#paleohistory

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Throwback Thursday: Sauropod Eggs

One of the things that always captured the imagination are baby dinosaurs. For a very long time, we knew next to nothing about dinosaur growth. In fact, they didn't even think babies could be preserved. It was a burning question: how did these terrible giants starts out life? In particular, how did an animal as large as a sauropod start out life?

In 1859, Roman Catholic priest, Father Jean-Jacques Pouech found the answer while exploring the geology of the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. Here is what he had to say about the find:

"The most remarkable are eggshell fragments of very great dimensions. At first, I thought that they could be integumentary plates of reptiles, but their constant thickness between two perfectly parallel surfaces, their fibrous structure, normal to the surfaces, and especially their regular curvature, definitely suggest that they are enormous eggshells, at least four times the volume of ostrich eggs."

However, this amazing find was overlooked by others and so he spent the rest of his life believing they were armadillo shell fragments. In 1989, though, the fragments were revisited and determined they were, in fact, dinosaur eggshell.

Tune in tomorrow for a look at Mamenchisaurus, the sauropod with the longest neck.

[kingjaspy]

check out my wiwaxia tribute

[climatepostsoviet]

Siberia's 'mammoth graveyard' reveals 800-year human interactions with woolly beasts

Woolly mammoths are evocative of a bygone era, when Earth was gripped within an Ice Age. Current knowledge places early mammoth ancestors in

[0rph3u5]

'She's perfect and she's beautiful': Frozen baby woolly mammoth discovered in Yukon gold fields | CBC News

The Yukon government's paleontologist is calling a frozen baby woolly mammoth found this week near Dawson City the 'most important discovery in paleontology in North America.'

[wildcat2030]

How did our legends really begin? - A new theory suggests that the similarities shared by many myths means that they have a common origin, passed down across thousands of generations. So, how did our stories really begin? Steve Connor reports - In the great mythological narrative of Homer’s Odyssey, the hero lands on the island of Sicily, the home of a race of one-eyed monsters, the Cyclopes. Finding a cave filled with a flock of sheep, the hero and his men feast on one of the animals until they are rudely interrupted by the cave’s furious owner. The Cyclops Polyphemus vents his anger by eating a couple of the intruders before blocking the cave’s entrance with a giant boulder. When Polyphemus returns to eat more of Odysseus’s men, the Greek hero manages to spear the eye of the Cyclops. Blinded, Polyphemus attempts to keep the men captive in the cave by feeling the backs of his sheep as they emerge each morning to graze. But Odysseus and his men hide beneath the bellies of the animals and so escape the monster’s grasp. Although Homer wrote the Odyssey in the 8th century BC, this particular part of his epic poem has a surprising resonance with other folklore and oral traditions spoken in the Swiss Valais of Central Europe, in the Basque country of northern Spain, in Russia, among the Saami of northern Scandinavia and the Apaches and other Native American tribes. They all speak of a fearsome master of animals, a hero who loses his way and is held captive but who escapes by hiding under the master’s own animals. The similarity of the narratives could be just coincidence. Each culture might just have devised its own folklore independently of the other, coming to surprisingly similar storylines. But many myths seem to share similar incidents, characters or narrative structures, whether they derive from classical Greece or the ancient mythologies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Japan or India. (via How did our legends really begin? - Features - Books - The Independent)