Arkology

Evangelists claim 'Noah's Ark' discovery on Turkish mountain.

So my theory that it was/is hidden in area 51 is not more supported ?

Fig.1. With the wood of the ark you could make a lot of crates...

To be continued...

Volcano god angry - lets sacrifice the geologist

Natural events or presumed catastrophes will always lure from their hideouts religious fanatics and other self declared experts.

The ongoing eruption on Island for example was interpreted as a side effect of the HAARP-Project, related to sun activity and first signs of the end of the world (coming in 2012).
No wonder that even the official religon(s) now have to contribute their explanation - the Italian theologian Antonio Rungi (I presume he is catholic) sees it as divine act: "The volcanic cloud that blocked air transport in Europe is - if we interpret it in the light of the Gospel and the Apocalypse - certainly a proof of God. Just a volcanic eruption to undermine the whole system, this makes us realize how precarious we are".

Fig.1. Cartoon from The Perry Bible Fellowship

But this is not even the dumbest opinion on the eruption:
The NATO was also portrayed as guilty, because the military exercise "Brilliant Mariner " should to be hold just during the ongoing eruption and consequent closure of commercial air routes, and naturally from these “facts” some connections to 9-11 are postulated.
Funnier is the alleged connection of the Icelandic volcano to a possible extraterrestrial invasion, Agent Spooky-Mulder would be pleased.

Meanwhile the German bio-physician Dieter Broers is cited in the German tabloid BILD: “NASA images show just one day before the eruption the largest solar flare in 15 years. - He is certain: The earth is heading to a doomsday triggered by the Sun in 2012.”

The tabloid, notorious known for its approach to science, continues with a list of other “incredible“explanations:

The German author Hartwig Hausdorf, dedicated “mystery researcher”, postulates a connection between the American HAARP-project and the volcano, a other author, Walter-Jörg Langbein clearly sees a ethical motivation behind the behavior of the volcano – our civilization, like the Maya, is to arrogant and must be punished.

Hydrobiologist and journalist Edgar L. Gärtner got the simplest of all explanations “There is no ash-cloud”. The entire story is only a conspiracy and a deflection strategy to prepare a terror attack of incredible proportions.
What else? Maybe that the ash is a strategy of the living planet, named after the Lovelock hypothesis Gaia – to reduce the of CO2 influx by airplanes? Or got the old Vikings it right, and is Eyjafjallajökull only the beginning of Ragnarök, and will be Iceland the battle ground of Thor and the Midgard serpent ?

Fig.2. Thor battles the terrible Jörmungandr ( Heinrich Füssli 1788).

Don´t even bother to ask a geologist... It’s seems that a geological explanation like Iceland is sitting on top of a magmatic hot spot is too unrealistic. Let’s remind of the good times, and the religeous mumbo-jumbo when volcanoes where simply calmed by a human sacrifice - so let’s use some geologist, it’s seems that anyway nobody is listening to them.

MAMOHTEHKA MAMA

"Mom for baby-mammoth" is an old soviet cartoon inspired by the discovery of baby "Dima" in 1977. This little masterpiece tells the story about baby mammoth that miraculously avoided extinction and started the quest for his mom search (found on Siberian Mammoth).

Cold War in the 21st century

The principle behind the system of the "Cold War" is simple: you have to possess a weapon stronger then your adversary.

So it's no wonder when governments all over the world are secretly constructing weapons with alien technology - or at least that is what the conspiracy fanatics all over the net are claiming.

Two recent examples: The EU will get the "Black Hole Gun", unfortunately for the LHC opponents the Constitutional Court judges in Karlsruhe (Germany) are obviously not afraid of black holes - they rejected a lawsuit against the use of the particle accelerator for scientific research.

But in case: it's only self defence, because the U.S. use(d) the "HAARP Death ray" to cause earthquakes and take over the world.

Picture reference

Climate hoax

What if climate change is the greatest hoax ever archieved:

from Atheist Movies

The day after tomorrow ?

Snow across Great Britain

... anyway - Europe is still inhabited...

An Animal Fable from the Upper Cretaceous

The modern tale "Homchen - ein Tiermärchen aus der oberen Kreidezeit" (Homchen - An Animal Fable from the Upper Cretaceous), was published in 1902 by the German author Kurd Laßwitz (1848-1919), considered a founder of the German science-fiction movement.

Homchen is a highly evolved marsupial of the Kala-tribe, living in a world dominated by the great lizards. In a world ruled by ignorance and oppression, Homchen rebels against the saurian warlords, and is banned from the society of mammals. He then decide to search the red snake, creator of the reptilian world, but the dinosaurs, and especially the "dainty beak's", high priests of the red snake, try to stop him at any costs.

