#Chinese nautilus fossil

[uk-fossils]

LITUITES Fossil Nautilus – Middle Ordovician – Songtao, Guizhou, China

This listing features a fascinating fossil nautiloid of the genus Lituites, collected from Middle Ordovician deposits near Songtao, Guizhou Province, China. Lituites represents a transitional nautiloid form with a mix of coiled and uncoiled shell structures, showcasing a unique evolutionary step in early cephalopod development.

Fossil Type & Species:

Type: Fossilised Nautiloid (Cephalopod)

Genus: Lituites

Species: Undetermined (genus level identified)

Geological Context:

Era: Paleozoic

Period: Ordovician

Epoch: Middle Ordovician (approx. 470–458 million years ago)

Formation: Likely marine limestones and shales from Songtao region

Locality: Songtao, Guizhou Province, China

Depositional Environment: Shallow marine platform with high faunal diversity and episodic sedimentation

Morphological Features:

Combines an initial planispiral coiled whorl with an extended straight (orthoconic) section

Ribbed ornamentation may be present on shell surface

Visible chambered structure indicative of buoyancy control

Scientific Notes:

Lituites is part of a group of early cephalopods that bridge the evolutionary gap between tightly coiled nautiloids and more straight-shelled orthoconic forms

Its morphology reflects an adaptation to a semi-nektonic lifestyle in Ordovician seas

Taxonomy:

Order: Tarphycerida

Superfamily: Lituitaceae

Family: Lituitidae

Authenticity & Display:

All of our fossils are 100% Genuine Specimens and come with a Certificate of Authenticity. The fossil shown in the photo is the actual piece you will receive.

Please refer to the image for full sizing details – scale cube = 1cm.

This is a remarkable example of early cephalopod evolution, ideal for collectors, educators, and anyone fascinated by Paleozoic marine life.

[biofunmy]

Tefaf Shakes Things Up With Cross-Collecting

When the European Fine Art Fair arrived in New York and set up in Park Avenue Armory four years ago, it was enough to be exactly what it was: a fair that boasted European old master paintings and antiquities and catered to museum curators and high-end connoisseurs.

Several years in, Tefaf is examining its clientele and tweaking its game plan. Among many of its 90 vendors, “cross-collecting,” or assembling private collections of art from different eras and categories, is a trend now, and Tefaf has responded by including 7 collaborative booths on its upper floor. Here, modern or contemporary art is displayed alongside ancient artifacts or Renaissance works in jarring, imaginative and sometimes radical ways. (It’s long been a signature of Axel Vervoordt, the antiquarian, designer, and founder of his Belgium-based company.)

France grabbed the world’s attention when Notre-Dame cathedral caught fire in April. Cultural programming feels particularly French-focused this year, with a report on Sunday for plans on rebuilding Notre-Dame; a panel on early 20th-century French fashion; and the American premiere of “Decoding Da Vinci,” a film co-produced by the Louvre Museum commemorating the death of Leonardo 500 years ago — while in the employ of the French court of King Francis I.

For aficionados and collectors of Chinese and Latin American art, these works are the subjects of panels (though not much represented in the fair itself). The educational offerings, titled Tefaf Afternoons and Tefaf Coffee Talks, sound casual, but they are helmed by experts, the same way every object in the fair is vetted by specialists, including other dealers. At $55 per single-entry ticket ($25 for students), Tefaf is an investment, both in time and money, but the assumption is that you can afford it.

