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parafrazerofhistory · 4 months ago

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The God of the Corycian Cave

“Nothing yet found at Olba [in Anatolia, modern-day Republic of Türkiye] throws light on the nature of the god who was worshipped there under the Greek name of Zeus. But at two places near the coast, distant only some fourteen or fifteen miles from Olba, a deity also called Zeus by the Greeks was revered in natural surroundings of a remarkable kind, which must have stood in close relation with the worship, and are therefore fitted to illustrate it. In both places the features of the landscape are of the same general cast, and at one of them the god was definitely identified with the Zeus of Olba. The country here consists of a tableland of calcareous rock rent at intervals by those great chasms which are characteristic of a limestone formation. Similar fissures, with the accompaniment of streams or rivers which pour into them and vanish under ground, are frequent in Greece, and may be observed in our own country [i.e., England] near Ingleborough [a mountain] in Yorkshire. Fossil bones of extinct animals are often found embedded in the stalagmite or breccia [a type of sedimentary rock] of limestone caves. For example, the famous Kent's Hole near Torquay [in England] contained bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, lion, hyaena, and bear; and red osseous breccias, charged with the bones of quadrupeds which have long disappeared from Europe, are common in almost all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. Western Cilicia is richer in Miocene deposits than any other part of Anatolia, and the limestone gorges of the coast near Olba are crowded with fossil oysters, corals, and other shells. Here, too, within the space of five miles the limestone plateau is rent by three great chasms, which Greek religion associated with Zeus and Typhon. One of these fissures is the celebrated Corycian cave.

Corycian Cave, exterior view.

(Source: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

“To visit this spot, invested with the double charm of natural beauty and legendary renown, you start from the dead Cilician city of Corycus on the sea, with its ruined walls, towers, and churches, its rock-hewn houses and cisterns, its shattered mole [harbor], its island-fortress, still imposing in decay. Viewed from the sea, this part of the Cilician coast, with its long succession of white ruins, relieved by the dark wooded hills behind, presents an appearance of populousness and splendour. But a nearer approach reveals the nakedness and desolation of the once prosperous land. Following the shore westward from Corycus for about an hour you come to a pretty cove enclosed by wooded heights, where a spring of pure cold water bubbles up close to the sea, giving to the spot its name of Tatlu-su, or the Sweet Water. From this bay a steep ascent of about a mile along an ancient paved road leads inland to a plateau. Here, threading your way through a labyrinth or petrified sea of jagged calcareous rocks, you suddenly find yourself on the brink of a vast chasm which yawns at your feet. This is the Corycian cave. In reality it is not a cave but an immense hollow or trough in the plateau, of oval shape and perhaps half a mile in circumference. The cliffs which enclose it vary from one hundred to over two hundred feet in depth. Its uneven bottom slopes throughout its whole length from north to south, and is covered by a thick jungle of trees and shrubs—myrtles, pomegranates, carobs, and many more, kept always fresh and green by rivulets, underground water, and the shadow of the great cliffs. A single narrow path leads down into its depths. The way is long and rough, but the deeper you descend the denser grows the vegetation, and it is under the dappled shade of whispering leaves and with the purling of brooks in your ears that you at last reach the bottom. The saffron which of old grew here among the bushes is no longer to be found, though it still flourishes in the surrounding district. This luxuriant bottom, with its rich verdure, its refreshing moisture, its grateful shade, is called Paradise by the wandering herdsmen. They tether their camels and pasture their goats in it and come hither in the late summer to gather the ripe pomegranates. At the southern and deepest end of this great cliff-encircled hollow you come to the cavern proper. The ruins of a Byzantine church, which replaced a heathen temple, partly block the entrance. Inwards the cave descends with a gentle slope into the bowels of the earth. The old path paved with polygonal masonry still runs through it, but soon disappears under sand. At about two hundred feet from its mouth the cave comes to an end, and a tremendous roar of subterranean water is heard. By crawling on all fours you may reach a small pool arched by a dripping stalactite-hung roof, but the stream which makes the deafening din is invisible. It was otherwise in antiquity. A river of clear water burst from the rock, but only to vanish again into a chasm. Such changes in the course of streams are common in countries subject to earthquakes and to the disruption caused by volcanic agency. The ancients believed that this mysterious cavern was haunted ground. In the rumble and roar of the waters they seemed to hear the clash of cymbals touched by hands divine.

The island-fortress and mole at Korykos (Corycus).

(Source: Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

“If now, quitting the cavern, we return by the same path to the summit of the cliffs, we shall find on the plateau the ruins of a town and of a temple at the western edge of the great Corycian chasm. The wall of the holy precinct was built within a few feet of the precipices, and the sanctuary must have stood right over the actual cave and its subterranean waters. In later times the temple was converted into a Christian church. By pulling down a portion of the sacred edifice Mr. [James Theodore] Bent had the good fortune to discover a Greek inscription containing a long list of names, probably those of the priests who superintended the worship. One name which meets us frequently in the list is Zas, and it is tempting to regard this as merely a dialectical form of Zeus. If that were so, the priests who bore the name might be supposed to personate the god. But many strange and barbarous-looking names, evidently foreign, occur in the list, and Zas may be one of them. However, it is certain that Zeus was worshipped at the Corycian cave; for about half a mile from it, on the summit of a hill, are the ruins of a larger temple, which an inscription proves to have been dedicated to Corycian Zeus.

Ruins of a basilica at Korykos.

(Source: Ingeborg Simon, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

“But Zeus, or whatever native deity masqueraded under his name, did not reign alone in the deep dell. A more dreadful being haunted a still more awful abyss which opens in the ground only a hundred yards to the east of the great Corycian chasm. It is a circular cauldron, about a quarter of a mile in circumference, resembling the Corycian chasm in its general character, but smaller, deeper, and far more terrific in appearance. Its sides overhang and stalactites droop from them. There is no way down into it. The only mode of reaching the bottom, which is covered with vegetation, would be to be lowered at the end of a long rope. The nomads call this chasm Purgatory, to distinguish it from the other which they name Paradise. They say that there is a subterranean passage between the two, and that the smoke of a fire kindled in the Corycian cave may be seen curling out of the other. The one ancient writer who expressly mentions this second and more grisly cavern is Mela, who says that it was the lair of the giant Typhon, and that no animal let down into it could live. Aeschylus puts into the mouth of Prometheus an account of ‘the earth-born Typhon, dweller in Cilician caves, dread monster, hundred-headed,’ who in his pride rose up against the gods, hissing destruction from his dreadful jaws, while from his Gorgon eyes the lightning flashed. But him a flaming levin bolt, crashing from heaven, smote to the very heart, and now he lies, shrivelled and scorched, under the weight of Etna by the narrow sea. Yet one day he will belch a fiery hail, a boiling angry flood, rivers of flame, to devastate the fat Sicilian fields. This poetical description of the monster, confirmed by a similar passage of Pindar, clearly proves that Typhon was conceived as a personification of those active volcanoes which spout fire and smoke to heaven as if they would assail the celestial gods. The Corycian caverns are not volcanic, but the ancients apparently regarded them as such, else they would hardly have made them the den of Typhon.

An engraving of Typhon, from the first volume of Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-54).

(Source: Athanasius Kircher, Public Domain, via Wikimedia)

“According to one legend Typhon was a monster, half man and half brute, begotten in Cilicia by Tartarus upon the goddess Earth. The upper part of him was human, but from the loins downward he was an enormous snake. In the battle of the gods and giants, which was fought out in Egypt, Typhon hugged Zeus in his snaky coils, wrested from him his crooked sword, and with the blade cut the sinews of the god's hands and feet. Then taking him on his back he conveyed the mutilated deity across the sea to Cilicia, and deposited him in the Corycian cave. Here, too, he hid the severed sinews, wrapt in a bear's skin. But Hermes and Aegipan contrived to steal the missing thews and restore them to their divine owner. Thus made whole and strong again, Zeus pelted his beaten adversary with thunderbolts, drove him from place to place, and at last overwhelmed him under Mount Etna. And the spots where the hissing bolts fell are still marked by jets of flame….

A photograph of Mount Ætna in Sicily, by Immanuel Friedlaender (1910).

(Source: Immanuel Friedlaender, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

“About five miles to the north-east of the Corycian impassable rocks, is another and very similar chasm. It may be reached in about an hour and a quarter from the sea by an ancient paved road, which ascends at first very steeply and then gently through bush-clad and wooded hills. Thus you come to a stretch of level ground covered with the well-preserved ruins of an ancient town. Remains of fortresses constructed of polygonal masonry, stately churches, and many houses, together with numerous tombs and reliefs, finely chiselled in the calcareous limestone of the neighbourhood, bear witness to the extent and importance of the place. Yet it is mentioned by no ancient writer. Inscriptions prove that its name was Kanyteldeis or Kanytelideis, which still survives in the modern form of Kanidiwan [Kanlıdivane, in the Republic of Türkiye]. The great chasm opens in the very heart of the city. So crowded are the ruins that you do not perceive the abyss till you are within a few yards of it. It is almost a complete circle, about a quarter of a mile wide, three-quarters of a mile in circumference, and uniformly two hundred feet or more in depth. The cliffs go sheer down and remind the traveller of the great quarries at Syracuse [in Sicily]. But like the Corycian caves, the larger of which it closely resembles, the huge fissure is natural; and its bottom, like theirs, is overgrown with trees and vegetation. Two ways led down into it in antiquity, both cut through the rock. One of them was a tunnel, which is now obstructed; the other is still open. Remains of columns and hewn stones in the bottom of the chasm seem to show that a temple once stood there. But there is no cave at the foot of the cliffs, and no stream flows in the deep hollow or can be heard to rumble underground. A ruined tower of polygonal masonry, which stands on the southern edge of the chasm, bears a Greek inscription stating that it was dedicated to Olbian Zeus by the priest Teucer, son of Tarkuaris. The letters are beautifully cut in the style of the third century before Christ. We may infer that at the time of the dedication the town belonged to the priestly kings of Olba, and that the great chasm was sacred to Olbian Zeus.

The chasm at the center of the ruins of the Greek city once known as Kanyteldeis.

(Source: Elelicht, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

“What, then, was the character of the god who was worshipped under the name of Zeus at these two great natural chasms? The depth of the fissures, opening suddenly and as it were without warning in the midst of a plateau, was well fitted to impress and awe the spectator; and the sight of the rank evergreen vegetation at their bottom, fed by rivulets or underground water, must have presented a striking contrast to the grey, barren, rocky wilderness of the surrounding tableland. Such a spot must have seemed to simple folk a paradise, a garden of God, the abode of higher powers who caused the wilderness to blossom, if not with roses, at least with myrtles and pomegranates for man, and with grass and underwood for his flocks.… In rainless countries the sky-god is deprived of one of the principal functions which he discharges in cool cloudy climates like that of Europe. He has, in fact, little or nothing to do with the water-supply, and has therefore small excuse for levying a water-rate on his worshippers. Not, indeed, that Cilicia is rainless; but in countries bordering on the Mediterranean the drought is almost unbroken through the long months of summer. Vegetation then withers: the face of nature is scorched and brown: most of the rivers dry up and only their white stony beds, hot to the foot and dazzling to the eye, remain to tell where they flowed. It is at such seasons that a green hollow, a shady rock, a murmuring stream, are welcomed by the wanderer in the South with a joy and wonder which the untravelled Northerner can hardly imagine. Never do the broad slow rivers of England, with their winding reaches, their grassy banks, their grey willows mirrored with the soft English sky in the placid stream, appear so beautiful as when the traveller views them for the first time after leaving behind him the aridity, the heat, the blinding glare of the white southern landscape, set in seas and skies of caerulean blue.

The ruins of Kanyteldeis, now known as Kanlıdivane.

(Source: Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

“We may take it, then, as probable that the god of the Corycian and Olbian caverns was worshipped as a source of fertility. In antiquity, when the river, which now roars underground, still burst from the rock in the Corycian cave, the scene must have resembled Ibreez [at Cappadocia in Anatolia], where the god of the corn and the vine was adored at the source of the stream; and we may compare the vale of Adonis in the Lebanon, where the divinity who gave his name to the river was revered at its foaming cascades. The three landscapes had in common the elements of luxuriant vegetation and copious streams leaping full-born from the rock. We shall hardly err in supposing that these features shaped the conception of the deities who were supposed to haunt the favoured spots. At the Corycian cave the existence of a second chasm, of a frowning and awful aspect, might well suggest the presence of an evil being who lurked in it and sought to undo the beneficent work of the good god. Thus we should have a fable of a conflict between the two, a battle of Zeus and Typhon.

Temple of Zeus in Olba, in the Republic of Türkiye.

(Source: HALUK COMERTEL, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

“On the whole we conclude that the Olbian Zeus, worshipped at one of these great limestone chasms, and clearly identical in nature with the Corycian Zeus, was also identical with the Baal of Tarsus, the god of the corn and the vine, who in his turn can hardly be separated from the god of Ibreez. If my conjecture is right the native name of the Olbian Zeus was Tark or Trok, and the priestly Teucers of Olba represented him in their own persons. On that hypothesis the Olbian priests who bore the name of Ajax embodied another native deity of unknown name, perhaps the father or the son of Tark. A comparison of the coin-types of Tarsus with the Hittite monuments of Ibreez and Boghaz-Keui led us to the conclusion that the people of Tarsus worshipped at least two distinct gods, a father and a son, the father-god being known to the Semites as Baal and to the Greeks as Zeus, while the son was called Sandan by the natives, but Hercules by the Greeks. We may surmise that at Olba the names of Teucer and Ajax designated two gods who corresponded in type to the two gods of Tarsus; and if the lesser figure at Ibreez, who appears in an attitude of adoration before the deity of the corn [i.e., of the grain] and the vine, could be interpreted as the divine Son in presence of the divine Father, we should have in all three places the same pair of deities, represented probably in the flesh by successive generations of priestly kings. But the evidence is far too slender to justify us in advancing this hypothesis as anything more than a bare conjecture.”

—J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, part 1 (The Golden Bough, vol. V, 1914, pp. 152-161)

A sarcophagus in the Temple of Zeus Olbius.