A sketch by Laßwitz of Homchen of the Kala tribe - clearly inspired by a Koala. Laßwitz considered human evolution as a straight forward process from rodents to marsupials to placental mammals and finally humans.

"You know what the red serpent will do, if you don't obey? He will swallow the sun, until it will be small and cold. And the day will be like the night, and all water will be frozen. The trees lost their leaves and the grass will be covered by white ash, so nobody will find something to eat. The reptiles that didn't starve, will be suffer great cold, and finally they will be unable to move. Then the animals of the night will rise, protect by their fur, and they will scratch the eyes from your faces, like Kala did to the hollow-bone. The mammals will eaten your flesh, and your bone they will throw against the sun, until it fall from sky and the eternal night begin."

Extinctions & Excrements

"dal letame nascono i fior
dai diamanti non nasce niente"
From dung flowers are born
From diamonds nothing comes
"Via del Campo", Fabrizio de André (Italian poet-musician)

Until 20.000 years ago North America showed a biodiversity of large mammals comparable with modern Africa, if not greater. 10.000 years later 34 genera with animal-species weighing more than a ton were extinct.

The extinction of the Pleistocene Megafauna is still an unsolved mystery. The proposed hypothesis range from overkill by human hunters to a meteor impact and climate change at the end of the last glacial maximum. Geologically speaking it happened suddenly, but a new study now maybe can date more precisely the extinction pattern and duration, using an unusual data source - fossil excrements and the inhabitants of this "biotope".

In 2005 and 2006 sediment cores with a complessive length of 11,7m were taken from Appleman Lake and compared with other cores of lakes in the U.S. State of Indiana.
Thirteen wood, pollen and charcoal samples, recovered from the lacustrine sediments, were dated by radiocarbon method on ages between 7.000 and 14.000 yr BP and used interpolate an age-depth model of the core.

The fungus-genus Sporomiella lives on animal dung and the spores have to pass the digestive tract of large herbivores to germinate. The spores can also accumulate in sediments along with other micro- and macrofossils like pollen and charcoal, so the presence of the fossil spores in sediments correlates with the amount of excrements - "Lots of dung means lots of spores" (JOHNSON 2009), and the amount of dung can give a hind to extrapolate the size of the population of herbivorous animals like mastodon or mammoth.

The timing of the Sporomiella decline and the first major charcoal peak are well constrained by two dates between 14.6 and 14.7ka. The wood pollen (Quercus and Pinus) increases between 10.7 and 12.2 ka.

Figure from GILL et al. 2009: Appleman Lake time series for (A to F) percent pollen abundances of selected taxa (NAP, nonarboreal pollen), (G) Sporormiella and (I) charcoal counts.

Applying this method, Gill et al. found that the amount of spores first decreases slowly, and only in 14.800 years old sediments the number of spores decreases significantly. To old for the proposed impact, and also to old for a climatic or environmental change - vegetation change, interpolated from the pollen assemblage, namely happens only after the faunal demise, and is more probable caused by the extinction of large herbivore, then the cause of extinction.

The greatest impact of humans - in form of the Clovis Culture - on the Pleistocene landscape in North American was supposed in a time interval between 13.330 and 12.900 years ago. The new data predates the Clovis, nevertheless archaeological findings support a lesser tool specialised pre-Clovis culture in the time interval of the Megafauna collapse, so human influence could not be ruled completely out.

Figure from JOHNSON 2009.

The changing environment after the Megafauna collapse, from an open savanna with scattered trees to a spruce-broadleaf woodland, was the result of ceased pasture of shrubs and trees by Mammoth and Co. The expansion of woodlands is also supported by a larger amount of charcoal in the sediments, from time to time the woodlands caught fire, and the ash was eroded, transported and finally deposited in the examined lakes.

Even if the new method con not give us the definitive answer, at least it's provide some new data to better understand the temporal progress and the environmental change of the late Pleistocene extinction event.

References:

GILL et al. (2009): Pleistocene Megafaunal Collapse, Novel Plant Communities, and Enhanced Fire Regimes in North America. Science 326: 1100-1103 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/326/5956/1100

GILL et al. (2009): Supporting Online Material for Pleistocene Megafaunal Collapse, Novel Plant Communities, and Enhanced Fire Regimes in North America. Science 326. www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5956/1100/DC1

JOHNSON (2009): Megafaunal Decline and Fall. Science 326: 1072 - 1073. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/326/5956/1072

Interview to Dr. Jacquelyn Gill by the Canadian Broadcast: mp3 (4MB)

--------- Thanks to Ole Nielson for linking to the post----------

Banana Flu pandemic: Vaccination now !!

How Creationist 'Origin' Distorts Darwin
by Eugenie C. Scott, Ph.D.