The collage aesthetic — juxtapositions of diverse and seemingly unrelated elements — has reached the art fair format. If you don’t mind the mixing of media, millenniums and cultural mind-sets, this is a good thing. A standout pairing is the contemporary art dealer Sean Kelly and the antiquities dealer Charles Ede (Booth 210). Among their smart displays are a photograph of the artist Marina Abramović, her face covered in honey and gold leaf to recreate a Joseph Beuys performance from the 1960s, next to a 2nd or 1st century B.C.E. Hellenistic head of a man, carved with parted lips and a bulging brow that suggests he was a powerful orator. Next door, Benappi, Mehringer, and Cortesi (Booth 211) are showing mid-20th-century European modern painting with Spanish renaissance sculpture. The Peruvian-born, Milan-based artist Jorge Eielson (1924-2006), who stretched and tied portions of his canvases into knots, can be found behind a 16th-century walnut sculpture of the hermit Saint Jerome by Juan de Valmaseda, suggesting wildly different approaches to dynamism in art.

Decorative Arts

Originally, Tefaf New York showed contemporary art in the spring and decorative arts in the fall. Contemporary art has clearly infiltrated this edition of Tefaf — a sign of its viral popularity — but furniture, silver and other decorative objects are well represented. A pair of 17th-century Japanese screens at Gregg Baker (Booth 353) feature a fall scene and a cherry tree made of blossoms created from crushed abalone shells. Burzio (Booth 336) has a hulking Italian table made around 1600 for the Alessandri family’s palace in Florence. Lavishly inlaid with coral, lapis lazuli and marble, and with gilt wooden legs, the table is a none-too-subtle display of the family’s wealth and power.

A wrought iron fireplace hood designed in the 1880s by Louis Comfort Tiffany for his East 72nd Street home, and then his Long Island estate — accented with distinct Japanese motifs — is at Lillian Nassau (320), while the French dealer J. Kugel (Booth 301) has a deliciously funky, mid-17th-century vessel by Hans Clauss of Nuremberg from a nautilus shell and gilt silver and featuring the Roman god of the sea, Neptune, grasping a seashell in his hand. Holding down the modern end, Anne-Sophie Duval (Booth 203) has a 1930 cream-colored leather armchair with ebony legs designed by Jean-Michel Frank, who combined raw materials with cool, classical lines to create a new minimal aesthetic.

Visionaries

In an age when fantasy and post-truth serve as refuges from nastier realities, there has been a perceivable spike in visionary art. Tefaf is liberally sprinkled with masterful proponents of this trend, throughout history. A fantastic allegory of “Ignorance, Envy and Jealousy” (1837) by the British Royal Academy painter James Ward is at French & Company (Booth 312). Complete with snakes, monsters, a shimmering rainbow and Truth (a statuesque woman) dressed in white, the canvas, which once belonged to the Royal Shakespeare Company, might have been considered academic kitsch a few decades ago. In our era, however it looks like a deliciously hallucinogenic mash-up of William Blake and internet emojis. Dreams and hallucinations were also near and dear to Surrealism, and Max Ernst provided some of its strongest images. A 1939 painting by Ernst of poplar trees at Galerie Thomas (Booth 308) makes foliage look like fossilized megaliths.

Notable Women

The hallway at the Armory is lined with color photographs by the Amsterdam-based photographer Carla van de Puttelaar of important women in the art world, including collectors, curators and other luminaries. A couple of female artists — not unknown, but certainly underrecognized — to look out for include the sculptor Germaine Richier at Galerie de la Béraudière (Booth 104) and Agnes Pelton at Bernard Goldberg (Booth 102). Richier’s sculptures somewhat resemble those of Alberto Giacometti. Like him, she was a student of Antoine Bourdelle (who was, in turn, a student of Auguste Rodin). Richier’s 1956 sculpture of a couple at Béraudière shows her technique of displaying brass with no patina, so it looks almost like gold.

In Pelton’s diminutive canvas “French Music” from around 1917 at Goldberg, sprites and spirits swirl through the lower regions. Pelton could be filed under visionaries: Her work tried to fuse color, sound and vision with occult shadings. The little work here serves as an appetizer to a retrospective of Pelton at the Whitney Museum that will be held in the spring, when Tefaf arrives again.