(Source: Cobija, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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imexperiencinggrowthgetoverit · 1 year ago

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List of all SDV and SDV:E (Stardew Valley: Expanded) Giftable Items

Horseradish

Daffodil

Leek

Dandelion

Parsnip

Cave Carrot

Coconut

Cactus

Banana

Sap

Large Egg

Egg

Milk

Large Milk

Green Bean

Cauliflower

Potato

Garlic

Kale

Rhubarb

Melon

Tomato

Morsel

Blueberry

Fiddlehead Fern

Hot Pepper

Wheat

Radish

Red Cabbage

Starfruit

Corn

Rice

Eggplant

Artichoke

Pumpkin

Bokchoy

Yam

Chanterelle

Cranberry

Holly

Beets

Ostrich Egg

Salmonberry

Amouranth

Pale Ale

Hops

Void Egg

Mayonnaise

Duck Mayonnaise

Void Mayonnaise

Clay

Copper Bar

Silver Bar

Gold Bar

Iridium Bar

Refined Quartz

Honey

Pickles

Jam

Beer

Wine

Juice

Clam

Poppy

Copper Ore

Silver Ore

Coal

Gold Ore

Iridium Ore

Wood

Stone

Nautilus Shell

Coral

Summer Shell

Spice Berry

Sea Urchin

Grape

Spring Onion

Strawberry

Sweet Pea

Common Mushroom

Wild Plum

Hazelnut

Blackberry

Winter Root

Crystal Fruit

Snow Yam

Sweet Gem Berry

Crocus

Red Mushroom

Sunflower

Purple Mushroom

Cheese

Goat Cheese

Cloth

Truffle

Truffle Oil

Coffee Bean

Goat Milk

Large Goat Milk

Wool

Duck Egg

Duck Feather

Caviar

Lucky Rabbit’s Foot

Aged Roe

Ancient Fruit

Mead

Tulip

Summer Spangle

Fairy Rose

Blue Jazz

Apple

Green Tea

Apricot

Orange

Peach

Pomegranate

Cherry

Bug Meat

Hardwood

Maple Syrup

Oak Resin

Pine Tar

Slime

Bat Wing

Rusty Blade

Swirl Stone

Solar Essence

Void Essence

Void Pebble

Void Shard

Void Soul

Fiber

Battery

Dinosaur Mayonnaise

Roe

Squid Ink

Tea Leaves

Ginger

Taro Root

Pineapple

Mango

Cinder Shard

Magma Cap

Bone Fragment

Radioactive Ore

Radioactive Bar

Ancient Fiber

Bearberry

Conch

Dried Sand Dollar

Ferngill Primrose

Golden Ocean Flower

Goldenrod

Green Mushroom

Four-Leaf Clover

Monster Fruit

Monster Mushroom

Mushroom Colony

Poison Mushroom

Red Baneberry

Salal Berry

Slime Berry

Rafflesia

Sports Drink

Stamina Capsule

Thistle

Void Root

Winter Star Ross

Dewdrop Berry

Aged Blue Moon Wine

Blue Moon Wine

Aegis Elixir

Armor Elixir

Barbarian Elixir

Gravity Elixir

Haste Exilir

Hero Elixir

Lightning Elixir

Pufferfish

Anchovy

Tuna

Sardine

Bream

Largemouth Bass

Smallmouth Bass

Rainbow Trout

Salmon

Walleye

Perch

Carp

Catfish

Pike

Sunfish

Red Snapper

Herring

Eel

Octopus

Red Mullet

Squid

Seaweed

Green Algae

Seacucumber

Super Seacucumber

Ghost Carp

White Algae

Stone Fish

Crimsonfish

Angler

Icepip

Lava Eel

Legend

Sandfish

Scorpion Carp

Flounder

Midnight Carp

Mutant Carp

Sturgeon

Tiger Trout

Bullhead

Tilapia

Chub

Dorado

Albacore

Shad

Lingcod

Halibut

Lobster

Crayfish

Crab

Cockle

Mussel

Shrimp

Snail

Periwinkle

Oyster

Woodskip

Glacierfish

Void Salmon

Slimejack

Midnight Squid

Spookfish

Blobfish

Stingray

Lionfish

Blue Discus

Baby Lunaloo

Bonefish

Bull Trout

Butterfish

Clownfish

Daggerfish

Dulse Seaweed

Frog

Gemfish

Goldenfish

Grass Carp

King Salmon

Kittyfish

Lunaloo

Meteor Carp

Minnow

Puppyfish

Radioactive Bass

Razor Trout

Seahorse

Sea Sponge

Shiny Lunaloo

Snatcher Worm

Starfish

Torpedo Trout

Undeadfish

Void Eel

Water Grub

Dwarf Scroll 1

Dwarf Scroll 2

Dwarf Scroll 3

Dwarf Scroll 4

Chipped Amphora

Arrowhead

Ancient Doll

Elvish Jewelry

Chewing Stick

Ornamental Fan

Dinosaur Egg

Rare Disc

Ancient Sword

Rusty Spoon

Rusty Spur

Rusty Cog

Chicken Statue

Ancient Seed

Prehistoric Tool

Dried Starfish

Anchor

Glass Shards

Bone Flute

Prehistoric Handaxe

Dwarvish Helm

Dwarf Gadget

Ancient Drum

Golden Mask

Golden Relic

Strange Doll

Prehistoric Scapula

Prehistoric Tibia

Prehistoric Skull

Skeletal Hand

Prehistoric Rib

Prehistoric Vertebrae

Skeletal Tail

Nautilus Shell

Amphibian Fossil

Palm Fossil

Trilobite

Emerald

Aquamarine

Ruby

Amethyst

Topaz

Jade

Diamond

Prismatic Shard

Quartz

Fire Quartz

Frozen Tear

Earth Crystal

Alamite

Bixite

Baryite

Aerinite

Calcite

Dolomite

Esperite

Fluorapatite

Geminite

Helvite

Jamborite

Jagoite

Kyanite

Lunarite

Malachite

Nepunite

Lemon Stone

Nekoite

Orpiment

Petrified Slime

Thunder Egg

Pyrite

Ocean Stone

Ghost Crystal

Tiger’s Eye

Jasper

Opal

Fire Opal

Celestine

Marble

Sandstone

Granite

Basalt

Limestone

Soapstone

Hematite

Mudstone

Obsidian

Slate

Fairy Stone

Star Shards

Fried Egg

Omelet

Salad

Cheese Cauliflower

Baked Fish

Parsnip Soup

Vegetable Medley

Complete Breakfast

Fried Calimari

Strange Bun

Lucky Lunch

Fried Mushrooms

Pizza

Bean Hotpot

Glazed Yams

Carp Surprise

Hashbrowns

Pancakes

Salmon Dinner

Fish Taco

Crispy Bass

Pepper Poppers

Bread

Tom Kha Soup

Trout Soup

Chocolate Cake

Pink Cake

Rhubarb Pie

Spaghetti

Spicy Eel

Sashimi

Maki Roll

Tortilla

Red Plate

Eggplant Parmesan

Rice Pudding

Ice Cream

Bluberry Tart

Autumn’s Bounty

Pumpkin Soup

Super Meal

Cranberry Sauce

Stuffing

Farmer’s Lunch

Survival Burger

Dish’O’The Sea

Miner’s Treat

Roots Platter

Triple Shot Espresso

Seafoam Pudding

Algae Soup

Pale Broth

Plum Pudding

Artichoke Dip

Stir Fry

Roasted Hazelnuts

Pumpkin Pie

Radish Salad

Fruit Salad

Blackberry Cobbler

Cranberry Candy

Bruschetta

Coleslaw

Fiddlehead Risotto

Poppyseed Muffin

Chowder

Fish Stew

Escargot

Lobster Bisque

Maple Bar

Crab Cakes

Shrimp Cocktail

Ginger Ale

Banana Pudding

Mango Sticky Rice

Poi

Tropical Curry

Squid Ink Ravioli

Mushroom Berry Rice

Big Bark Burger

Flower Cookie

Frog Legs

Glazed Butterfish

Grampleton Orange Chicken

Mixed Berry Pie

Baked Berry Oatmeal

Void Delight

Void Salmon Sushi

#Mistakes have likely been made and I will not be fixing them so just reply to the post with any corrections #sdv #stardew #stardew valley #sdv:e #sdve #stardew expanded #stardew valley expanded #giftable items #sdv items #sdv gifts #sdv gifting #long post

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xtruss · 22 days ago

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From Peasant Fodder To Posh Fare: How Snails And Oysters Became Luxury Foods

— Beth Daley | The Conversation | May 22, 2025

An Oyster cellar in Leith. John Burnet, 1819; National Galleries of Scotland, Photo: Antonia Reeve

Oysters and escargot are recognised as luxury foods around the world – but they were once valued by the lower classes as cheap sources of protein. Less adventurous eaters today see snails as a garden pest, and are quick to point out that freshly shucked oysters are not only raw but also alive when they are eaten. How did these unusual ingredients become items of conspicuous consumption?

From Garden Snail To Gastronomy

Eating what many consider to be a slimy nuisance seems almost counter-intuitive, but consuming land snails has an ancient history, dating to the Palaeolithic period, some 30,000 years ago in eastern Spain. Ancient Romans also dined on snails, and spread their eating habits across their empire into Europe. Lower and middle class Romans ate snails from their gardens, while elite consumers ate specially farmed snails, fed spices, honey and milk.

An Ancient Roman mosaic dating to the 4th century AD depicting a basket of snails, Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, Aquileia, Italy. Carole Raddato/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Pliny the Elder (AD 24–79) described how snails were raised in ponds and given wine to fatten them up. The first French recipe for snails appears in 1390, in Le Ménagier de Paris (The Good Wife’s Guide), but not in other cookbooks from the period.

In 1530, a French treatise on frogs, snails, turtles and artichokes considered all these foods bizarre, but surprisingly popular. Some of the appeal had to do with avoiding meat on “lean” days. Snails were classified as fish by the Catholic Church, and could even be eaten during Lent.

For the next 200 years, snails only appeared in Parisian cookbooks with an apology for including such a disgusting ingredient. This reflected the taste of upper-class urbanites, but snails were still eaten in the eastern provinces.

Schneckenweib, or Snail Seller, illustrated by Johann Christian Brand in Vienna, after 1798. Wien Museum

An 1811 cookbook from Metz, in the Alsace region in northeastern France, describes raising snails like the Romans, and a special platter, l'escargotière, for serving them. The trend did not travel to Paris until after 1814.

French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) hosted a dinner for Russian Tsar Alexander I, after he marched into Paris following the allied forces’ defeat of Napoleon in 1814. The chef catering the meal was the father of French cuisine Marie-Antoine Carême, a native of Burgundy, spiritual home of the now famous escargots de Bourgogne.

Carême served the Tsar what would become a classic recipe, prepared with garlic, parsley and butter. Allegedly, the Tsar raved about the “new” dish, and snails became wildly popular. A recipe for Burgundy snails first appeared in a French culinary dictionary published in 1825.

It is ironic that it took the approval of a foreign emperor, who had just conquered Napoleon, to restore luxury status to escargot, a food that became a symbol of French cuisine. Snails remain popular today in France, with consumption peaking during the Christmas holidays, but May 24 is National Escargot Day in France.

Oysters: The Original Fast Food

Oysters are another ancient food, as seen in fossils dating to the Triassic Era, 200 million years ago. Evidence of fossilised oysters are found on every major land mass, and there is evidence of Indigenous oyster fisheries in North America and Australia that dates to the Holocene period, about 12,000 years ago.

There are references in classical Greek texts to what are probably oysters, by authors like Aristotle and Homer. Oyster shells found at Troy confirm they were a favoured food. Traditionally served as a first course at banquets in Ancient Greece, they were often cooked, sometimes with exotic spices.

Music-cover sheet for ‘Bonne-Bouche’ by Emile Waldteufel, 1847-1897. © The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA

Pliny the Elder refers to oysters as a Roman delicacy. He recorded methods of the pioneer of Roman oyster farming, Sergius Orata, who brought the best specimens from across the Empire to sell to elite customers.

Medieval coastal dwellers gathered oysters at low tide, while wealthy inland consumers would have paid a premium for shellfish, a perishable luxury, transported to their castles.

French nobles in 1390 preferred cooked oysters, roasted over coals or poached in broths, perhaps as a measure to prevent food poisoning. As late as the 17th century, authors cautioned:

But if they be eaten raw, they require good wine […] to aid digestion.

Oyster Seller, Jacob Gole, 1688–1724. Rijksmuseum

By the 18th century, small oysters were a popular pub snack, and larger ones were added as meat to the stew pot. That century, it is believed as many as 100,000 oysters were eaten each day in Edinburgh and the shells from the tavern in the basement filled in gaps in the brickwork at Gladstone’s Land in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.

Scottish oyster farms in the Firth of Forth, an inlet of the North Sea, produced 30 million oysters in 1790, but continual over-harvesting took its toll. By 1883 only 6,000 oysters were landed, and the population was declared extinct in 1957.

As wild oyster stocks dwindled, large oyster farms developed in cities like New York in the 19th century. Initially successful, they were polluted, and infected by typhoid from sewage. An outbreak in 1924 killed 150 people, the deadliest food poisoning in United States history.

Costumes of Naples: Oyster Sellers, c. 1906–10. Rijksmuseum

Far from the overabundance of oysters we once had, over-fishing, pollution, and invasive species all threaten oyster populations worldwide today. Due to this scarcity of wild oysters and the resources required to safely farm environmentally sustainable oysters, they are now a premium product.

Next On The Menu

Scarcity made oysters a luxury, and a Tsar’s approval elevated snails to gourmet status. Could insects become the next status food? Ancient Romans ate beetles and grasshoppers, and cultures around the world consume insects, but not (yet) as luxury products. Maybe the right influencer can make honey-roasted locust the next species to jump from paddock to plate.

#TheConversation.Com #Beth Daley | Executive Editor ✍️ | General Manager #Peasant Fodder #Posh Fare #Snails 🐌🐌🐌#Oysters 🦪🦪🦪#History #Food 🍲🍱🥘#Food History

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deceasedcharmofthebourgeoisie · 3 months ago

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Like sharks and nautiluses, oysters are living fossils, their anatomy relatively unchanged in their 190 to 250 million years on this planet. When dinosaurs walked the earth, oysters dominated the oceans, sculpting the marine environment with massive reefs built on the remains of their predecessors. Excavations of ancient settlements indicate that Stone Age humans relied on oysters and other shellfish for survival, and some scientists postulate that this increase of omega-3 fatty acids in their diet helped with brain growth and the development of tools, culture and religion. Some archaeologists hypothesize that the abundance of shellfish along the coast helped guide human migration over the North American land bridge and into the Americas. That bounty sustained human populations for millennia. In the mid-1800s, New Yorkers ate an average of 600 oysters a year, dredged from reefs so big they appeared on nautical charts. European appetites were equally voracious — and destructive. By the end of the century, wild oyster reefs had all but disappeared from the globe, having fallen victim to over-harvesting and industrial pollution. Scientists now estimate that today’s global oyster population is a mere fraction of historic numbers. Our hunger for oysters has changed the geography of our coasts, denuding them of natural wave breaks and making them more vulnerable to sea level rise, storm surges and erosion. Had the great expanse of oyster reefs that historically protected New York Harbor south of Staten Island remained in place, instead of dredged to feed a growing population throughout the 1800s, damage from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy wouldn’t have been nearly as bad, said Sally McGee, who manages the Shellfish Growers Climate Coalition within the environmental nonprofit, The Nature Conservancy.

Aryn Baker, A Climate Solution On The Half Shell, Noema Magazine

#oysters #environmentalism #climate change

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qingxin-dream · 3 years ago

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Your event is so cool and unique, I just saw it pop up in the tags and would like to request Kazuha with loach pearls and luminescent spines. I think it'd be very sweet.

Promise Me

a/n | aw thank you anon! and you couldn’t have picked a better combination imo for the event this was so fun to imagine and write. i got way too invested in the backstory but how can i not kazuha is just so—🥺❤️ i really hope i did this justice! (art credits: @/maiaiiaiiai on deviantart).

warnings | self-contained slow burn fic, unedited

genre | fluff, childhood crushes + love confession

word count | 3k

pairing | kazuha x reader

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In those wondrous days so many years ago, your messy hair bounced freely, your toothy smile often turned into infectious giggles, and your eyes were bright with endless possibilities. The puddles of a rainy spring day were portals to a new world waiting to be explored. The shells washed ashore after a midsummer storm hid the secrets to an underwater palace. The piles of golden-hued leaves carried on the autumnal wind were your unpredictable guides to distant lands hidden between trees.

The world was your oyster, and you had the best adventurer as your loyal partner through thick and thin. Though, you wouldn’t know it just by looking at him.

