The Wordsmith's Forge

How Earth's First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
Sponges have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have saved the world.

How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us, why did the planet eventually thaw again? The evidence for Snowball Earth is written on every continent today.





That's reassuring given the poor life choices of Homo sapiens today.

Today is Juneteenth.

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Today's theme is Hetalia. Initially a webcomic, Hetalia was later adapted as a serialized manga and an anime series. The series personifies the nations of the world into immortal anthropomorphic characters and presents an allegorical (and often satirical) interpretation of political, historical, and cultural events throughout history and the present day. This riff is a personal favorite.

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3,500-year-old graves reveal secrets that rewrite bronze age history

Around 1500 BC, radical changes occurred in people's lives: they ate and lived differently, and the social system was also reorganized.
Bronze Age life changed radically around 1500 BC in Central Europe. New research reveals diets narrowed, millet was introduced, migration slowed, and social systems became looser challenging old ideas about nomadic Tumulus culture herders.

The Best Part of Researching Trans History Is When I’m Wrong

Lost pieces are being found, and pictures are coming together after generations of obscurity.


If you or your people are being hunted, write down your history and culture. Copy it. And then scatter it as widely as you possibly can. Hide it in walls, under floorboards, tuck it into other books. Stamp it on clay, fire it, and drop the tablets into a landfill because archaeologists always know to look for middens. Fling the copies so far that your enemies will never find them all. And then you can speak your truth to the future and the listening ears who come after.

Now is the perfect time for this kind of activism.  It's something anyone can do.  It's cheap and easy.  Just pick any thing the fuckwits in charge want to suppress, and work against that to preserve it.  You can do this every time they piss you off.

Fossil tracks show reptiles appeared on Earth up to 40 million years earlier

The origin of reptiles on Earth has been shown to be up to 40 million years earlier than previously thought -- thanks to evidence discovered at an Australian fossil site that represents a critical time period. Scientists have identified fossilized tracks of an amniote with clawed feet -- most probably a reptile -- from the Carboniferous period, about 350 million years ago.


So exciting!  :D

Giant croclike carnivore fossils found in the Caribbean

Imagine a crocodile built like a greyhound -- that's a sebecid. Standing tall, with some species reaching 20 feet in length, they dominated South American landscapes after the extinction of dinosaurs until about 11 million years ago. Or at least, that's what paleontologists thought. A new study shows the Caribbean Islands were a refuge for the last sebecid populations at least 5 million years after they went extinct everywhere else.

LOL yes, I spotted those in Peculiar Obligations. Nice to know people have found them in the Caribbean here too, and later than expected.  They're often called galloping crocodiles or hooved crocodiles.  Here are some different examples.

This video gives a tour of dinosaur art from the beginning to current examples.