TEFAF NEW YORK FALL

Nov. 1-5; Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; tefaf.com.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[newstfionline]

Options Limited, North Korea Lit by Flashlights, Creaky Grid

Associated Press, Nov. 11, 2018

PYONGYANG, North Korea--More than 20 years after his father almost bargained them away for a pair of nuclear reactors, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has his nuclear weapons--and a nation still plagued by chronic blackouts.

Even on the clearest days, plumes of smoke from two towering chimneys linger over the center of Pyongyang. The Soviet-era Pyongyang Combined Heat and Power Plant smokestacks are one of the North Korean capital’s most recognizable landmarks.

Possibly more than anything else, this is Kim Jong Un’s Achilles heel as he turns his attention from developing the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal to building its economy.

If stalled nuclear talks with Washington ever get back on track, helping Kim solve his country’s chronic energy deficit could be one of the biggest carrots President Trump has to offer. Washington, Seoul and Tokyo tried that back in the 1990s, and were even ready to pay for and build those two reactors Kim’s father wanted.

Years of intensive sanctions have severely impacted North Korea’s supply of fossil fuels from the outside world, but they also have spurred the country to cobble together a smorgasbord of energy resources, some of them off the grid and some of them flat-out illegal.

Here’s a look at where Kim stands and what he is doing to win his country’s real struggle for power.

The big picture. Among the most iconic images of North Korea are nighttime satellite photos that reveal it as an inky abyss ringed by the bright lights of China, South Korea and Japan.

The whole nation of 25 million people uses about the same amount of electricity each year as Washington alone. It uses as much crude oil in a year as the U.S. consumes in just 12 hours. South Korea has about twice the population of the North, but its electricity consumption in 2014 was about 40 times bigger.

Hydroelectricity, which is subject to seasonal swings, provides about half of the fuel supplied to the national energy grid. Coal accounts for the other half.

The grid is leaky, archaic and badly needing repairs.

That smoke-spewing power plant in the capital, which supplies much of the power and hot water needs for central Pyongyang, dates to the 1960s. Lights in the huge concrete apartment blocks of Tongil Boulevard across town stay lit thanks largely to the East Pyongyang Thermal Power Station--built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

What electricity there is is unevenly distributed.

The showcase capital and cities near coal or hydroelectric power plants get the best coverage. Military facilities also take precedence and often have their own supply. So do important party and government operations, some of the higher-profile residences and hotels in the capital and even some restaurants. Lights used to illuminate portraits of the leaders at night never go out.

Still, it’s not uncommon for the power even in many higher status locations to flicker on and off. Dancing beams of flashlights are commonplace on the streets or in otherwise darkened apartments. In rural villages, even that often fades to black.

Keeping the oil flowing ... North Korea must import about 3 million to 4 million barrels of crude oil each year to sustain its economy.

Most of it flows through one pipeline. The China-North Korea “Friendship Oil Pipeline” runs from the border city of Dandong under the Yalu River to a storage facility on the North Korean side about 13 kilometers (10 miles) outside the city of Sinuiju. From there, some is sent across country by truck or rail to the east coast, where it is stored at the port of Munchon. More is transported to Pyongyang for priority recipients such as the military, government departments and state enterprises, and to the port of Nampo, southwest of Pyongyang.

The pipeline--technically there are two, one for crude and the other for refined products--was built between 1974 and 1976.

North Korea used to have two refineries. The pipeline from China terminates at the Ponghwa Chemical Factory, which produces gasoline and diesel. The other refinery was built by the Soviet Union in the north near the Rason Special Economic Zone in the 1970s. It shut down in 1995 with the collapse of the Soviet empire. The pipeline that connected it with Siberia has long been out of use.

Under U.N. sanctions imposed late last year, North Korea can import a maximum 500,000 barrels of refined oil products along with 4 million barrels of crude oil per year.

Along with its Chinese connection, the North has been supplied by Russian tankers that ship oil and petroleum products to Munchon and another east coast port, Hungnam. It has found willing suppliers in the Middle East, or on the open market.