He was the quiet type, not one to easily approach others for help or fall prey to rash decisions. No, he chose his words carefully and sparingly, weaving the most eloquent phrases or witty replies. You always wondered where his mind was behind those scarlet orbs, but it was apparent he never let his guard down no matter how lax he seemed.

He was much more attuned to the sounds of nature. He could hear an intruder from a mile away, smell the faint traces of an abandoned campfire from the night before, and feel the breeze warn him of a distant storm. His observant eye made him an excellent traveling partner, indeed.

Your mother would only let you venture as far as the outskirts of the rural village you called home. But that never stopped the both of you from wandering through the Inazuman wilderness until nightfall, a tattered leather backpack full of the day’s lucky finds strapped to your shoulders and a rusty sword sheathed on your friend’s hip.

You found it quite fitting when you learned of his name the first time you asked him to help carry your precious treasures home. Somehow this mysterious, cream-haired boy had guessed the direction of your hidden trove before you even told him. ‘When I am lost, the winds whisper the way forward,’ he had declared matter-of-factly to your astonished face.

Kaedehara Kazuha. Ten thousand maple leaves, painted with the warm colors of wisdom.

“Here we are!” you announced excitedly, rushing to the small opening in a huge tree with lots of big sprawling roots twisted through the dirt. You quickly stuffed your finds into the little tree hollow next to your myriad of unique rocks and fossils. “Welcome to my secret base, Kazuha. You’re my first visitor ever! So don’t even think about telling anyone else about this place, alright?”

The skinny boy hummed in response, taking in the vast green canopy of the tree. There was a makeshift treehouse stationed high up and he spotted a worn hammock draped from a particularly sturdy branch. “You picked an ideal spot.”

That was the fateful day you and Kazuha became friends.

You were surprised to discover that his imagination was just as wild and boundless as yours, conjuring up far-fetched fantasies of ancient prophecies and protecting you from harm like the gallant knights from your storybooks. He loved roaming the countryside with you. Hand in hand, you’d rush to a shiny treasure that caught your eye from afar and Kazuha would laugh merrily at your adorable antics as you dragged him along.

Sometimes your eager curiosity would get the best of you, suddenly putting you and Kazuha face-to-face with a dangerous foe. When anything dared to attack you, Kazuha would instantly place himself between you and the assailant, dull blade ready to defend you as his most precious friend. Thankfully that didn’t happen often. The worst enemy you encountered was a buried Dendro slime that grew angry after you so rudely stomped on its sprouts in a hurry.

At the end of the day, you were both just lonely kids desperate for an escape from the monotony of reality. Growing up was a scary notion and you weren’t planning on giving up your free-spirited lifestyle anytime soon—or ever.

There was one memory you cherished deeply, when you and Kazuha spent hours recuperating from the day’s excursion in the lofty treehouse. The warm sun hugged the horizon for miles on end as it sank lower and lower, its rays washing the sky in breathtaking watercolor hues. A few of the brightest stars were barely visible in the heavens, and the collective sound of crickets stretching their legs filled the air.

Your treehouse wasn’t anything special, just a small wooden platform with railing. It didn’t have a roof, which was perfect for watching the movements of the night sky amid plenty of sheets and comfy pillows splayed out on the floor. There was no hustle and bustle of the city to interrupt the tranquility of nature. No parents to come running after you, chastising you for who-knows-what.

It was just you and Kazuha, and you preferred it that way.

You recounted the thrilling and unexpected parts of your trek, waving your hands in the air animatedly as Kazuha watched amused. He would poke fun at how you mistook an innocent Geo slime for a idle rock to sit on or how your terrible Hilichurlian impression landed you both in an unusual predicament. You’d deny it and try to brush him off, only for Kazuha to tickle your sides until you admitted to your silly shenanigans.

“Okay, okay, Kazu!” you pleaded between bouts of hard laughter, trying to push his hands away from your sensitive torso.

He stopped as you asked, his own giggles happily humming on his lips as he turned on his side to fully face you, leaning his chubby cheek on his hand. When you met his fond gaze, your heart leapt and your tummy felt strange, almost giddy.

“There are many lands left unseen, many secrets yet uncovered, and many treasures to be had in this world. Like a bird learning to fly, you’ve inspired me to soar beyond the nest and into the unknown,” Kazuha smiled earnestly, casting his expression downward in contented reminiscence with a dusting of pink on his skin. “You are my best friend, (Y/N), and I want to travel the world with you. No matter how long it takes or what happens.”

Immediately your face brightens enthusiastically and Kazuha breathes a small sigh of relief as if it was difficult to finally express himself to you. His proposal had you beaming at the moon hanging above, imagining what it would be like to explore each of the seven nations with Kazuha. With a pleased sigh, your eyes sparkle with the possibilities of the future. “Me too. I wouldn’t have it any other way… Pinky promise me? We’ll be friends forever?”

Nodding, the young boy assured, “I promise.”

Then eventually came the fateful day you didn’t show up to the old maple tree as usual. Kazuha had seen you yesterday, softly bidding you goodnight when you had to return home for dinner. It was a day just like any other, and his mind was already preoccupied with the prospect of tomorrow’s adventures that were just a night’s rest away.

Were you simply running late? Did you get caught up with household chores? Could you have fallen ill this morning?

Kazuha patiently waited under the tree for you to arrive at any moment, but that moment never came. A naturally laid-back person, he decided to assume you were busy and stopped by your house. He took a sneaky glance in the window, but you weren’t there either. Typically your mother stayed to take care of you and the house, yet she wasn’t in the kitchen cleaning up breakfast. In fact, no one was home. And it was barren.

“Excuse me,” Kazuha politely inquired of your neighbor, worried that something bad may have happened to you or your family. “Do you know when the (L/N)s will return home?”

“Oh, dear,” the old woman drawled out, a saddened look on her wrinkled features. “They won’t be coming back anytime soon. I’m afraid they left Inazuma late in the evening yesterday, hun.”

“L-left? For good?” Kazuha’s chest felt tight, his heart cracking at the thought of you no longer with him—his closest traveling partner had simply vanished into thin air. What about the adventure you planned for today? What of your treasures left behind in the old tree hollow? Who would whisk Kazuha away into the vast wilderness searching for fantastical dreams the way you did?

What about the promise you both made?

The awful creak of the elderly woman’s rocking chair snapped Kazuha out of his spiraling thoughts. She nodded feebly, “Yes, dear, I’m sorry.”

He couldn’t bear to stand idle any longer. Before he knew it, his feet had taken him far away, as far as his poor legs would take him with tears quietly streaming down his cheeks. Far away from anything that reminded him of your presence that had been there just the day before. He ran and he ran through forest and thickets until he collapsed at the beach’s edge, ruby-red eyes glassy and blurred.

All he could do is hope that fate would be kind enough to allow your paths to cross again in some corner of the world.

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Liyue Harbor was unlike anything you had ever seen. Streets lined with hundreds of different local businesses, sidewalks crowded with a sea of faces you’d never recognize, and buildings towering several stories connected by strings of paper lanterns. There was never a dull moment with all the holidays, festivals, or competitions going on. It was the biggest city you had ever visited, stretching along the southern coast of Liyue into the huge ocean that separated it from Inazuma.

It had been years since your parents forced you to move to the land of the Geo Archon. Your heart still aches miserably when you’re reminded of everything you left behind, especially the one and only person who lifted you up when the world often weighed you down. You remember how you sobbed so hard and resented your parents for taking your best friend away from you.

You never anticipated that one day might be the final adventure with your beloved comrade. You weren’t given the chance to offer Kazuha a proper goodbye. No exchanging addresses to write one another, no farewell gifts to remember each other by. You couldn’t even stop by the maple tree to pick up your collection as a token of your many adventures.

You always wondered what Kazuha had thought or felt after you left the country out of the blue. It hurt you so bad to think of him. Who was there to guide Kazuha across the treacherous terrain if not you? Who would be the one to help him find rare treasures right beneath his feet? Who would keep him company despite his solitary nature?

Worrying over Kazuha was pointless, you had eventually come to terms with. You’d probably never see him again. Your parents tried to encourage you to make friends in Liyue, but none of them were as eccentric in all the right ways like Kazuha. As you grew older, you became an outcast. It was difficult making friends in a foreign city you never wanted to go to in the first place. City folk wouldn’t understand your love for exploring nature anyway so you busied yourself with work from the Adventurer’s Guild, where at least you could still pursue your passion.

Today Katheryne had tasked you with picking up and delivery a large shipment for Miss Ying’er and her perfume shop from the Crux Fleet. You were quite used to being a postal carrier since the Adventurer’s Guild refused to give you scouting missions because of your insistence on working alone. Apparently Beidou had made the perilous voyage through Inazuma’s tempest for some special circumstance, which included the flora and seedlings Miss Ying’er requested.

You were in the harbor marketplace when the huge ship pulled into the docks, weighing its anchor into the sea. Already, you could see the crew gathering wooden crates and vases, preparing to unload them onto the cobblestone sidewalk. You waved to Beidou, who acknowledged that you were to pick up some of the items.

“Long time no see, (Y/N)!” the captain yelled from aboard her ship. “If you need a helping hand, I’m sure one of my guys wouldn’t mind.”

“Hey, Beidou! Thank you!” you called back, turning your attention to the crewmen placing more crates on the wooden dock.

Suddenly you spotted one with a large flower emblem stamped on the side, so you reach out to ask for the light-haired crew mate to hand it to you. “Oh! Actually, I need that crate please.”

“Of course,” he replied, lifting the crate of flowers back up and turning to you.

As you attempted to position your hands to hold the crate, you spare a passing glance at the man and instantaneously your body freezes in place. The flowers felt unusually heavy in your arms as your lip quivered and heart raced at the impossible revelation before you.

“(Y/N)?” his soothing voice broke the silence. “Is it really you?”

The mysterious crew mate’s soft gaze bore into you with a peculiar familiarity, like he could see the years of repressed thoughts, feelings, and longing rush back through you. Was this man before you actually who you think it is? How could he bear to speak to you after your sudden disappearance? The idea of looking him in the eyes again, facing so much guilt but also so much happiness at the same time left you utterly terrified.

Slowly, you gathered the courage to meet his patient expression. You couldn’t believe he was right here in front of you, just handing you a crate of flowers. He could’ve been anywhere in Teyvat, for all you knew. But he was here with you again, after everything.

You noticed how his hair had grown much longer, tied back into a lazy ponytail, with a long scarlet highlight on the side. He had the appearance of a wanderer with a much nicer blade resting on his hip than you last remembered. There was something different about the way he carried himself, but you couldn’t quite place it. When you saw a glowing Anemo vision clipped next to a faded one, you understood.

“Kazuha?” you breathed in shock, uncertain of his reaction.

Swiftly, he set aside the crate and embraced you in a surprisingly tight hug, holding you so close as if to keep you with him a bit longer—to make sure you were real. Kazuha buried his nose deep into your shoulder and you wrapped your arms around him, rubbing his back in small motions. You smelled like home, a nostalgic reminder of all those days spent exploring the secrets of Inazuma in his distant childhood.

Quickly separating himself from you in embarrassment, Kazuha bowed apologetically. “I-I’m sorry, I just… It’s you. I’ve missed you dearly, comrade. I never imagined I would find you in Liyue after all these years.”

“No, no,” you cried frantically, shaking your head. “K-Kazuha, if anything, I should be apologizing to you. I… I left you. My parents wouldn’t let me say goodbye. I didn’t even have time to write a note to you. I—”

You began to panic from so many conflicting emotions flooding you, hot tears threatening to spill and an anxious lump restricting your voice. Kazuha instantly reached out to pull your hands away from your distraught face gently, whispering to you, “(Y/N), dove, there’s no need to cry over me. I forgive you, okay? Let’s take care of these crates and we can catch up.”

Once you both delivered Miss Ying’er’s shipment, you invited Kazuha to watch the twilight descending over Liyue Harbor from the cliffs north of the city. You could not stop your heart from thumping with excitement, or maybe anxiety, every time you accidentally brushed hands trekking up the mountainous path. It was as if there weren’t years of separation, and you were silently thankful that Kazuha was an understanding person.

When you reached the ideal spot, you sat in the wild flowers and grass together overlooking Liyue. The crickets were waking up, and you were reminded of your favorite evening with Kazuha so long ago. How he teased and tickled you, a cute blush tinting his cheeks, promising to stay by your side forever. You wondered if he held those memories as fondly as you.

“I’m happy to see you faring well,” Kazuha hums thoughtfully, reveling in the warmth of the setting sun. He peeks an eye open to catch your reddened face, smiling that clever smile of his. “My memory pales in comparison to your lovely visage.”

“And you still have such a poetic tongue,” you roll your eyes and laugh lightly, leaning toward him teasingly to nudge his shoulder with yours. “I always loved that about you. I missed the way you’d talk about our adventures with your pretty words.”

“You know, I’ve always kept one of our treasures with me. Would you like to see it?” he asked.

Your face brightens, looking Kazuha over to see if you recognized any embellishments that might resemble one of your precious tokens. “Really? Yes, show me.”

From beneath his clothes, he pulled out a black necklace with a single piece of polished jade resting against his chest. He fingered the stone affectionately before turning to you, who had leaned even closer to take a look at the treasure. Though you cannot tell, Kazuha’s heart leapt too.

“I like to think this little charm brought me a sense of peace. I didn’t want to forget you,” he admitted sheepishly, letting his voice trail off softly. For a moment, his lips parted but he dismissed the idea with an embarrassed shake of his head.

“Kazuha,” you call to him delicately, attempting to catch sight of his wine-crimson irises beneath his fluffy bangs. “I’m glad we found each other again. I don’t think I could stand to be without you again.”

“Then let’s never part again, dove,” Kazuha grabs both of your hands in his and caresses them lovingly, searching your eyes for any sign of discontent or hesitation at his advance. Although his nerves make him feel shaky, he has to put his mind and heart to rest once and for all. “On one condition…”

“Let me call you mine.”

thanks for reading! reblogs are appreciated! my masterlist

#[art of the adepti event].✿#[opulent dreams].✿#genshin impact #genshin #genshin impact imagines #genshin imagines #genshin x reader #kaedehara kazuha #genshin kazuha #kazuha x reader

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fatehbaz · 4 years ago

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“Cows destroyed the vibrant but now-extinct coastal sea ecologies of Mediterranean-climate California.” Hmmm. Blaming the cow (the creature) and not the industry, or those who orchestrated the introduction of the creature? As if the exponential expansion of cattle industry in California in the 1800s was simply inevitable, an innocent or neutral historical development. Why were the cows there? Who put the cows there? Who profited?

More like: Settler-colonial cattle ranching and other agricultural industry destroyed coastal sea ecologies of California.

Here’s a thing:

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Southern California’s beaches bustle with year-round activity [...]. Beyond the surf, however, sand gives way to mud, and lots of it, on a narrow band of mostly empty continental shelf that stretches some 250 miles along the coast. Scavengers such as crabs and burrowing worms dominate this dull mudscape, which is often obscured by swirling sediment.

The culprit behind this wasteland?

Cows, says Susan Kidwell, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago who made the surprising connection.

