Old Dead Stuff: A Blog About/For Things That Aren't Alive Anymor

THE one-stop shop for prehistoric theories, essays, hypotheses, and opinions. Tune in each day for facts, opinions, and fantasies! Header image: Paleoart by Luis V. Rey, Icon: Icthyosaurus with 2 Plesiosaurs by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

[our-queer-experience]

helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

[the-gummy-worms-have-me]

I think I found the article!

The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong

The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence

Read it if you have the time, it's very interesting.

[mikkeneko]

Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.

The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.

[aethersea]

Anthropologists also look at damage on our ancestors' skeletons for clues to their behavior. Neandertals are the best-studied extinct members of the human family because we have a rich fossil record of their remains. Neandertal females and males do not differ in their trauma patterns, nor do they exhibit sex differences in pathology from repetitive actions. Their skeletons show the same patterns of wear and tear. This finding suggests that they were doing the same things, from ambush-hunting large game animals to processing hides for leather. Yes, Neandertal women were spearing woolly rhinoceroses, and Neandertal men were making clothing.

I also thought this part was cool :)

[genderqueerdykes]

PLEASE read this article, this information is incredible for everyone looking to unlearn bioessentialism

[anti-terf-posts]

official anti terf post

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

I love caves as a horror theme but I HATE when there are things in the caves. Horror writers utterly ruin cave stories by not realizing that the cave itself is the monster.

It’s fine when caves are a gateway that something is coming through, or the cave is somehow alive and malicious, or if the only monster is what the narrator brings in with themself, but I hate hate hate when writers expect me to be creeped out by spelunkers being menaced by creatures that live inside the cave.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

my beloved mutual, I agree that every labyrinth needs its minotaur

but the horror of a labyrinth from the perspective of Theseus is nothing like the horror of a labyrinth from the perspective of the Minotaur… a cave is horrifying because the Earth built it to contain you

[somestorythoughts]

“A cave is horrifying because the Earth built it to contain you”

So I was fully on board with both sentiments, cave as the horror sounds cool and monster in the cave is cool, and then comes that line and holy shit that is a new horrifying thought.

I think I’ll put it in a story somewhere

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

It’s a thought I always have while caving. Looking into a naturally-formed chamber or hallway that has never seen the light of day is eerie—there’s a reason specific chambers end up with architectural names, like “the ballroom” or “the great hall”. The resemblance to human habitation and artefact is uncanny… sprawling, incomprehensible structures in crude mockery of buildings and cathedrals and dungeons, as though designed by some awful alien intelligence that had only dreamt of human needs. Inhospitable doll-houses, lightless, windowless, with oubliettes and dungeons and poison winds and air that robs the breath from your lungs. We refer to our ancient ancestors as “cavemen” but they were no more adapted to the labyrinthine darkness than we are today—we did not spring from caves but from the treetops and savannas with the sun and stars above us. A cave is a mouth, a throat, a digestive system. It is just tempting enough to draw us in—cool and sheltered and beautiful, but it has no real will to sustain us. Green things do not grow in caves. Even the other predatory creatures that shared our caves fell victim to them, when they slipped or strayed or wandered too deep.

[olddeadstuff]

A fun note about our ancestors, the aforementioned “cavemen”. It is as has been written, we did come down from the treetops and the sun, with no roof above us. But we have found our ancestors, hominids and ancient humans, within caves. We have found a lot of hominids and ancient humans in caves. Across millions of years, in a lot of interesting configurations...

Take for example, the Altamura Man: a Neanderthal man uncovered in Northern Italy, dated to hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s worth noting that his bones and especially skull actually fused to the cavern, to the point very little of him can be taken out. It’s actually really cool-looking:

Of course, this picture kinda buries the lede about how this man would’ve died. Even accounts describing how he probably fell through a sinkhole aboveground undercut that deep within these chambers, he would’ve been hung upside down:

There’s a non-zero chance that one day, this guy fell into a pit and was suspended upside-down, in the pitch-black dark of a space he was never meant to see, slowly dying as blood pooled into his head...

And that’s just one example. An earlier hominid, Petralona Man, is known from a cavern in Greece. Things like the fossil’s position in the human family tree are uncertain, but one thing’s for sure, he had had it much worse than the Altamura Neanderthal:

(Yeah, that’s a stalagmite sticking out of his head. Most likely impaled on the way down, and hopefully that had killed him...)

Over and over again, the mazes beneath the earth have eaten us. We have fallen prey to the spaces themselves, an unbeatable predator, for as long as we have spent out of the trees.

With the previous descriptions of gullets in the earth, chambers “built” where nothing can grow, it feels like maybe conceptions of caves where Something In It is Out To Get Us are almost a relief... then the isolation, the overwhelming space of it all, can come secondary to the Monster in the Cave.

