would go for at auction? Every museum in the world and a *lot* of private collectors will want a piece of this place.
This is interesting:
When the asteroid hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago, it sent a tsunami of seawater up into North Dakota (not quite *that* impressive… the Western Interior Seaway stretched from the gulf of Mexico into Canada at the time). sent earthquakes up as far as North Dakota that caused seawater from the Western Interior Seaway to slosh well inland. With the seawater went sea creatures; the sea water and critters ended up in local fresh water, mixing with fresh water fish. And the fish ended up breathing the tiny little glass spherules blasted into the atmosphere in their bajillions by the impact; the glass lodged in their gills in their final moments of life.
Edited for accuracy
The moon is a terrible place for life. Primarily, it has no atmosphere of note, so no form of life currently known could live in any meaningful way there. But there were a few points in the *distant* past when the Moon could have supported a meaningful atmosphere. The possibility exists that very early on (3.5 to 4 billion years ago) it could have had a liquid water over, enough to cover the whole moon 1 kilometer deep; and while the atmosphere would be held to the Moon rather weakly due to the low gravity, and thus be easily blown away by the solar wind, the atmosphere would have been constantly replenished by evaporation from the ocean. A later phase would theoretically have seen a thick atmosphere generated by outgassing from the basalt rocks. The lifespan of this sort of atmosphere would be short on geological timescales… seventy million years or so. But while that is pretty short for biogenesis and natural selection to produce a native ecosystem of any complexity, had terrestrial organisms such as cyanobacteria been blasted off Earth by meteor bombardment, they *could* have been carried to the moon and set up shop there, spending several million years spreading and thriving until the atmosphere did eventually fade away. Additionally, it *seems* that Earth generated primitive cyanobacteria in a very short time once the conditions were right for it… something like ten million years. If the moon had windows of 70 million years, that would have been enough.
Had life started off on the moon, I’m not sure we’ll ever know. The place has been blasted to hell and gone by meteor bombardment; any fossils would likely have been quite near the surface, and likely long since turned to powder. I suspect, though, that once we set up shop there and generations of humans start calling the place home, there will be big rewards set up to be the first to find a fossil lunar stromatolite. Long before they find a fossil stromatolite, they’ll probably have to find a fossil shoreline or a fossil river.
“Jurassic Park” opened on June 11, 1993… a quarter century ago. A decade ago I mentioned that it had been fifteen years, and that that made me feel old. Imagine what a quarter century does. Gah.
Seeing “Jurassic Park” remains a favorite memory of mine, in no small part due to the company I saw it with. But beyond that, seeing dinosaurs *that* realistic on the big screen was a freakin’ revelation. Movie history can be fairly divided between “before JP” and “after JP,” as movie makers saw the potential of computer animation; many movie makers used the new technology to make wonders… and others used the technology to make cheap crap or overpriced, bloated unnecessary eye candy. But the positives outweigh the negatives in my view, and many of the descendants of JP have been truly spectacular.
A paper recently published in “Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology” suggests that cephalopods did not evolve on Earth, but arrived in the form of frozen eggs around 270+ million years ago. Cephalopods are of course pretty weird compared to just about all other animals, and their nervous systems and DNA are different, but this does seem to be a bit of a stretch.
Abstract:
We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis
of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One
particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate
lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ~500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly
associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but
is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary
boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the
remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the
Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism fossil evidence contained within meteorites as well
as the detection in the upper atmosphere of apparent incoming life-bearing particles from space. In our
view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra
Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion – life
may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to
flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and
space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been
continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution
which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind.
I’ve personally never been especially impressed with the notion of panspermia.Not because it’s necessarily impossible, but because it seems to be simply adding an extra step to the explanation of biogenesis. The fossil evidence shows that life arose on Earth more than 3 billion years ago, so having added extraterrestrial weirdness added 500 million and 270 million years ago seems unnecessary.
But it does explain Cthulhu.
If you want uncritical videos about goofy subjects like monsters and UFO’s, YouTube will hook you up. Look at all the “Flat Earth” videos. Look at them. But if you want skeptical takedowns, you might have to dig a little further, and if you want skeptical takedowns that are well researched and explained, you have to dig a little further still. But Trey The Explainer does the job nicely.
Many of his videos are about paleontological subjects, but many others are about various “cryptids” (i.e. mysterious animals that people “know” to exist but can never seem to prove… Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Honest Politician, that sort of thing). Some are better known than others, but two vids I found quite good are on the Black Knight Satellite and the Ropen. Both are relatively recent inventions; both are manifestly silly; both are easily and quite adequately explained away with clear video evidence showing them to have mundane explanations; and yet, both are readily believed by many.
Some interesting recent developments:
When a continental plate is subducted beneath another, you’d imagine that it would melt away to liquid hot magma and become part of the gooey inner mess. but as it turns out, some of these plates can stick around in a more or less solid state for a *long* time, and they can be mapped using seismic tomography. Around a hundred of these slabs have been mapped out, down to several hundred kilometers in depth, still recognizably more-or-less solid chunks drifting in the mantle. This means that there *could* *maybe* *possibly* be some really interesting things down there where we’ll almost certainly never get to see them. Say, 300 million years ago something truly remarkable evolved on some small continent… say, an archosaur developed smarts *real* fast and became human-smart and built a whole civilization on their island, then they were wiped out by disease or aliens or a high tax rate married to an unwise nanny-state system of government. Their cities of concrete and stone were buried under dust and mud and ash, then fifty million years later the plate was subducted. Meaning that a hundred miles below your feet there might still be recognizable evidence of a far-pre-human terrestrial civilization, one you’ll almost certainly never get to hear about.
And…
These aren’t piddly little tubes, either. These are big enough to plant whole cities within, inside where they’d be protected from radiation and thermal cycling.