A few years ago, Kidwell was sifting through seafloor samples from three sites near greater Los Angeles, looking for shards of fossilized shells under several inches of silt. She found pieces of older shells but, unlike the shells of burrowing clams present on the seafloor today, these fragments belonged to filter feeders such as scallops and brachiopods -- an ancient group of animals sometimes called lamp shells -- who filter nutrients out of the water column. Kidwell and fellow researcher Adam Tomašových, of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, had stumbled upon a lost ecosystem. The remains of other invertebrates in the muck, including tube worms, barnacles, and colonies of tiny invertebrates called bryozoans, pointed to an entire community that once thrived on a rocky seafloor. Like the brachiopods, these creatures were also mostly absent from the mud-coated shelf today. Kidwell and Tomašových were perplexed by the stark difference between the shelf’s past and present ecosystem. In a 2017 study, they dated nearly 200 of the fossilized brachiopod shells to reconstruct the demise of these filter-feeders.

They predicted this ancient ecosystem gradually declined over thousands of years as California’s sea levels fluctuated.

However, the shells told a different story.

The population of brachiopods had thrived on the shelf for some 4,000 years before suddenly crashing 150 years ago. “We were completely blown away when we got the results,” Kidwell says. “They survived into the present day only to disappear.”

As the timeline took shape, the mystery of the muddy shells only deepened. Kidwell investigated the usual suspects of marine degradation -- pollution, climate change, overharvesting -- but the chronology wasn’t right. By the time Los Angeles was urbanizing in the late 19th century, this ecosystem was already coated in mud. In fact, when the brachiopods vanished, what we now know as Hollywood was little more than farmland. Then the lightbulb went off for Kidwell. “The only thing it could have been was cows,” she says.

According to her research, the arrival of livestock with Spanish missionaries in the 1770s represented the biggest change to Southern California’s coastal ecosystem prior to urbanization. Left to roam free, cattle and horse populations exploded like microbes across a petri dish.

By the mid-19th century, the legions of livestock were compacting the soil as they overgrazed native vegetation. Coupled with a general lack of knowledge about soil conservation and Southern California’s semi-arid climate, where dry periods are punctuated by heavy rains that maximize runoff, the conditions led to what Kidwell calls a “perfect storm” for enormous amounts of sediment washing into the ocean. A separate study of the muddy bottom of Santa Monica Bay tells a similar story. [...]

The smothering sedimentation phenomenon is not unique to Southern California. Relatively shallow continental shelves fringe many of the world’s coasts, often extending miles offshore. Animals that attach themselves to the shelf seafloor, such as the European flat oyster, risk burial under silt.

Once a staple of Europe’s North Sea, the oysters were harvested to the brink of extinction during the 19th century. So, when Lasse Sander, a physical geographer at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, dated oyster shells from a collapsed reef in the German Bight, he was surprised to find the reef’s demise dated to around the year 700, long before overfishing of the North Sea’s shelf began. Like Kidwell, he turned to history to explain this anomaly. Much like California in the 19th century, early Medieval Europe was marked by environmental upheaval.

An expanding human population clear-cut vast tracts of forest, which increased erosion and sent huge amounts of dirt into the North Sea, smothering the oysters.

Sander says the demise of both the North Sea oysters and the brachiopods off Southern California’s coast are examples of how environmental degradation on land is linked with the health of the ocean.

“You have to connect the hinterland of a coastal system with the marine ecosystem,” he says. Similarly, Kidwell believes these two cases illustrate how far the human imprint on a landscape can spread. “This demonstrates the ability of land use to impact not only local lakes and lagoons but the open continental shelf,” she says.

Although oysters remain scarce in the North Sea, a small piece of Southern California’s earlier shelf ecosystem persists off Catalina Island, one of the Channel Islands less than 30 miles southwest of Los Angeles. Thanks to less intense grazing practices on the island, its surrounding shelf is still a lively palette of orange, pink, and yellow brachiopods and scallops.

Anchored to rocky outcrops, the animals filter bits of sediment from the water, offering a clear glimpse of the lost ecosystem that once thrived all along Southern California’s coast.

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Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Jack Tamisiea. “How Cows Destroyed an Entire Marine Ecosystem in California.” Atlas Obscura. 21 June 2021.

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doctorslippery · 4 years ago

Link

A mermaid.

A merman.

A shark with 2 heads and tentacles where its tail should be.

The net has been chewed through.

A skeleton with different gold bones.

A school of singing fish.

The tentacle of a kraken.

A bunch of crabs with weirdly shaped claws. Some look like they have hands, paws, knives, trident, etc.

A kraken toddler.

The kid of a mermaid & merman. Around 6 or 7 years old.

A 20ft. white lobster.

A severed ear with an attached golden earring.

A message in a bottle.

Dragon-turtle egg.

A poisonous fish that deals 1D8 damage when eaten.

A school of quippers.

A locked chest.

Fragments of a wrecked vessel.

Eggs of a Sahuagin.

A coral/barnacle-encrusted magical weapon/armor.

A concrete block with the remnants of two humaniod legs sticking out. If the players break the concrete, a ring of waterbreathing can be found on one of the toes. Kinda makes you wonder how the person died if it wasn’t by drowning….

A ships intricately detailed figurehead.

A chum bucket.

A pineapple with a sea snail crawling all over it.

A lobster trap containing a crab, a squid, a sea sponge, and a starfish.

A glass ball containing a live squirrel.

A broken leg bone.

A letter in a bottle. Written on the letter is a recipe for a very delicious sandwich.

A painting of a pirate and his parrot.

A bloated corpse that looks exactly like you.

The net is empty, but coated with gritty, pitch-black oil.

A perfectly intact but not fossilized dead animal that has been extinct for millennia.

A fist-sized, segmented black metal pyramid that causes everyone around it to vie for possession of it with increasing violence unless it is submerged in salt water.

A skull of the fishman species with noticeable gouges and cuts around the eye sockets.

Driftwood.

The most beautiful piece of driftwood you’ve ever seen.

A rune-covered iron flask sealed with a silver band.

A wooden doll without clothes.

A grapefruit sized stone sphere that mysteriously floats in salt water.

A key carved from bone.

A fine/expensive looking cloak that hasn’t begun to rot yet.

A large cod. (Gold ring in its stomach)

A scroll case with a now-indecipherable treasure map.

Your net is torn from your hands: a DC 25 perception check from on the ship, or a DC15 from in the water, reveals an immovable rod that it got caught on.

A sentient jeweled necklace which appears to be worth several thousand gp but tries to convince the wearer to kill themselves.

An ornate wooden statue of some god or goddess, now covered in barnacles.

A bottle containing one copper piece and a note reading “spend it well”. The coin is too big to leave the bottle.

A sleeping human girl wearing barnacle/seaweed covered clothes that look incredibly old. Once she is relatively dry, she wakes up.

A strange stone tablet with a map etched on it, and writing in Aquan.

A live crab, but made of solid gold and encrusted with gems.

The anchor of a legendary pirate vessel.

A talking fish that offers to grant a wish in exchage for being set free.

A rusty sword that seems to glow, but only when you look at it from the corner of your eye.

A carved stone talisman on a broken cord, tangled in seaweed.

A bottle of rum.

An ancient bottle of wine, encrusted with barnacles.

A brass oil lamp – maybe you should try rubbing it clean…

1d8 spiky green fruits. It will cause you to vomit sea water (and just sea water) if you eat it.

A golden compass and astrolabe.

A sea-elf offering slightly damp sea scrolls for sale. Very handy during storms.

Giant 30ft. clam. 50% chance for a pearl.

Giant lobster being ridden by a sea goblin.

A talking sea turtle.

A reverse mermaid. (Top half fish and human legs).

A bottle with a (d100)potion inside.

A school of fish that cause hallucinations when consumed.

A giant 25ft oyster. Cracking it open reveals a Sea Dragon egg instead of a pearl.

A chunk of meteorite that fell into the ocean.

A glass helmet that grants darkvision and waterbreathing.

A trident.

A shipwrecked sailor.

The leftovers from a sauhaugin attack.

Large orbs that appear to be made of pure water, which are slightly gesticulating (an aquatic variant of gelatinous ooze).

A baby in a basket (race can very based on DM descretion).

A pirates peg leg. Made of two parts, a wide brim that attaches to the leg and the actual peg. Unscrewing it reveals the leg is hollow, with a map on the inside.

A Demigod who had one too many to drink. Return him to their dad to get a reward.

A shackled live Triton.

Several large pieces of perfectly polished sea glass.

An old boot mimic.

A bag of coins from different civilizations, not all of them are from recent civilizations, but all of them are covered in a black, viscous ooze.

A clam that’s sealed shut, with an unbreakable shell. If the shell is pried open, the clan starts signing sea shanties in the wrong key – very, very loudly.

A bottle with a map in it.

An entire campfire, still lit, that doesn’t burn anything.

A small red crab that speaks fluent Common with a melodic accent. Once in the boat it demands to be placed back under the sea.

A barnacle clad silver hand mirror, miraculously still intact. When you try to look at your reflection, you see yourself as a bloated dead corpse.

A sealed container with an important letter inside.

An odd & very fancy looking coffin that is sealed.

A sextant made of coral, covered in kelp.

A harpoon.

Gold coins that are (20d10 x 100) years old.

A whale screaming bloody murder.

The eggs of a kraken.

A very large squid. Could easily be mistaken for a kraken.

The skulls of Giants. 8 to be precise.

The Kraken

A shark with half-formed legs.

A shell inscribed with runes (a mermaid’s love poem).

A giant that was out for a swim. He got tangled in the net.

An octopus with a knife and a salty look in her eye.

A mysterious egg that doesn’t belong to any known species.

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uk-fossils · 5 months ago

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Gryphaea dilatata Fossil Giant Oyster | Jurassic Kimmeridge Clay Osmington Mills Dorset UK | Genuine Specimen + COA

Gryphaea dilatata Fossil Giant Oyster

Formation: Kimmeridge Clay

Age: Jurassic Period (Approx. 157–145 million years ago)

Location: Osmington Mills, Dorset, UK

This listing offers a stunning Gryphaea dilatata, a fossilized giant oyster from the Jurassic period, renowned for its unique "devil’s toenail" appearance. Discovered on December 4, 2024, by our expert team members Alister and Alison, this fossil was unearthed from the Kimmeridge Clay at Osmington Mills, Dorset. Carefully cleaned, prepped, and treated by Alison, this exceptional specimen is both visually striking and scientifically significant.

Species Information:

Gryphaea dilatata, commonly known as the “devil’s toenail,” was a genus of extinct oysters that thrived in Jurassic seas. These bivalves had a thick, curved shell, with the lower valve typically larger and more inflated than the upper valve. They inhabited shallow marine environments, filtering nutrients from the water.

Fossils of Gryphaea are highly prized for their distinct morphology and their role in reconstructing ancient marine ecosystems. This specimen, being larger than average, showcases the robustness of the species and offers a tangible connection to life over 150 million years ago.

Product Details:

Authenticity Guaranteed: 100% genuine fossil with a Certificate of Authenticity included.

Exact Specimen: The fossil in the photos is the exact piece you will receive.

Size: Refer to the scale cube (1 cm) and photos for precise dimensions.

Discovery and Preparation: Found on December 4, 2024, by Alister and Alison, and expertly prepared by Alison to highlight its natural features.

Formation and Location: Sourced from the Kimmeridge Clay at Osmington Mills, Dorset, UK.

This Gryphaea dilatata fossil is an excellent addition to any collection, ideal for display, study, or teaching purposes. Its historical importance, unique appearance, and scientific value make it a standout piece for collectors, educators, and paleontology enthusiasts alike.

Shipping & Handling:

Your fossil will be securely packaged to ensure safe delivery. International shipping with tracking is available for a smooth and worry-free purchasing experience.

Don’t miss the opportunity to own this genuine and beautifully preserved Gryphaea dilatata fossil giant oyster. Add this extraordinary piece of Earth’s Jurassic history to your collection today!

#Bivalve #Fossil Shell #Devils Toenail #Gryphaea #jurassic coast #charmouth #fossils #fossil #pocket money

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highvoltagearea · 5 years ago

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Five Places Where You Can Collect Fossils Around D.C.

About 20 million years ago, the land that’s now Virginia, Maryland and the nation’s capital Washington, D.C. was underwater. Where monuments now stand, giant megalodon shark hunted down prehistoric whales and dolphins and fish darted through coral. The marks these creatures left on the world haven’t washed away, as folks stumble on fossil evidence of their ancient lives all the time.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History boasts fossils from all around the world, and yet plenty come from the area surrounding the museum itself. There’s a Miocene era baleen whale skull on display that was found in the Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, for example. A giant Megalodon replica hangs from the atrium in the cafe; a nearby plaque explains that you can still find “Meg” teeth on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

For amateur fossil hunters dreaming of coming across a megalodon tooth on the beach, we’ve curated a list of fossil hot spots just a hop, skip and jump from the Natural History Museum.

Calvert Cliffs – Lusby, Maryland

Calvert Cliffs State Park

(Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)

Perhaps the most well-known fossil site on the east coast, the Calvert Cliffs cover about 24 miles of shoreline in Maryland. More than 600 species of fossils, including prehistoric oyster shells, mollusks and scallops as well as shark teeth, have been found on the shores. You might even find a megalodon tooth—most likely, however, you’ll find smaller teeth of other kinds of ancient sharks. Most finds date back to the Miocene era, or around 15 million years ago.

You might be wondering why it is so easy to find shark teeth millions of years old on the beach. According to Smithsonian marine paleobiologist David Bohaska, sharks lose their teeth and regrow new ones constantly. In its lifetime, he explains, a single shark can have thousands and thousands of teeth.

One location where you can access the cliffs is at Calvert Cliffs State Park in Lusby, Maryland. Just a 1.8-mile walk from the parking lot, you can scour the open beach area with a small shovel and sieve—these you’ll need to bring yourself—for remnants of prehistoric sea life. (Don’t bring a hammer or bang on rocks as this will only damage the fossil, Bohaska advises.) The cliffs are layered at a slant, so you’ll find fossils from different geologic time periods depending on where you are.

“The layers at the top are the more recent chapters and the stuff at the bottom is older,” Bohaska explains. He warns that it is illegal to climb on the cliffs or search beneath them in this area, so pay attention to signage.

Don’t forget to stay socially distant while fossil collecting during the Covid-19 pandemic. Try to give others about six feet of room—about the size of a baleen whale skull, for reference.

(Courtesy of Stratford Hall)

“You’re out in the wild, be aware,” says Bohaska. “If you look at the cliff and it has a crack, or if there’s a tree overhanging, that’s not a place you want to stand.”

You can find lots of in-depth information about where to look for fossils and how to determine what you found on the Maryland Geological Survey website. You can also download Smithsonian Scholarly Press’ The Geology and Vertebrate Paleontology of Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, USA online.

Be sure to plan ahead for filled-to-capacity closures on busy holiday weekends like Labor Day. And pack your mask: The Maryland Park Service requires face coverings in public buildings and outdoor public spaces wherever social distancing is not possible.

Stratford Hall – Stratford, Virginia

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In 1717, Virginia colonist and politician Thomas Lee purchased Stratford Hall, a 1,200-acre property in Stratford, Virginia. About 17 million years earlier, during the Miocene era, however, the Stratford Hall estate’s towering 150-foot-high cliffs were actually part of the seafloor, according to its website.

In 2013, amateur paleontologist Jon Bachman—who serves as Stratford Hall’s educational events coordinator—found a 15-million-year-old whale skull on the shores of the Potomac River at the four-generation Lee family home, where Robert E. Lee was born in 1807. The six-foot-long, 1,000-pound fossil was unearthed when the banks of the river eroded that summer. The skull was “the biggest” found near the cliffs, but there’s plenty more where that came from, including “shark-toothed porpoises, salt-water crocodiles, sea cows, gopher turtles [and]rays,” according to Stratford Hall’s website.

