Tag: dinosaurs

#REVIEW: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, by Riley Black

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, Reviews4 Comments

I say this a lot, but it’s as true now as it’s ever been: I don’t need to review this book, because you already know if you want to read it or not, so really, my job here is just to make sure that you know it exists. And did you know that Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs existed? Yes? Then you have it already. No? Go buy it. I was about to say “It’s about dinosaurs!,” which actually isn’t quite true, because the book begins on what Black quite reasonably refers to as the worst day in the history of the entire world: the day that a 6-mile-wide object, possibly an asteroid, possibly a fragment of a much larger asteroid, and possibly even a comet, slammed into the Chicxulub region of what is now the Yucatán and basically killed every living thing on Earth. Including all the dinosaurs, except for the ones lucky enough to be living underground or underwater when the object hit. She goes into some pretty intense detail about what happened in the immediate aftermath and then skips ahead a bit in each subsequent chapter– the next day, the next year, 100 years later, and so on. “That sounds fascinating!,” you think, if you’re the type of person who would be reading this blog in the first place.

Yup.

I like the description on the cover, there, that refers to the book as “narrative prehistorical nonfiction.” This is definitely a work of pop science; there are notes, but they’re confined to the back; Black is not citing sources or arguing with specific paleontologists during the text, because it’s not that type of book, but neither is she engaging in wanton speculation. Where things are fuzzy, she says so, but she talks about the different changes on Earth after the explosion through narrative, fictionalized stories about the various creatures that would have been alive (or could have been alive, at least) during whatever time period she’s discussing. In other words, we might not have uncovered the fossils of the specific Triceratops with bone cancer in the Hell Creek formation in what is now Montana that she discusses in the first chapter, but there were definitely Triceratops there and we’ve uncovered evidence of some that appear to have had cancer. Do we know for sure that this particular turtle might have been in this river at that time, staying alive partially by breathing through its cloaca? Nope! But they can do it now, so it’s reasonable to project that ability backwards given other trends in the evolution of prehistoric turtles.

You get the idea. This book tells stories; the stories are not specifically true, necessarily, but they are carefully fictionalized, and there’s forty pages of extra “stuff” in the back past the official end of the book if you want to read in more detail. Which I do, of course. What you need to be able to pull off a book like this is a fine grasp of the detail, a good journalist’s instinct for getting your story straight, and a novelist’s flair for storytelling, which is a rare combination, but one Black (an amateur paleontologist but not, I believe, a Ph.D) has in spades. This is a great read for anyone who thinks deep history and dinosaurs are cool, and if you’re not one of those people, you’re not here anyway, so everybody else go buy it.

(Oh, and also: I found out about it on Twitter, and bought it on the spot, so those of you who don’t think Twitter can sell books are doo-doo heads.)

You feed a cold, right?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life3 Comments

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Last night, at approximately 4:30 in the morning, I was bludgeoned out of a sound sleep by the sudden and overwhelming need to vomit.  Like, threw the covers damn near off the bed, kicked the cat, scared the shit out of the dog, damn near fell over clawing for the bathroom before I projectile vomited all over my entire fucking bedroom.  And then… nothing.  I got into the bathroom and absolutely nogoddamnthing happened.   When my alarm woke me up this morning, I spent a moment reflecting on the fact that I was able to breathe normally and thought oh, hey, maybe I’m better!  and then got out of bed and was damn near forced to my knees by the virulence of the ensuing coughing fit.  How the hell I made it to work this morning is a mystery, and instead of the usual caffeine product that I make sure to bring with me every day (a bottle of tea, most of the time) I brought Robitussin.  I literally do not know how I got through the day, but I managed it, and with enough sales to make the effort more or less worth it.

On the way home, I drove past another fucking wild turkey.  I live less than a mile from what is effectively open prairie and woodland (yes, both, in different directions) so the occasional deer and the much-less-occasional herd of deer in the neighborhood isn’t unheard of, along with the other usual urban wildlife, but I swear I never saw a wild turkey before this year and now I’m seeing them all the time.  Wild turkeys are fucking weird, guys, and I have the same reaction every time I see one, which is to briefly wonder why the fuck a dinosaur is that close to my car.  This particular wild turkey was even weirder, because I watched it in my rear-view mirror as I was driving past and the damn thing was hopping, not walking, across the street.  So maybe it’s a one-legged wild turkey?  I dunno.  I’ve never been one for hunting but I kind of do want to see if these things make for good eating or not.