[a-book-of-creatures]

What even is a starfish

[olddeadstuff]

Oh

My God

[mspaleoart]

Tiktaalik roseae

Late Devonian (375 Ma)

I’m back again, after a loooong time neglecting this blog. I’ve been planning to come back for a while, and I’m finally here! I thought I’d return with one of my favorite vertebrate fossils, Tiktaalik roseae! The common ancestor of all tetrapods was probably not Tiktaalik, but something very similar. Scientists use it as a model organism for that ancestor, though, and I’ll be doing the same here.

Keep reading

[olddeadstuff]

Broken my streak of radio silence to boost my good friend’s work! Give her a follow - with hope there’ll be more 😋🤞🏻

[holy-ghost-fire]

I’ve never seen dinosaurs displayed in public and the BYU Museum of Paleontology made the wait worth it

[synapsid-taxonomy]

Y’know I hate to profile an entire nation’s pool of researchers, but Russian cladistic paleontology and taxonomy as a whole kinda sucks tbh

From Zelenkov 2009, for an analysis with 17 taxa

[hummingyogurt]

Hescheleria greeting each other

[hhjjjjhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhksl]

Visit Original Link

[olddeadstuff]

this is... EXACTLY how the eventual adaptation of the new comic needs to sound

[artistic-daspletosaurus]

Benji Paysnoe on Instagram: “Big Boy has some BIG colors! While we are aware that tyrannosaurs were in the Arizona area 75 Mya, the exact species cannot be determined…”

3,126 Likes, 41 Comments - Benji Paysnoe (@benj_art_min) on Instagram: “Big Boy has some BIG colors! While we are aware that tyrannosaurs were in the Arizona area 75 Mya,…”

[starwarsgraphictee]

JoJo’s Bourgeois Adventure

[isablooo]

L’aventure bourgeois de Jojo

[trainthief]

me, circa early 1800s, paying a stable boy a few coppers to ride overnight to deliver you an urgent letter with a thick wax seal that after you struggle to break it just says “bitch!” in tiny little writing 

[peristeronicsuperhero-deactivat]

no no no, you don’t understand the true level of spiteful here. The sender of a letter didn’t pay for the post in 1800. The receiver did. You just made your enemy pay for the privilege of being insulted.

[ladyshinga]

I’m starting to see why messengers were gettin’ shot

[orallech]

I

[singularfortean]

Witness Reports Anomalous 'Balls of Light' near Location of Indiana's Prairie Creek Reservoir 'Mothman' Sightings

The Singular Fortean Society recently corresponded through a series of emails with a man who said he had witnessed “many balls of light” in a rural area of Indiana near Prairie Creek Reservoir. Prairie Creek Reservoir has been the center of a recent string of reports that describe sightings of a wi

Could these anomalous balls of light be related to ‘Mothman’ sightings near Prairie Creek Reservoir?

[alphynix]

What Triassic animal has a name that sounds like a Transformers character?

Triopticus primus!

Living in Texas, USA, during the Late Triassic, about 229-226 million years ago, Triopticus was a type of archosauriform reptile (a “cousin” to crocodiles, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs). Classifying it any more specifically than that is rather difficult since it’s only known from a single partial skull.

It had five large bony bosses on its head that convergently resembled the domes of pachycephalosaurs, suggesting it may have engaged in similar headbutting or flank-butting behavior. At the back of its skull there was also a distinctive deep pit that looked like a “third eye socket”, inspiring it its name – although this feature probably wasn’t actually a parietal eye, instead just being the result of the way several of the bosses came together at that point.

The rest of its appearance is unknown, and this reconstruction is rather speculative as a result. But based on other archosauriforms it was likely to have been a small semi-sprawling quadruped, possibly around 80cm in length (2′7″).

[fakehistory]

[bogleech]

the reason the wrinkle-faced bat is my favorite bat rather than the vampire bat or the sucker footed bat or even the hairless bat (which are all good quality bats!) is that the male has a hood of skin he can flip up to cover his weird face completely. I’ve never seen photos of the mask all the way up, though; this is the highest I’ve ever seen it. Supposedly it even has thinner patches where it covers up the eyes and it “hooks” onto the little ridge along the bat’s forehead. We don’t know even know what it’s for. Only the males have it so it’s possible it’s just something the girl bats like. Sexual selection does all kinds of messed up shit that otherwise seems useless.

[olddeadstuff]

*1996 Santa Claus voice* They do exist...

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

I like how there’s a dinosaur whose genus is essentially “big Paul”

I … actually didn’t see that part of the Wikipedia article on Magnapaulia and … wow.

The generic name is a combination of the Latin magnus, “large”, and the first name of Paul G. Haaga, Jr., the president of the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

Big Paul

(image by @thewoodparable)

[telion-gall]

Tavie