The cliffs still turn loose small fossils as they erode. As sediment accumulated for millions of years, the ocean underwent a series of marine transgressions, meaning that over a long period of time, the shoreline receded and advanced several times. Each time that movement happened a new layer of sediment was dumped, and those layers can be seen as one looks up at the cliffs.

“The back and forth of the ocean created the right environment to preserve the remains of countless animals,” Bachman explains. “Now, as the river current scours the cliffs, these fossils are exposed and slowly emerge out of the cliffs. That’s what people want to find.”

Jon Bachman (left) and Howard University anatomy professor Daryl Domning and his daughter, Charlotte Domning, make their way to the site to excavate the skeleton of a prehistoric whale in August 2013.

(Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Today, the waterline at the Stratford cliffs is about 16 million years old, Bachman says.

Due to irresponsible fossil hunting practices, however, visitors must purchase a grounds pass ($8 for adults and $5 for kids) to access a small, well-marked, 100-yard-long collecting area on the beach. The Hall still offers guided collecting tours led by one of their Paleo Patrol volunteers, explains Alex Withers, an events coordinator at Stratford Hall. Tours are typically about four hours long. Withers notes there is limited weekend tour availability left in the 2020 season, but they are taking reservations for 2021. (You can read up about their COVID-19 guidelines on their website.)

Bachman, who used to be a fourth grade teacher in Virginia’s Prince William County, says making fossil collecting a lifelong hobby is a worthwhile adventure. “It takes patience, this stuff isn’t littering the ground,” he says. “It’s humbling and fascinating hobby.”

Start with reviewing the principles of geology, Bachman suggests. Then move on to studying the geology in your area, which will tell you what rock formation and landscape features are nearby—and therefore, what fossils might be found there. State geologic societies have useful information on their websites.

“It’s just a delight and you don’t have to get a degree in it to enjoy it,” he adds. “You can educate yourself in stages. It’s about familiarizing yourself with the landscape around us.”

Westmoreland State Park Fossil Beach – Montross, Virginia

Westmoreland State Park Fossil Beach

(Virginia State Parks)

About 70 miles south of the Natural History Museum, Westmoreland State Park’s Fossil Beach is another hotbed for prehistoric shark teeth, but what’s really eye-catching about the location is the stratigraphy—or rocky layers—of the cliffs. Gazing up at the cliffs’ stripes is like looking 25 million years back in time; each layer represents millions of years of geologic history. Fossil Beach neighbors Stratford Hall, so the geology in both areas is similar.

“The river current erodes the sediment and fossilized material washes up on the beach,” explains Bachman, who lives nearby and collects fossils at this location. Bachman’s wife, Dianne, recently found the lower part of a leg bone, which they later found out may belong to a Miocene pseudo-toothed pelican, Pelagornis miocaenus, after having their colleague Robert Weems, a paleontologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, take a look. The bone is about six inches long and hollow, much like bird bones are today.

“People probably stepped over it a million times,” says Bachman.

Jon Bachman, an amateur paleontologist and avid fossil collecter, says his favorite find isn’t his own. His wife found a Miocene era bird bone recently.

(Courtesy of Jon Bachman)

The area was once home to the unique prehistoric whale species, Eobalaenoptera harrisoni. A model of the 14 million-year-old baleen whale hangs in the Caroline County visitor’s center just a short drive from Fossil Beach. When the original fossil was excavated in the 1990s, researchers recovered half of the full skeleton, making it one of the most complete and largest prehistoric whale skeletons in the U.S. The skeleton is housed in the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville.

During the pandemic, “face coverings are required in all park facilities and where social distancing is not possible,” according to the park’s website. Virginia State Parks also recommends bringing your own soap and hand sanitizer. Of course, respect social distancing and keep a six-foot space between yourself and others. Step aside to let others pass on trails.

Purse State Park – Nanjemoy, Maryland

Purse State Park

(Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Just over an hour’s drive south of D.C., Purse State Park is located on a stretch of the banks of the Potomac River called Wades Bay. Paleontologist Michelle Pinsdorf of Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History says most of the fossils you’ll find at this site are from the late Paleocene—specifically the Aquia Formation rock layer, which is 55 to 59 million years old.

“During this time period, many types of animals were evolving and diversifying to adapt to the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous time period,” Pinsdorf writes in an email to Smithsonian magazine. “Because the deposit is marine in origin, the teeth of a wide variety of shark and bony fish species can be found in this formation.”

Alongside shark teeth, you may find an occasional prehistoric crocodile tooth, which by comparison sort of look like “an ice cream cone with an almost silky texture,” says Bohaska.

You’ll also spot plenty of fossilized shells. Pinsdorf says prehistoric oyster shells are among her favorite finds at Purse State Park. “Although they are heavily eroded and don’t have much of the shell pattern or shape left, they are a beautiful purple color and have an interesting luster and smooth texture,” she says.

The ideal time to search is during low tide when there is enough shoreline to scour. “But if you go in the days after a storm or rough waters, you’re more likely to find fossils that have recently eroded out of the bedrock, and are in better condition as a result,” explains Pinsdorf.

The trails are unmarked so it’s important to carry a compass and map, according to Maryland’s tourism department. Pinsdorf suggests taking a quarter-mile trail westward, across the road from the Park’s parking area on Route 224 (Riverside Road), to a narrow stretch of beach along Wade’s Bay.

“Bringing a colander or mesh screen is recommended to aid in sifting the gravel, in which small but numerous shark teeth and can be found,” she says. “Larger, weathered oyster shell fragments are present at this site also.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, face coverings are required in park buildings and outdoor areas where social distancing is not possible. Some parks have introduced additional cleaning procedures for restrooms or closed public restrooms. Others may be offering portable bathrooms instead, according to Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources.

Dinosaur Park – Laurel, Maryland

Steve Jabo, a fossil preparator at the Smithsonian, works on a large fossilized dinosaur bone found at Dinosaur State Park in 2011.

(Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Originally a prime site for iron mining, African American miners in 1858 were the first to discover dinosaur fossils at this site. Geologist Philip Thomas Tyson brought the fossilized bones from the mines to a scientific conference in 1859, where they were officially identified as dinosaur remains.

“It’s a place where people have been working for a few hundred years,” explains paleontologist Matt Carrano of Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. If the area where Dinosaur Park now stands hadn’t been mined at all, it would look like a normal Maryland hillside covered in vegetation. “It’s only a good spot for fossil collecting because it was mined for so long,” he says.” You’re looking at bedrock where there should be soil.”

Today, Dinosaur Park features fossilized dino bones, including some from Maryland’s state dinosaur Astrodon johnstoni, and floral remnants from the early Cretaceous period about 115 million years ago. At the time, the region would have resembled something like a swampy bayou with muddy streams. According to Carrano, the sediment was a very fine, almost “pottery-quality,” clay-like material.

“You’re walking on a clay layer that was deposited 110 million years ago,” Carrano says. Now, when it rains, the clay absorbs the water and then dries out again, revealing fossil fragments in that process. The most common finds are plant material, like wood and pine cones.

“Every now and then the conditions are just right and you get a situation when the environment is saving things instead of recycling them,” Carrano explains.

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Due to COVID-19, all public programs and fossil collecting at Dinosaur Park are currently on hold, but the park area is open from sunrise to sunset. The unrestricted area features a Cretaceous-era garden and a climbable dinosaur “skeleton.” Signs describe the kinds of dinosaurs that once roamed the area, what Maryland’s prehistoric environment looked like and the African American history in the area, according to the park’s website.

Dinosaur Park usually serves as an outdoor laboratory, where the public can work alongside paleontologists to help uncover the past on the first and third Saturdays of the month or by appointment. Hundreds of fossils discovered by visitors have been collected and cataloged to date, enhancing our knowledge about the ancient ecosystem that once existed here.

“There’s a steady stream of new discoveries,” Carrano says. “We’re in this phase when the variety is much greater than we knew, just because we didn’t have much collected from the area. Many times, you’ll know you have something new, but you don’t have enough of it to give it a new name.”

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nuadox · 5 years ago

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Shell indicates that days were half-hour shorter 70 million years ago

- By Nuadox Crew -

Planet Earth turned faster at the end of the time of the dinosaurs than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365, according to a new study of fossil mollusk shells from the late Cretaceous period. Such means a day lasted only 23 and a half hours, according to the new study in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.

The ancient mollusk, from an extinct and wildly diverse group known as rudist clams, grew fast, laying down daily growth rings. The new study used lasers to sample minute slices of shell and count the growth rings more accurately than human researchers with microscopes.

The growth rings allowed the researchers to determine the number of days in a year and more accurately calculate the length of a day 70 million years ago. The new measurement informs models of how the Moon formed and how close to Earth it has been over the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth-Moon gravitational dance.

The new study also found corroborating evidence that the mollusks harbored photosynthetic symbionts that may have fueled reef-building on the scale of modern-day corals.

The high resolution obtained in the new study combined with the fast growth rate of the ancient bivalves revealed unprecedented detail about how the animal lived and the water conditions it grew in, down to a fraction of a day.

“We have about four to five datapoints per day, and this is something that you almost never get in geological history. We can basically look at a day 70 million years ago. It’s pretty amazing,” said Niels de Winter, an analytical geochemist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the lead author of the new study.

Climate reconstructions of the deep past typically describe long term changes that occur on the scale of tens of thousands of years. Studies like this one give a glimpse of change on the timescale of living things and have the potential to bridge the gap between climate and weather models.

Chemical analysis of the shell indicates ocean temperatures were warmer in the Late Cretaceous than previously appreciated, reaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in summer and exceeding 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in winter. The summer high temperatures likely approached the physiological limits for mollusks, de Winter said.

“The high fidelity of this data-set has allowed the authors to draw two particularly interesting inferences that help to sharpen our understanding of both Cretaceous astrochronology and rudist palaeobiology,” said Peter Skelton, a retired lecturer of palaeobiology at The Open University and a rudist expert unaffiliated with the new study.

Ancient reef-builders

The new study analyzed a single individual that lived for over nine years in a shallow seabed in the tropics—a location which is now, 70-million-years later, dry land in the mountains of Oman.

Torreites sanchezi mollusks look like tall pint glasses with lids shaped like bear claw pastries. The ancient mollusks had two shells, or valves, that met in a hinge, like asymmetrical clams, and grew in dense reefs, like modern oysters. They thrived in water several degrees warmer worldwide than modern oceans.

In the late Cretaceous, rudists like T. sanchezi dominated the reef-building niche in tropical waters around the world, filling the role held by corals today. They disappeared in the same event that killed the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

“Rudists are quite special bivalves. There’s nothing like it living today,” de Winter said. “In the late Cretaceous especially, worldwide most of the reef builders are these bivalves. So they really took on the ecosystem building role that the corals have nowadays.”

Image: Daily and seasonal layers are visible in a cross section through the specimen of the rudist clam Torreites sanchezi analyzed in the new study. The red box highlights well-preserved parts of the shell. The inserts show microscopic images of the daily laminae which are bundled in groups likely linked to the 14/28 day tidal cycles. Credit: AGU.

The new method focused a laser on small bits of shell, making holes 10 micrometers in diameter, or about as wide as a red blood cell. Trace elements in these tiny samples reveal information about the temperature and chemistry of the water at the time the shell formed. The analysis provided accurate measurements of the width and number of daily growth rings as well as seasonal patterns. The researchers used seasonal variations in the fossilized shell to identify years.

The new study found the composition of the shell changed more over the course of a day than over seasons, or with the cycles of ocean tides. The fine-scale resolution of the daily layers shows the shell grew much faster during the day than at night

“This bivalve had a very strong dependence on this daily cycle, which suggests that it had photosymbionts,” de Winter said. “You have the day-night rhythm of the light being recorded in the shell.”

This result suggests daylight was more important to the lifestyle of the ancient mollusk than might be expected if it fed itself primarily by filtering food from the water, like modern day clams and oysters, according to the authors. De Winter said the mollusks likely had a relationship with an indwelling symbiotic species that fed on sunlight, similar to living giant clams, which harbor symbiotic algae.

“Until now, all published arguments for photosymbiosis in rudists have been essentially speculative, based on merely suggestive morphological traits, and in some cases were demonstrably erroneous. This paper is the first to provide convincing evidence in favor of the hypothesis,” Skelton said, but cautioned that the new study’s conclusion was specific to Torreites and could not be generalized to other rudists.

Moon retreat

De Winter’s careful count of the number of daily layers found 372 for each yearly interval. This was not a surprise, because scientists know days were shorter in the past. The result is, however, the most accurate now available for the late Cretaceous, and has a surprising application to modeling the evolution of the Earth-Moon system.

The length of a year has been constant over Earth’s history, because Earth’s orbit around the Sun does not change. But the number of days within a year has been shortening over time because days have been growing longer. The length of a day has been growing steadily longer as friction from ocean tides, caused by the Moon’s gravity, slows Earth’s rotation.

The pull of the tides accelerates the Moon a little in its orbit, so as Earth’s spin slows, the Moon moves farther away. The moon is pulling away from Earth at 3.82 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year. Precise laser measurements of distance to the Moon from Earth have demonstrated this increasing distance since the Apollo program left helpful reflectors on the Moon’s surface.

But scientists conclude the Moon could not have been receding at this rate throughout its history, because projecting its progress linearly back in time would put the Moon inside the Earth only 1.4 billion years ago. Scientists know from other evidence that the Moon has been with us much longer, most likely coalescing in the wake of a massive collision early in Earth’s history, over 4.5 billion years ago. So the Moon’s rate of retreat has changed over time, and information from the past, like a year in the life of an ancient clam, helps researchers reconstruct that history and model of the formation of the moon.

Because in the history of the Moon, 70 million years is a blink in time, de Winter and his colleagues hope to apply their new method to older fossils and catch snapshots of days even deeper in time.

Source: American Geophysical Union (AGU)

Read Also

Earth’s got a new ‘moon’ – here’s what to expect

#earth #planets #paleontology #moon #biochemistry

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ledlenss-blog · 8 years ago

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The real secret to cheap family vacations is to be opportunistic

The real secret to cheap family vacations is to be opportunistic. When a friend offers you their cabin on the lake, say yes. Can you have as much fun at the cheaper, closer amusement park? Then that's where you need to be. Do the kids like the idea of cooking dinner over a campfire? Drive right on by that reastaurant. Find out what everyone really enjoys. It's sad to spend MORE on a trip for LESS enjoyment.

Examples Of Cheap Family Vacations

In Michigan, and many other places, you can find reasonable motels on the beach. Cheaper, and usually more scenic, are the numerous campgrounds on the beaches of Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron. You can find these in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and in Ontario, Canada. Below are a couple beach-based vacation ideas.

Treasure Hunting Vacations

Two metal detectors will cost less than a few nights with the family in a hotel. Why not camp near a ghost town or beach, and spend your days hiking, exploring, and hunting buried treasure? We always find interesting things when we take our metal detector to the beach. The kids will love the adventure, and when they get bored with digging up quarters, they have swimming nearby.

Beachcombing Vacations

This is cheap, and the whole family can enjoy it. You can find all sorts of things washed up on the beaches of the Great Lakes and the Oceans. In Michigan, we used to find bouys, parts of houses, and light bulbs. The light bulbs actually worked, a mystery solved years later when a sailor told me they throw them overboard for target practice. We were finding the ones that escaped the bullets.

We also found chunks of coal that had fallen off freighters. We burned them in the campfire. We found balloons with messages attached, sea shells, fossil rocks, odd-shaped driftwood, pieces of styrofoam big enough to use as rafts, and - you get the point.