Since the imposition of the import cap, Pyongyang has been implicated in increasingly sophisticated schemes to augment its supplies with hard-to-track transfers of oil by tankers at sea.

Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told the Security Council in September the United States tracked at least 148 instances of oil tankers delivering refined petroleum products obtained through illegal ship-to-ship transfers in the first eight months of this year. She claimed the amount of illegally transferred oil--about 800,000 barrels--was 160 percent of the annual 500,000 barrel cap.

“In reality, we think they have obtained four times the annual quota in the first eight months of this year,” Haley said.

... And going off the grid. David von Hippel and Peter Hayes of the Nautilus Institute have been following North Korea’s energy issue for years.

Comparing Chinese trade figures from 2000 through 2017, they found explosive growth in North Korea’s imports of passenger cars and trucks that put an additional 107,000 vehicles on its roads. Tractor sales also rose and sales of “electricity propelled” bicycles or scooters, a category that wasn’t even listed until last year, doubled to 128,000.

The truck and tractor sales almost certainly reflect an upgrade to the North’s transportation and agricultural sectors. Being able to get around is a key to doing business in a market-centric economy, and so is having enough spending power to buy things like electric scooters.

Moreover, in a study released this month, Hayes and von Hippel also found that imports of diesel- and gasoline-powered generators, coupled with solar panels that are already ubiquitous in the North, are creating an energy system increasingly independent of the national power grid.

“The data ... reinforces a picture of a DPRK in which a more vibrant, modernizing, increasingly (at least functionally) market-based economy is providing households, business and institutions with the wherewithal to invest in both off-grid electricity supplies and increased transport services,” they wrote, using the acronym for the North’s official name.

Still, keeping the power on often can be an elaborate routine.

Solar panels, the cheapest option, can keep a room lit, a mobile phone working and maybe a TV or another appliance going. When electricity from the grid is actually flowing, it can be used to charge batteries before the next blackout hits.

Those with a little more clout or money use diesel- or gas-powered generators that can power anything from a restaurant to an apartment block.

Or a military installation.

[uk-fossils]

LITUITES Fossil Nautilus – Middle Ordovician – Songtao, Guizhou, China

This listing features a fascinating fossil nautiloid of the genus Lituites, collected from Middle Ordovician deposits near Songtao, Guizhou Province, China. Lituites represents a transitional nautiloid form with a mix of coiled and uncoiled shell structures, showcasing a unique evolutionary step in early cephalopod development.

Fossil Type & Species:

Type: Fossilised Nautiloid (Cephalopod)

Genus: Lituites

Species: Undetermined (genus level identified)

Geological Context:

Era: Paleozoic

Period: Ordovician

Epoch: Middle Ordovician (approx. 470–458 million years ago)

Formation: Likely marine limestones and shales from Songtao region

Locality: Songtao, Guizhou Province, China

Depositional Environment: Shallow marine platform with high faunal diversity and episodic sedimentation

Morphological Features:

Combines an initial planispiral coiled whorl with an extended straight (orthoconic) section

Ribbed ornamentation may be present on shell surface

Visible chambered structure indicative of buoyancy control

Scientific Notes:

Lituites is part of a group of early cephalopods that bridge the evolutionary gap between tightly coiled nautiloids and more straight-shelled orthoconic forms

Its morphology reflects an adaptation to a semi-nektonic lifestyle in Ordovician seas

Taxonomy:

Order: Tarphycerida

Superfamily: Lituitaceae

Family: Lituitidae

Authenticity & Display:

All of our fossils are 100% Genuine Specimens and come with a Certificate of Authenticity. The fossil shown in the photo is the actual piece you will receive.

Please refer to the image for full sizing details – scale cube = 1cm.

This is a remarkable example of early cephalopod evolution, ideal for collectors, educators, and anyone fascinated by Paleozoic marine life.