A minute or so later, I had another massive coughing fit and came very close to swerving into oncoming traffic.  Frighteningly close, actually.  Probably should have pulled over.

And then I got home and made the sumptuous feast you see in the photo above for dinner– yes, that’s turkey– and for dessert I plan to have codeine.  I will try to post something more generally useful and less hallucinatory tomorrow; for now I’m just happy to be alive.

The end.

Merry Christmas, y’all

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting4 Comments

IMG_2129Generally, today is the lowest-traffic day of the year, which means I will either not be on much after right now or be posting every ten minutes since you’re not around to be annoyed by it.  We’ll see!

Also, the boy let us sleep in until 8:30 and didn’t notice there were presents under the tree until we pointed it out; I assume that will never happen again.

In which two thumbs up, would watch again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television5 Comments

UnknownThe boy has abruptly shifted his educational TV priorities in the last few days, suddenly becoming an ardent devotee of PBS Kids’ Dinosaur Train.  I can’t say I mind; I’ve seen every episode of Sesame Street aired since 2008 fifteen times by now and something new is hella welcome.

If you’re child free, like a sensible person, or your kids are older than toddler age, you might not be familiar with the premise of this show.  It’s a fascinating mix of science and nonsense; the idea is that the orange tyrannosaur in the middle there, whose name is Buddy, because of course it is, was randomly discovered in the pteranodon nest along with the three baby pteranodons behind him, and when they all hatched at the same time Mama pteranodon just sorta shrugged and decided she had four kids.

One of whom is supposed to eat the other three.  Plus her.  And daddy pteranodon.  There is an episode where Buddy discovers he’s a T-Rex, right?  He discovers that he’s supposed to be a carnivore (he eats “carrion,” which is an undifferentiated lump of meat-lookin’ stuff not unlike what Chicken McNuggets are made of, which begs the question of what the hell he’s been eating since hatching) and that he’s eventually going to be very very big.  Left alone is the fact that he eats other dinosaurs.  The episode we just watched featured the kids talking to an ankylosaurus who declared that his heavy armored plates were to keep him safe from other carnivorous dinosaurs “who might want to hurt me,” and the phrase, “…like you” was conspicuously omitted from the end.

Also, there is the titular “dinosaur train,” which is full of all sorts of dinosaurs and travels around to “T-Rex Town” and “Triceratops Town” (probably not their actual names but you get the idea) and apparently travels through time as well– they actually acknowledge that they’re heading to the “Cretaceous Age” or the “Jurassic Age” from time to time– technology that I’d love to have access to.

The thing, though, is that everything else is awesome, and it ain’t like I’m enough of a dick to actually be offended by the show using Buddy as a non-homicidal protagonist; it just entertains me.  They don’t skimp on the complicated names of the dinosaurs (there’s a funny bit at the end of each show where they show four or five kids trying to pronounce the names of things) and they manage to pack a legitimately impressive amount of scientific information into every episode.  Plus there’s a guy who calls himself Dr. Scott who shows up at the end of every episode who is either an actual paleontologist or an actor portraying one who gives two or three minutes of detailed information about the dinosaurs that were portrayed in the episode.

And then there’s “Point of Fact!” guy, who wins the show.  Sometimes “Point of Fact!” guy walks through a drawing of a door on Dr. Scott’s stage and declares that, as a Point of Fact, no, hadrosaurs did not actually arrange concerts where they played their fluted crests, as portrayed in the episode you just watched.  This always terribly disappoints the children listening to Dr. Scott, and then he follows up with a related actual fact and makes them happy again.

And then– and I swear this isn’t a joke– PoF Guy goose-steps his way back off the screen.  It’s ridiculous.  And hilarious.

Dinosaurs, science, goose-stepping Nazi pedants.  Everything I want in a children’s show.