Camping Vacations

If your family is willing to live in tents for a few days, or if you already own an RV, camping is the cheapest of cheap family vacations. We recently stayed at Williams Landing in Florida for eight days. We stalked alligators, watched armadillos walk through camp, saw a dozen other forms of wildlife, and sat around the fire trading stories with new friends from England and Texas every night. The cost, including the hot showers: zero. Woodall's catalog, available at any big RV dealer has listings of free campgrounds.

Other Cheap Family Vacations

How about a Montana testicle festival? Festival vacations can keep the whole family happy. You'll usually find carnival rides, music, events, contests, and more. By the way, Montana's testicle festivals are billed as family events, but good luck trying to get the kids to eat the "Rocky Mountain Oysters."

Boondocking is all about parking your recreational vehicle where you don't have to pay. If you aren't sure that kids will enjoy being in the middle of nowhere, find a ghost town or other treasure hunting locale. In Arizona, an old Mayan Indian showed us where to look for arrowheads, semi-precious stones, and ancient pottery. The desert is a great place to escape to in the winter, and treasure hunting is cheap vacation as well.

There are many more cheap family vacations, and many ways to keep any vacation cheaper. Stock the cooler with 25 cent pop instead of paying pop-machine prices. Keep the kids full on healthy snacks to avoid restaurants. Be an opportunistic vacationer.

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riverofhistory · 6 years ago

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Episode 4: From Trilobites to Therapsids

Image credit: Evan Howard, under CC BY 2.0. (cropped)

The following is the transcript for the fourth episode of On the River of History.

For a link to the actual podcast, go here. (Beginning with Part 1)

Part 1

Greetings everyone and welcome to episode 4 of On the River of History. I’m your host, Joan Turmelle, historian in residence.

The history of life on Earth is punctuated by several key themes. Throughout these next three episodes, I will be explaining the events that shaped the age of visible life, the Phanerozoic Eon. This time spans 541 million years, all the way to the present day, so this is the Eon to which we are currently in. You will notice that the evolution of living organisms is often regulated by the recurring fluctuations of a mostly oxygenated atmosphere and a mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. You’ll also see that, despite the sheer horrors of mass extinction events, they are critical in shaping biodiversity. And, perhaps most crucial of all, the development of new features among groups of organisms is mostly a process of reshaping and recycling old things. In evolution by natural selection, you will never see a new trait forming out of nothing. Nearly always, new traits are developed in specific situations and only later find new uses as the environment changes.

The first era of the Phanerozoic Eon is the Paleozoic, or the age of ancient life. It lasted from the beginning of the Phanerozoic 541 million years ago and ends 251.9 million years ago. It was during this time that grand marine ecosystems developed and spread all across the globe, and living things spread out onto the land and made a home for themselves there.

The Paleozoic starts with the Cambrian Period (541 to 485.4 million years ago). Following a brief period when the fragments of Rodinia collided to form a new supercontinent called Pannotia, which itself split apart some 573 million years ago, the landmasses of the Earth were mostly collected into four continents. The largest, towards the south pole, was Gondwana. An expansive and long-lived continent, Gondwana includes regions that will eventually become Africa, South America, Australia, India, Madagascar, and Antarctica. Moving northwards from the south pole is Baltica, which includes most of Europe. Flanking Baltica is Siberia and Laurentia (made up of mostly North America). Two great oceans encompassed the continents, with the Iapetus Ocean separating Laurentia from Gondwana and the Panthalassic Ocean making up most of the northern hemisphere. Bordering the continents were an abundance of shallow seas, which acted as a cradle for the newly evolved animals.

As the Ediacaran faunas slipped away into obscurity, the descendants of the first animals diverged into two major groups based upon their mode of embryonic development. There is a process called gastrulation, where the growing bundle of cells collapses inwards on one side of its body and becomes the precursor to the gut. For most of the animals on one lineage, the protostomes, the opening to the gut became the mouth, and the exit-hole (the anus) opened later. For the members of the other animal lineage, the deuterostomes, the opening to the gut became the anus first, and the mouth came last. This seemingly trivial observation underpins most of the animal kingdom, and by the end of the Proterozoic Eon most of the major animal lineages had evolved.

The biggest key trait for the animals of the Cambrian was the development of hard skeletal parts on their bodies. Prior to these adaptations, most animals were soft-bodied and resembled worms. Around the beginning of the period, some lineages began to incorporate minerals like calcium and silica onto their bodies. This biomineralization is still poorly understood but has been hypothesized as tying to dietary needs. Some of the oldest fossils of hard-parts belong to the teeth of early worms like Protohertzina, that could have used their new adaptations to better grab prey items. In response, some organisms, like the early mollusks, developed hardened shells to protect themselves. One lineage of animals used calcium carbonate to stiffen their bodies and support themselves on the seafloor. Possibly related to sponges, the archaeocyathids formed symbiotic relationships with algae and bacteria that bound their cup-like bodies together, becoming the first reef-building organisms. As later animals, like true sponges and the ancestors of corals, refined their abilities to make hard-parts, they soon overran the archaeocyathids and drove the entire group into extinction.

As more and more lineages evolved hard internal and external skeletons, and the process became increasingly easier due to chemical changes in the oceans, animal diversity peaked in a grandiose display of unique and fascinating species 535 million years ago. This was the Cambrian Explosion, an event marked in the fossil record as the first time that organisms could really leave well-preserved fossils, as shells and skeletons tended to preserve better than soft-parts. That being said, there have been some spectacular fossils found in Cambrian deposits that have managed to preserve more easily decayable structures, like tentacles, internal organs, even skin pigmentation. These types of fossils seem to have formed through a rapid layering of clays that prevented the bodies of the different organisms from breaking down. Two sites stand out for their deposits, the Maotianshan shales of Yunnan, China, and the younger Burgess Shale of British Colombia, Canada.

With most of today’s animal lineages already established at the beginning of the Cambrian Explosion, much of their evolution during this time went towards the development of their primary modes of life.

Mollusks are among the most abundant animals in the oceans, rivers, and lakes of the world, but their evolution (like that of all major animal groups) began in the warm, saltwater seas off the coasts of the continents. The shells of mollusks serve as defensive structures that protect their vital organs from predators, and they themselves feed with a hardened and barbed tongue called a radula that scrapes edible materials from the surfaces of rocks. Cambrian mollusks came in a variety of forms, including the three majors groups: the valve-shelled bivalves (including clams, mussels, and oysters), the mostly coiled-shelled gastropods (snails and slugs), and the cephalopods (squids and octopodes) which gradually lost their shells.

Distantly related to mollusks are brachiopods. You’re probably not familiar with them, but during the Paleozoic Era they were one of the most common animal groups in the oceans. They look like clams but are actually very distinct in their anatomy. The valve-like shells of brachiopods cover filamented-tentacles that collect food particles from the water, and the shell is opened and closed by special muscles. Clams, like all bivalve mollusks, have a ligament that controls the movement of their hinged-shells, and they’re free-swimming organisms: brachiopods attach themselves to seafloor sediments by a long, flexible stalk.

Though well-adapted to their environment, mollusks and brachiopods were outnumbered by the arthropods, today the largest group of animals in the world. Ancestral arthropods used minerals to strengthen their entire bodies and developed an external skeleton or exoskeleton that preserved their internal organs. Unique for most animal groups was the evolution of jointed limbs, which could be adapted to a variety of different environments and lifestyles. Living arthropods include insects, arachnids, crabs, shrimp, and millipedes: some 80% of all animals. Who could guess that an exoskeleton and jointed limbs would prove to be such a successful adaptation?

The road to the arthropods was paved by many strange experiments in evolution, and the animals that underwent these changes belong to a larger group called Panarthropoda (named because it includes arthropods as well as their relatives). Genetic evidence and fossil remains show the earliest panarthropods as worm-like creatures, with stubby limbs and soft skins that probably walked along the seafloor or gripped onto sponges, like squirrels and monkeys in the trees. Today there are a few living descendants from these early groups, called velvet worms. Their soft skins leave them vulnerable to the elements, so they only survive in moist, tropical rainforests. One particularly curious member was Hallucigenia, famous among paleontologists because it was originally interpreted as a many-stalked animal that used rows of tentacles to grab food from the water. Later studies discovered that these researchers had accidentally been viewing the animal upside-down! It was an early panarthropod, protected from predators by a row of spines that grew along its back. The “tentacles” were actually its limbs.

Later panarthropods continued to strengthen their bodies with minerals and some adapted their limbs into paddles, allowing them to swim among the sponge reefs of the Cambrian oceans. They developed two appendages at the undersides of their heads that served as sensory organs and a few toughened those organs with hard teeth. One bizarre member of this group was Opabinia, looking like some Lovecraftian beast, shrunk down to a measly 2 and a half inches. It sported five eye-stalks and had one long flexible structure that ended in a little tooth-lined clasping grip, which it used to snag food and bring it towards its mouth (kind of like an elephant).

But the group that really dominated the Cambrian was the anomalocarids, which took up a wide range of niches. Niches are like occupations that organisms hold: the roles they play in different ecosystems. For example: a tiger holds the niche of apex predator in its habitat - nothing preys on it, but it alone sits at the top of the food web. Some anomalocarids may have filled the niche of apex ocean predator. There is some possible evidence that these panarthropods used their frilled appendages to grab soft-bodied prey and direct it towards a circular mouth, lined with teeth-like projections. But many members of the group were filter-feeders, with their appendages lined with long bristles for collecting food particles, like the baleen whales of today. Though they were the largest animals in the Cambrian, anomalocarids appear to have mostly died off by the end of this period, with evidence that a few species clung on for another 100 million years before going extinct.

Proper arthropods fully divided their bodies into segments, each sporting its own pair of jointed limbs. These animals divided into two major groups: mandibulates, with paired antennae and chewing mouth parts, and chelicerates, lacking antennae and having shredding mouth parts. Mandibulates include insects, crustaceans, and myriapods (millipedes and centipedes); chelicerates include arachnids and horseshoe crabs.

The highlights of the Cambrian Explosion (and really the stars of the Paleozoic Era) were the trilobites. We’re not sure what kind of arthropods they are, but that’s really the only major mystery of this now extinct group. Their woodlouse-like fossils are so prevalent, and their record so complete, that we have a good idea how they lived, what they ate, and what their reproductive cycle was like. The name means “three-lobed” and refers to the general structure of their exoskeleton: a cephalon or head, a thorax, and a pygidium or tail. They came in a variety of different body forms, including species with spines, species with enormous eyes, and species with thin bodies. There were free-floating planktonic forms and trilobites with eye-stalks that probably hid under the sand, but most trilobites appear to have been grazed on particulate food. The largest species grew to the size of bed pillows, large enough to eat other trilobites. In the Cambrian Period, they were the most common and most successful of the newly evolving animals.

The previously described animals were all protostomes, but deuterostomes had also expanded in diversity. One prominent group in the oceans were the echinoderms, who incorporated minerals into a strong but flexible inner skeleton or endoskeleton. A series of tubes stretches through their bodies and helps these animals breath, move, and feed. Echinoderms today include sea stars and urchins, and the earliest members of the group were mobile organisms. However most Cambrian echinoderms appear to have been filter-feeding, stalked animals, attached to the ocean floor. Other deuterostomes include the hemichordates, which were worms that supported their bodies with a long nerve cord and breathed through gill slits at their front ends.

Perhaps the most important group to animals such as ourselves are the chordates, because this is the lineage that humans and all other vertebrates belong to. Ironically enough, chordates did not play a large role in the Cambrian oceans, and as a whole they were probably uncommon in their ecosystems. Like hemichordates, chordates have gill slits and a nerve cord that runs through the body, but in this group the cord became supported by a rod stiffened by cartilage, the notochord. Also prevalent is a tail that helped these deuterostomes control their movement as they swam through the seas. Some of these chordates retained these ancestral traits and buried themselves into coastal marine sediments, becoming the lancelets. Others hollowed out their bodies and some of those secured themselves to rocks, becoming the sea squirts and salps. The ancestors of vertebrates developed early in the Cambrian Period, around 530 million years ago. Particularly good fossils from the Maotianshan shales of China show that two early vertebrates - Haikouichthys and Myllokunmingia – had encased their brains in a skull and sported small vertebral elements around their notochord. These were not true bony vertebrae, but from these ancestral forms onwards there is a marked increase in bony hard-parts throughout the body. Animals like these were very fish-like, and for all intents and purposes could be called the earliest fishes.

By the end of the Cambrian Period, the abundance of minerals in the shallow seas changed nearly all of the major animal groups alive today, and in turn, they began to change their ecosystems as well. Prior to the Cambrian Explosion, much of the seas were covered in mats formed by microbial colonies, including those of cyanobacteria. With the rise of grazing animals like mollusks and echinoderms, these mats began to face decimation as the new animals feasted on them. As a consequence, these mat-forming microbes began to move deeper into the oceans and higher onto surface rocks where these newly-evolving animals could not get them.

Roughly 499 million years ago, deadly hydrogen sulphide levels rose and oxygen levels depleted in shallow marine waters and caused many different species to go extinct. Trilobites were severely affected, as were many unique forms of animal life. It is unclear what set off this change in ocean chemistry, but it set the conditions for new animals to evolve.

Part 2

The Ordovician began 485.4 million years ago and ended 443 million years ago. The massive continent of Gondwana moved slowly southwards and the remaining landmasses of Laurentia, Siberia, and Baltica gradually began to move towards each other. Small island continents slowly collided with Laurentia to the south and produced the first stages of the Appalachian Mountains. This continental drift caused the Iapetus Ocean to widen slightly, and there were still extensive shallow seas where large collections of sediments eroded into their waters. Like the period that preceded it, the Ordovician was mostly a hot, tropical world.

These warm oceans, now bounced back from their previous chemical changes, had many marine niches left open for species to fill. On top of that, the rise in minerals from erosion produced a bloom of planktonic organisms. There is a marked rise of fossils featuring new groups of animals during the beginning of this period, with the number of species tripling from previous levels over a 25 million-year timespan. This led paleontologists to coin a name for this time: The Global Ordovician Biodiversification Event. The animals that evolved during this period were to set the standard for marine faunas for the duration of the Paleozoic Era, and introduced a number of new modes of living. For the first time, animals began to make greater journeys out into the open ocean and some groups of mollusks and worms started burrowing deeper and deeper into the seafloor.

Reefs expanded in great numbers during the Ordovician, and the main builders during this period were a group of now-extinct sponges called stromatoporoids. They were originally thought to be types of corals because their skeletons were made of dense calcite minerals, much tougher than sponges nowadays. But they were not the only encrusting marine animals around. One of the last major groups of animals finally evolved in the Ordovician: the bryozoans. Sometimes called moss animals due to their superficial similarities, bryozoans live in hardened colonies that grow on rocks or the shells of animals. Each colony is made up of several tiny creatures with little tentacles to filter-feed with. Their numbers were significantly greater in the Paleozoic, but living species are not as common as other colonial animals like corals.

The major groups of mollusks continued to diversify, and the bivalves came into high prominence during the Ordovician. Like the unrelated brachiopods, bivalve mollusks have valved-shells (that’s where they get their name), and they’re filter-feeders, but rather than use filamentous tentacles to catch food, bivalves have plates of gills inside their shells, all lined up like a stack of paper. While the brachiopods controlled the deeper regions of the seas, bivalves were more content in nearshore waters where they didn’t have to compete for the same resources. Gastropod mollusks were doing well too, and a few of the dominant lineages evolved in the Ordovician, including the ancestors of limpets. Limpets have survived into the present day and their anatomy is remarkably ancient, lacking the coiled shells of their later relatives. Nonetheless, the conical shells of limpets are excellent adaptations: the animal can stick itself to rocks and completely cover its body with a tough exterior that most predators have difficulty with.

The heavy-weight champions of the Ordovician were the cephalopods. Although the majority of species today have reduced or lost their shells altogether, the earliest groups had spectacular shells. One lineage, the endocerids, could grow their shells up to 19 feet in length, making them the largest animals in the world at the time. They have been suggested to be major marine predators, using their tentacles to snag prey items, but it is equally possible that some species were filter-feeders. In any case, they would have been awkward animals to look at; because their giant shells were full of empty spaces the center of gravity would have made them float vertically in the water, with their tentacles facing downwards, like living icicles.

Despite their losses during the Cambrian extinction event, trilobites managed to bounce back and became more diverse than ever. Great swarms of them roamed the seabed, feeding on all sorts of organic materials. Some groups when threatened by predators could roll themselves up into a ball, using their head and tail to completely protect their soft undersides and legs, while other species used their spines for defense. There were plenty of new arthropod predators in those days, with the earliest eurypterids evolving 460 million years ago. Though they look like giant marine scorpions (and are commonly called sea scorpions), eurypterids were only distantly related to arachnids. Nonetheless, some species possessed scorpion-like pincers for snipping at prey, and one kind called Megalograptus had a spike at the end of its tail – though there’s no evidence that it was venomous. Crustaceans too were beginning to diversify. The first ostracods and branchiopods evolved: these are small-bodied animals that swim through the water with their arms or antennae. Ostracods are mostly microscopic and planktonic animals, but branchiopods are perhaps more familiar due to two major lineages: the water fleas and the brine shrimp (popularly marketed to children as ‘sea monkeys’).

All of the surviving lineages of echinoderms evolved during the Ordovician Period, including the first sea stars, brittle stars, urchins, sea cucumbers, and crinoids. Among these groups the crinoids are the least common in modern times, but during the Ordovician they were remarkably diverse, growing in groves around calm, shallow seas. Crinoids attached themselves to the ocean floors on long stalks and sported a comb of filter-feeding tentacles atop their heads. They shared their world with other long-gone lineages, including the blastoids, who looked like crinoids but had very pentagonal heads. A new lineage of hemichordates developed that were to become the dominant planktonic animals of the early Paleozoic: the graptolites. Despite their relation to the living worm-like species, graptolites were remarkably different. They were tiny colonial animals – like bryozoans – that lived in hardened tubes that simply floated along ocean currents. These tubes, made of proteins, often sported beautiful patterns and shapes, with some graptolites resembling fans or coils, and others lining their tubes with rows of spines or branches.

The vertebrate story continued at a slow pace. By the Ordovician, fish had evolved proper bones and covered their bodies in scales, and the majority of species had gone a step further and strengthened their scales into solid armor. Like most of the other animal groups, these would have proved to be a great defense against predation. However, fishes still remained a small part of the ecosystem. They were not apex predators, for they still lacked jaws and could only suck up soft-bodied food from the seafloor, and they did not venture out into the open oceans either, with all species remaining in shallow seas and along coastlines and estuaries.

The earlier development of the ozone layer proved to be a beneficial aid to life on Earth, allowing so many different marine organisms to thrive in the oceans, but for the first time ever, life began to colonize the terrestrial world. Up until the Ordovician, the only types of plants were marine species of red and green algae. The only land-living, photosynthetic organisms were the mats of cyanobacteria that moved onto surface rocks to escape the threat of grazing animals. Analyses on living species of green algae suggest that the first land plants developed from freshwater species and survived on land because they adapted their bodies to become waterproof (which prevented them from drying out). Fossils from 473 million years ago show plants very much like liverworts, which are the oldest surviving group of land plants today. Liverworts do not have roots or stems, but instead attach their flattened bodies called thalli to the ground. Like their algal relatives, liverworts and other early land plants reproduced with spores, which the adult plants release into the water where they land and grow into copies of their parents. This meant that, despite their terrestrial existence, the first land plants were restricted to warm, moist environments.

But they were not alone in their travels, because they were soon followed by the earliest land fungi. Fungi had already been around on Earth since the Proterozoic, making up on of the major groups of eukaryotic organisms. In fact, they are more closely related to animals then they are to plants, meaning you have more familial relations to the mushrooms in your soup than to the carrots or onions. Fungi are mostly decomposers: breaking down dead materials that provide them with nutrients. They had a ready food source when the first land plants began to die, and through their decomposition process they began to churn parts of the sediment, creating soil. All land plants today rely on soil for nutrients, so newly growing spores were treated to an increasingly safer environment, thanks to the fungi. Ever slowly the stage was set for the rise of terrestrial environments, as vast numbers of liverworts blanketed the margins of freshwater rivers and lakes.

The good times were not to last, as the Ordovician closed with a major mass extinction event. While the direct causes are still debated by researchers, the changing conditions at the time almost certainly put pressures on marine organisms. Analysis of rock formations around 450 million years ago demonstrate that carbon dioxide levels plummeted, while oxygen levels increased dramatically. As Gondwana moved south and covered the poles, the Earth became cool enough for glaciers to form there, which expanded and took in such large amounts of water that the sea levels dropped. Many of the warm, shallow marine environments were lost as a result, and as much as 86% of marine species went extinct. Yet again, the trilobites took some serious damage and their numbers never recovered to previous levels; and there were great losses of brachiopods, bryozoans, and graptolites. What happened to all the carbon dioxide? Hypotheses blame the drop in levels due to the rise of the first land plants, because their sheer numbers on land may have photosynthesized a little too well. Other evidence points to volcanic weathering causing the drop in carbon levels; remember, weathering of certain rocks often takes up carbon dioxide. The ice sheets at the south pole were at their greatest extent during the last seven million years of the Ordovician, but when the period ended much of the marine life in the oceans was gone.

The Silurian picks up where the Ordovician left off: a relatively short geologic period from 443.8 million to 419.2 million years ago. As the Earth’s overall climate warmed up again the glaciers began to recede in Gondwana, and the sea levels rose. The giant continent itself started inching northwards. By now, Laurentia and Baltica had connected together as one landmass called Euramerica, due to the inclusion of lands that would eventually become Europe and North America. Siberia remained isolated, and the Iapetus Ocean began to close as Gondwana and Euramerica moved closer to each other.

As it had done after the Cambrian, marine life rebounded following the Ordovician, but now there were depleted stocks. Trilobites and graptolites lost much of their diversity, and the great sponge reefs had lessened in number. In their place emerged two types of stony corals that had evolved quietly during the Ordovician. The first group and the ones that primarily formed the new reefs were the tabulate corals. They were colonial organisms, like living corals, and formed flattened, table-like structures in great quantities. Among them was the second group, the rugose corals, who could form colonies or remain as single organisms. Their bodies looked like horns, but they often angled themselves in their growth. Surprising as it may seem, corals are related to sea jellies: whereas sea jellies adapted themselves to be free-floating animals, corals flipped that body plan over and resided to an existence attached to rocks and seafloor sediments. These new coral reefs became great templates that supported a wide variety of animal life.

The iconic invertebrates of the Paleozoic, the giant cephalopods and frightening eurypterids, continued to stalk the oceans. Among the mollusks, the bivalves managed to radiate into a great number of new groups, given that their main competitors the brachiopods faced such heavy losses at the end of the Ordovician.

Fish became big winners during the Silurian Period, thanks to the evolution of true jaws. Given that the first fishes were jawless animals, how did this adaptation come to be? Genetic and anatomical evidence points to a change in development of the front most gill arches (the parts of the throat that provide support for the gills themselves). These migrated towards the exterior of the mouth and allowed that part of the body to close and open at will. Given that gills help fish take in oxygen from the water, this ability to work the mouth would have helped them take in more water (this feat is called buccal pumping). These ancestral jawed fishes could effectively breath faster than their contemporaries and as a result could swim better too. Over time, this adaptation found another function, fish that had strengthened the repurposed gill arches could now catch and kill prey with their mouths more efficiently. New dietary options opened up, and now the fishes of the Silurian could eat each other! The gill arches became true jaws. This remarkable change in physiology prompted the evolution of all the major groups of jawed fishes, and as a result, the jawless fishes were now about to face some serious competition.

The situation on land grew much more serious. As collections of plants and fungi changed the surfaces of freshwater coasts, new plants evolved to join their number. Among the liverworts were the first mosses, which had special structures called rhizoids that gave them some anchorage to the soil. New plants evolved later on, around 433 million years ago, that underwent significant structural changes to their bodies. These were the vascular plants, so named because inside their revolutionary new roots, stems, and leaves was a system of vein-like tubes that could take in water and nutrients and distribute them through their body. This was a more efficient system than what the liverworts and mosses had, because it meant that vascular plants had more strength to support their bodies in the gravitationally-dominant environment. One of the icons of Silurian botany is Cooksonia, which was one of the most common land plants at the time. They were relatively tiny plants, only growing as high as 2 inches, that had a Y-shaped prong structure. At the end of these prongs were their spores, which they could release into the wind. At the other end of the plant spectrum is Baragwanathia, which was among the tallest plants on land (growing up to 11 inches high). These plants were lycopods, one of the surviving members of this new flora that can still be found today. They’re distinguished among their peers by their covering of tiny leaves all along their stems, which increased their surface area and allowed more sunlight to be captured. Traits like these allowed lycopods and other vascular plants to outgrow their competitors and really change the landscape.

But the plants and fungi were no longer alone in their world. Fossil evidence indicates that for the first time, animals began to make serious trips onto the land. Prior to the Silurian, there is some fossil evidence that certain creatures were making small visits to the sandy coasts: for example, trackways have been found that have been identified with eurypterids and aquatic myriapods like millipedes. But these animals could not have permanently stayed on land because they still breathed with gills and so they had to return to the water to survive. Arthropods that managed to survive on land had underwent mutations that changed their bodies. The first land arachnids developed book lungs that were retained inside the body and took in oxygen from the air instead of water. Other arthropods like mandibulates switched out gills for a series of spherical holes along their bodies, connected to an interworking system of tubes that carried oxygen everywhere. Among all members of the group, their jointed limbs proved to be helpful in supporting their weight as they roamed the soils. By the end of the Silurian, arachnids (in the form of scorpions and a now extinct group called trigonotarbids) and myriapods (in the form of millipedes and centipedes) established a presence of land. With new resources like plant matter, some arthropods developed into herbivores, while others took advantage of the new prey items and remained carnivores. It is even possible that the ancestors of earthworms and nematodes were living on land at this time, though their soft-bodies would have not preserved well in these conditions. Thus, the first land ecosystems and food webs were in place.

Part 3

The Silurian Period passed calmly into the Devonian Period, 419.2 million to 358.9 million years ago. As Gondwana moved northwards it started to rotate as the lands that would become Australia and China began to move towards Siberia. Euramerica made contact with Gondwana by the middle of the Period, closing the Iapetus Ocean forever. This collision of continents pushed up great mountains along the connected landmasses: these were the precursors of the Caledonian Mountains, which today can be found along Greenland, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. This mountain building also helped push the Appalachians higher. The glaciers that dominated the south pole in the Silurian had receded significantly till they were almost nonexistent. Carbon dioxide levels rose, and the world became much warmer and dryer.

While tabulate corals were still doing well during the Devonian, the rugose corals increased in diversity and joined their relatives as the main reef-building organisms. Brachiopods and crinoids continued to filter-feed among the reefs, while eurypterids decreased in overall importance in marine ecosystems. Among the crustaceans, the earliest decapods evolved, which sport ten legs. The ancestral body plan of the first decapods was very shrimp-like, and indeed shrimp and prawns belong to this group (though these are interchangeable terms for the same animals that lack any scientific basis). More prominent members of the decapod group, like the crabs and lobsters, didn’t evolve until much later in the Mesozoic Era. The mollusks themselves also gave a world a new lineage of cephalopods, with strong sutured shells that formed coils. These were the ammonoids and they became predatory mollusks, unlike their filter-feeding relatives the endocerids (which, incidentally, died out during the Silurian).

The ammonoids and decapods proved to be very special organisms, because they featured in a remarkable adaptation event called the Nekton Revolution. Paleontologists coined this term to refer to a change in the fossil record when many organisms began to adapt to a swimming lifestyle. To be nektonic is to be free-swimming. Now more and more animals were occupying niches in the open ocean, and the seas began to crowd with an abundance of different organisms.

The fish, which had already developed into their main groups, were now diversifying into different forms and taking advantage of the new niches that were being created: it was the Age of the Fishes. One group of jawed fishes called antiarchs converted their front fins into hardened plates and moved their eyes to the tops of their heads, possibly helping them move along the seabed and bottom-feed. Another lineage, the chondrichthyans, made their internal skeletons cartilaginous (that is, made of cartilage instead of bone), which lightened their weight and made them faster and more efficient predators. This paved the way for the first sharks. It’s often been said that sharks have remained unchanged since the Devonian, but a quick glance at the fossil record debunks this: most of the early sharks of the Paleozoic were strange and weirdly-shaped animals, one example being Sethacanthus which sported an anvil-shaped growth at the top of its back that paleontologists have had difficulty explaining. Modern-type sharks won’t evolve for a long time. But the most spectacular of all the fishes in the Devonian were the arthrodires, who strengthened their heads and jaws with thick armor plating. The biggest members of the group included the open-ocean filter-feeder Titanichthys and the apex predator Dunkleosteus, both reaching lengths of up to 33 feet. With the rise of jawed fishes like these, nearly all marine ecosystems from the Devonian to the present day had vertebrate animals as their main predators.

Among the bony fishes stemmed two kinds. There were the ray-finned fishes or actinopterygians that trading in their fleshy front fins for a webbed-ray of bony or cartilaginous spines. In the present day, most fish species belong to this group. The other group of bony fishes kept their fleshy-fins and developed a lobed-anatomy where the fins encased a series of bones. These lobe-finned fishes or sarcopterygians are vital to the story of our evolution, because it was from this group that the ancestors of land vertebrates originated. How did this remarkable transition from aquatic animals to land animals take place?

The current fossil evidence we have points to the bony fishes of the Devonian evolving along seashores and coastal environments. Most of the lobe-finned fishes were finding food in estuaries and freshwater rivers. They were not particularly fast vertebrates, and they didn’t need to be, as they did not face any of the pressures of open ocean living that their relatives the ray-finned fishes faced. By growing out the bones in their fins and creating a wrist joint, sarcopterygians could skulk about the riverbed or cling to aquatic plants. Over time the fins became more flexible and more joints developed: from ankles to elbows. Now the sarcopterygians had proper limbs that allowed them to better move through their freshwater environment. But at the same time, this anatomy proved beneficial when a few of these fishes started making temporary journeys onto the shores in search of food, as there were plenty of arthropods already there. Repeated trips caused their skeleton to strengthen and become more flexible. The hip bones adjusted to the hind limbs and gave them more support, while the shoulders separated from the ribs to aid with steering the body. A neck formed, and some of the bones of the limbs moved outwards and formed digits. They could breathe the air with lungs and collect oxygen from the water with gills. It’s important to state that fishes ancestrally had air sacs: ray-finned fishes modified them into swim-bladders to aid with buoyancy, while lobe-finned fishes developed them into proper lungs. The stegocephalians had arrived, spearheaded by the appearance in the fossil record of forms like Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, and Ichthyostega. While these fishes were capable animals on land, able to shuffle along the sands and silts like seals and mudskippers do today, they were primarily aquatic and still gained most of their resources in the water. But it was a capable start of things to come.

The land became a truly inviting place during the Devonian. Liverworts, mosses, and lycopods blossomed into a number of larger forms, and they were joined by a host of new vascular plant lineages that grew into complex branching forms with the first proper leaves. Monilophytes – the group that includes the ferns and horsetails – gave their roots the ability to spread out and form new copies of itself. Because these structures form underground, they can allow monilophytes to survive in harsh conditions, meaning that the earliest ferns and horsetails were able to spread out farther than other plants previously could. Another lineage of vascular plants went from using spores to dividing their sex cells into different structures, with the female sex cells staying in the parent plant and the male sex cells needing to be dispersed as pollen grains. This simple adaptation allowed these plants called spermatophytes to increase their genetic diversity and their range of distribution, because now pollen could be carried further by the wind. Not only that, once the two sex cells met and formed an ovule (or egg), special cells were directed to form a hard outer layer around it. This shell enclosed a wet storage of food that sustained the embryonic plant until it could be planted somewhere else. This is how seeds formed, and fossils of Devonian plants called Elkinsia and Runcaria reveal this process in action. In the meantime, some of the members of the monilophytes and seed plants started to grow more and more vessels for transporting water up their stems. These structures were formed by an organic molecule called lignin, which itself was encased in another organic molecule called cellulose. Following generations of growth, the lignin-cellulose outer-layers of plants strengthened and hardened and gave rise to the first plants with woody stems. Wood is a tough material and it allowed plants to rocket to the skies: the first trees had evolved. Understandably, they started out small, but soon towered over their neighbors: one of the oldest trees, Wattieza, was 26 feet tall. With the evolution of seeds and wood, plants spread much farther from the waters than they ever could before.

Arthropods and mollusks flourished in the growing forests: the earliest mites, spiders, and harvestmen, accompanied by the first air-breathing snails. Insects begin their story in the Devonian, having evolved from freshwater crustaceans related to branchiopods in the Silurian. These hexapods, as their name suggests, developed a body plan with six legs. Some of these early hexapods adapted their tails to act as ‘spring-boards’ that could propel them away from predators. They survived to the present day, earning their common name springtails. The first insects distinguished themselves by growing larger and moving away from the underground, moist environment of their ancestors. They became herbivores, ingesting the leaves and stems of the new plants that were evolving. Like the springtails, remnants of this time still exist today in the form of the soil-living bristletails and those domestic pests the silverfish.

Right around the end of the Devonian struck a series of mass extinction events. The expansion of terrestrial plants with deep, piercing roots seems to have allowed great quantities of soil nutrients to wash away into the rivers and seas, causing oxygen levels in the water to decrease. This eutrophication would have caused vast regions of the seas to become anoxic and deadly for living things. It was a particularly damaging collection of extinction events: estimates place the loss of marine groups at 40-50%. Some of the organisms that were still recovering from their losses in the Ordovician, like the trilobites and brachiopods, were hit hard. In fact, all but one lineage of trilobites was wiped out. The graptolites, that curious lineage of hard-shelled, planktonic worms, vanished from the Earth, as did many unique forms of echinoderms and most of the newly-evolved ammonoids. The great reefs of tabulate corals and sponges met their end, leaving those organisms relegated to lesser roles in the ecosystem. The Age of Fishes ended with losses too: all of those weird and wonderful jawed fishes, the arthrodires, the antiarchs, and others, died in the low-oxygen oceans. Jawless fishes saw most of their number go extinct, leaving two lineages of worm-like animals, the hagfishes and the lampreys, to go on to present times.

Part 4

So the world entered a new period, the Carboniferous, from 358.9 million to 298.9 million years ago. Euramerica and Gondwana remained connected as a giant continent, but by the middle of the period those pieces of Gondwana that would go on to form the lands of China had collided with Siberia. In turn, these ancestral Asian lands pushed against Euramerica and rose up the Ural Mountains. A vast expanse of water was opened, creating a new ocean called the Paleo-Tethys. Parts of Gondwana still hovered over the south pole, and the small glaciers there slowly began to grow again. At the western edge of Euramerica, the Rockies were beginning to raise.

But the primary modifiers of the Earth’s land and climate would prove to be the living things that resided upon it. The seas of the world were much reduced in diversity following the Devonian Extinction Events, and for a period of time there were no major reef-building organisms. The rugose and tabulate corals were still around – in lower numbers – but they did not form reefs. In their place emerged great forests of crinoids, those stalked echinoderms that filter-feed through the water. Often termed ‘meadows’, these expanses of crinoids grew and died in such rapid succession that they formed deposits of limestone.

On land, the foundations of the world’s coal deposits were developing. As plants continued to evolve and spread across the land, great forests grew and went on to cover much of the available land. New species of trees evolved among the vascular and non-vascular plants. Some kinds of lycopod, like Lepidodendron and Sigillaria, could tower 130 feet in the air and sported scale-like bark. There were giant horsetails too: Calamites reached up to 66 feet high and in some cases had stems 24 inches thick. Tree ferns were present and seed plants also produced enormous forms, like the 148-foot high Cordaites. As you can see, giant trees were the norm in the Carboniferous. There were so many tough, woody plants around, but nothing to eat them. Despite a patchy fossil record, we can be confident that wood-eating bacteria and fungi had not evolved yet because of how these trees ended up dying. When they eventually dropped to the ground, rather than decompose, the trees got covered up by swampy sediments. Over time, the remains of the trees piled on top of each other, and millions of years of heat and pressure from the Earth’s surface converted the biological remains into coal deposits. The most prominent remains of coal come from Carboniferous rocks, which is what gave the period its name: due to the lack of decomposition, all the carbon that the plant took in is still there. Keep this in mind for later.

With so many forests on the land, carbon dioxide levels plummeted while oxygen levels rose significantly: over 30% above present day levels. In turn, the presence of so much oxygen in the air (plus the fact that wood now existed) meant that passing lightning strikes could spark fires for the first time. All this oxygen had another adverse effect on animal life too.

Due to the way arthropods breathe, the more oxygen is available to them, the larger they get. This period of Earth’s history is famous for its abundance of seemingly-improbable giant arthropods. The myriapods begat the giant millipede-relative Arthropleura, an herbivorous species that grew over 7 feet long. There were massive three-foot scorpions roaming the coal forests, preying on the hordes of new terrestrial species. And insects truly began to diversify during this time. The key adaptation that marked the path for the insects was wings. While still a controversial discussion in paleontology, genetic and morphological evidence has suggested that the precursors of insect wings developed from gills that became repurposed for movement in air rather than water. The first wings were stiff structures that were held outwards from the body, and these were found in the first mayflies, dragonflies, and damselflies. Relatives of these insects, the dragonfly-like griffinflies were among the giant arthropods of the Carboniferous. The wingspan of one called Meganeura reached 26 inches meaning that it would have been a formidable aerial predator. Later insects modified their wings to fold inwards towards their bodies, and this proved to be a beneficial change because it meant that these delicate structures could be protected from wear and tear. By the end of the Carboniferous, the ancestors of grasshoppers, cockroaches, lacewings, and beetles had made a home for themselves in the coal forests.

Stegocephalians remained mostly aquatic animals for most of the Carboniferous, but a descendant branch of this group, the tetrapods, began to diversify into a myriad number of lineages. Tetrapods are proper four-limbed vertebrates that all (at least ancestrally) retained five digits on each foot. One group, the temnospondyls, produced crocodile-like forms that lurked in the swamps and fed upon large aquatic animals. It is among the temnospondyls that we find the ancestors of true amphibians, who retained an aquatic larval stage. Other tetrapods formed lineages that did not survive the Paleozoic, including worm-like animals that lost their limbs. The most significant development in the vertebrate story was the amniotic egg, where the embryo is stored with water and nutrients inside a hardened shell that could be laid on the land, rather than in water. With so many opportunities for predators to feast upon the jelly-like, soft eggs of their predecessors, this adaptation meant a better chance for survival. So the amniotes evolved to become proper terrestrial animals, able to survive away from the water and take on the newly emerging ecosystem that is the land. As a consequence of living in a dry world, amniotes developed toughened, water-proof skins and claws on their digits allowed them to better maneuver over rough surfaces or brush. By the end of the Carboniferous, two lineages of amniotes had evolved, becoming the two great groups of land vertebrates: the sauropsids or reptiles, and the synapsids, the ancestors of mammals. The two groups are distinguished by the placement of holes behind the eye socket that aid with jaw-muscle attachment. Reptiles typically have two holes behind their eye socket, while synapsids have just one. And there were herbivorous and carnivorous species that played vital roles in their food webs.

The Carboniferous was a dramatic time for life. The effects of the coal forests proved too great for the planet, and the resulting losses of carbon dioxide and gains of oxygen caused the Gondwanan glaciers to grow in size until they expanded across the continent. The climate cooled and caused many of the forested swamps to fragment in size or die off altogether. Wetland-adapted tetrapods died off in huge numbers and many of the giant lycopod trees perished as well. It was the hardy plants and animals that took over their ecosystems. Ferns and seed plants expanded their range and formed vast swaths, and the amniotes diversified in the new drying world. This glaciation was short-lived, but of course that meant that its effects put greater pressure on life as a whole.

The final period of the Paleozoic Era was the Permian, 298.9 to 251.9 million years ago. The Gondwanan glaciation ended during the early part of this time, around 280 million years ago, and the levels of carbon dioxide rose again. The famous supercontinent of Pangaea formed during this time, as the Gondwana-Euramerica landmass collided with Siberia and the other continents. This meant that, had our modern borders been present at the time, you could walk from Sumatra to Argentina without ever needing to cross a body of water. With the shrinking of the coal forests and the rise of upland, terrestrial ecosystems, vast parts of the land were not in contact with any river or coastline and they subsequently dried up and formed deserts and scrublands. Thus, the Permian was a hot, dry planet, but one populated by animals and plants that could withstand it.

Marine faunas bounced back slightly, and sponges once again took the helm as the main reef-builders. Brachiopods and bryozoans managed to do very well and were common animals in the seas, while the trilobites were few and unimportant. Ammonoids regained their former numbers. The diversity of fishes, while much reduced from their Devonian days, was still high, and there was even room for experimentation. A relative of sharks and rays, Helicoprion, sported a strange coiled row of teeth in its mouth and this baffled paleontologists for years because no one knew where exactly it was supposed to go. Reconstructions abounded, with some placing the whorl at the front of the jaws and some placing it deep in the throat. The most recent interpretation, based on better fossils, finds the tooth whorl in the center of the lower jaw where it stuck out awkwardly.

Alongside the ferns grew newer kinds of seed plants. Gymnosperms did remarkably well in the drier parts of the land, with the first cycads and ginkgoes taking root in the sands. Conifers (represented today by species like pine, spruce, and fir) had evolved in the Carboniferous, but they flourished during the Permian. Despite all this diversity, the most common tree in the world was not a conifer but a seed-bearing plant called Glossopteris. What made this plant so hardy was ability to cope with colder environments, including mountain ranges.

Tetrapods roamed over the warmer and wetter regions of the planet, with giant temnospondyls sharing the swamps, lakes, and rivers with equally giant predatory lobe-finned fishes called rhizodonts. The stars of the Permian lived on land, however. The amniotes spread out far and wide over the Pangaean supercontinent and took on nearly every niche and body type available. Among the reptiles were the first land vertebrates to return to an aquatic existence, with later varieties occupying more of an amphibious niche: periodically switching between land and water. Some reptiles took to the air, developing membranous structures along their sides for short gliding. The earliest ancestors of turtles appear to have lived about this time, too.

Most of the apex predatory and herbivorous niches went to synapsids, who often were the largest animals in their ecosystem. The earliest synapsids were lizard-like animals, that walked with a sprawling gait and had an ectothermic physiology, gaining heat from their surrounding environment for metabolic functions. Included among these ancient synapsids is Dimetrodon, which sported a row of spines along its back that were encased in webbing. It was originally thought that structures like these aided in their ectothermy, with excess heat being released by the sail while winds that blew on it cooled the animal, but recent studies now dispute this: it just doesn’t seem to work like that. Newer studies have shown a role of the sail in courtship displays, meaning that Dimetrodon was almost certainly a colorful animal.

Later synapsids gradually adapted their bodies to better efficiency. The limbs were placed underneath the body, and the sprawling gait was traded in for a walking locomotion. This would have changed their physiology too, and this has prompted many paleontologists to view these newer animals, called therapsids, as endothermic (able to generate their own internal heat). Therapsids were increasingly mammal-like vertebrates and they were more efficient predators and herbivores. Some species took on a burrowing lifestyle, while others became arboreal (living in trees). Some reached enormous sizes and resembled ferocious pigs, while others were sleek and almost weasel-like. The most spectacular members of this group, and the dominant predators of the later Permian times, were the gorgonopsians. They sported fangs that certainly helped them deliver crushing blows to their prey, and some species grew over 11 feet long.

But no matter how hardy a species you are, whether an apex predator or a cold-adapted tree, you’re not guaranteed safety from extinction. It was at the end of the Permian Period, 252 million years ago, that the mother of all mass extinctions occurred. Based upon all the evidence we have, paleontologists have recognized that around this time, a series of volcanic eruptions in Siberia unleashed a huge blanket of lava over the continent. As volcanoes do, carbon dioxide would have been released into the air, but this was on a scale of gigatons (that is, a billion tons). Over the rapid 1-million-year period of these eruptions, as much as 170,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide were belched into the air, triggering a devastating greenhouse effect that warmed the entire planet. The waters of the world became acidic and the land dried and cracked with heat. Life never came so close to being killed off, as 80-96% of all organisms went extinct. The list of casualties is pretty long, but among the animals we have met during our voyage through time, every trilobite, eurypterid, rugose, and tabulate coral was wiped away. Brachiopods, bryozoans, echinoderms, mollusks, and arthropods suffered heavy losses. For the first time during a mass extinction event, land animals were heavily effected, with many of the newly evolved synapsids, reptiles, and temnospondyls suffocating and starving to death. The only organisms that managed to actually thrive in this hellish world were colonies of sulfur-eating bacteria.

Yes, life was almost rendered extinct on Earth, but it wasn’t. The fact that you are here right now is a testament to the versatility and resourcefulness of your ancestors. To have survived the near end of the world and then go on to fill the next is a great gift, and one that should be embraced whole-heartedly. When the Paleozoic ended and the Mesozoic began, the slate was wiped clean and a new story could be told.

And with that, we must lay anchor to our river journey. In the next episode, we enter the Mesozoic Era. This was the golden age of the dinosaurs, the most famous prehistoric animals of all. But they were not the only new organisms to call the Earth home. They shared the world with a host of strange plants, mollusks, insects, fishes, and reptiles, as well as the direct ancestors of the mammalian lineage. That incredible time and all the events that shaped it, will be told to you.

That’s the end of this episode of On the River of History. If you enjoyed listening in and are interested in hearing more, you can visit my new website at www.podcasts.com, just search for ‘On the River of History’. A transcript of today’s episode is available for the hearing-impaired or for those who just want to read along: the link is in the description. And, if you like what I do, you’re welcome to stop by my Twitter @KilldeerCheer. You can also support this podcast by becoming a patron, at www.patreon.com/JTurmelle: any and all donations are greatly appreciated and will help continue this podcast. Thank you all for listening and never forget: the story of the world is your story too.

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