Ray Comfort and I agree that "science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted." We agree that it would be nice for students to get a free copy of Darwins best-known book, On the Origin of Species. I'll even go further than he might: The Origin -like Shakespeare and the Bible- should be on every educated person's bookshelf. If you don't understand evolution, you can't be considered scientifically literate. And we agree that students should read the Origin thoroughly.

Unfortunately, it will be hard to thoroughly read the version that Comfort will be distributing on college campuses in November...

Creationism is coming to a campus near you, but don´t fear, a vaccine is here:
BANANA POWER NOW: Don't Diss Darwin.

2012

NASA has put online a website to dismiss the predictions about the end of the world as we known it in December 2012. Doomsday scenarios comprise planets that hit earth, polar shift theory and as the last, but not least, the meteor of doom.

But when the (false) prophets claiming to know about the end had studied carefully the Mayan calendar, they would know that the end of the world will approximately be as following:

First, the very old goddess Chakchell, with her terryfing snake headdress, will shake out the waters from the jar of the gods.
Then, with the help of the dark god of the underworld, a owl is symbol of his power, they together will force the divine crocodile to spit out a even more deadly deluge of water. And finally even the holy hieroglyphs will cry and the world will sunk and drown.

Dresdner Codex, plate 47

That's what I claim is a good catastrophic Armageddon ... or as option watching another movie by R. Emmerich... (hurry up Chakchell !!).

Geo Art: An inconvenient truth about extinction

It's seems that Geo-Art is spreading trough the Geoblogosphere. Here a short cartoon proving finally why the dinosaurs got extinct, and mammals get the victory gesture - seen in the legendary diary hold in the small inn in the Gubbio gorge (Umbria - Italy) with the infamous C/T iridium anomaly (the first entry in the book is by Alvarez itself):

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Chicken Wing

The 8th specimen of Archaopteryx was not found in the limestone formation of the Solnhofer Plattenkalke, in contrast to all other fossils, but in the overlying , and younger, Mörnsheimer Schichten in 1990. Only parts of the wings and skull are preserved. The exemplar is part of a private collection and still not studied, so the attribution to the genus Archaeopteryx is not proved.

Another fragmentary skeleton is the 9th fossil of Archaeopteryx, the specimen of the family Ottmann and Steil, or "Chicken wing", discovered 2004, and only preserved as the right wing missing parts of the digits. The proportions of the bones are very similar to the other fossil bones of the known Archaeopteryx specimens, also are the imprints of the feathers recognizable.

The dancer in the stone

The 5th specimen of Archaeopteryx (syn. A. recurva; Jurapteryx recurva) is the smallest known, and is interpreted so to represent a juvenile animal. The fossil is well preserved, especially the skull. Discovered in 1951, it was first (as many times before and after) mistaken for a pterosaurian, and sold to the naturalist Franz Xaver Mayr, who also in a first moment determinated is as Compsognathus, a small dinosaur. After he realized his error, he halted the discovery secret until 1972, fearing legal problems for the non declared possession of such a special fossil. In 1972 he finally showed the fossil to the custodian of the natural collection in Munich, and in the following years Mayr and Peter Wellnhofer published the discovery. Since the opening of the Jura Museum in Eichstätt in 1976 the fossil is displayed in the collection of the Museum.

American Archaeoptery-X

The Thermopolis-specimen, after the actual location in the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre, Thermopolis, is one of the best preserved fossils of Archaeopteryx, and the X-th in the order. The finding circumstances are unknown, in 2001 it was offered for sale, presumably by a private Swiss collector, first to the German museum of Senckenberg, but the costs were to expensive. It was so acquired by the Dinosaur Centre, finally described and presented in 2005 to the public. In this specimen the second toe is notable, like in the Deinonychosauria it could be stretched backwards.

The Sixth Bird

The sixth specimen of Archaeopteryx was recognized during fossil-preparation work in 1987, and it is the largest known and considered an adult or subadult animal. Exact location and time of the discovery of the fossil are unknown, during the seventies it was treasured in the collection of the major of Solnhofen - Friedrich Müller.A worker of a quarry near Eichstätt claimed that it was discovered in 1985 and then sold illegal to the major. In 2003 the law case was closed, the provenance of the fossil - the investigated quarry - couldn't be confirmed. Today the Solnhofen specimen can be admired in the Major Müller-Museum in Solnhofen.

Old feather

To celebrate the "Darwin year" on the Munich Mineral Show 2009 were displayed six of the known specimens of Archaeopteryx, and because it's a rare opportunity, and Archaeopteryx is a pop-icon of earth sciences, here some impressions:


The imprint of a single feather discovered in 1861 in a quarry near the village of Solnhofen. This fossil was the first evidence for birds in the lagerstätte of the Solnhofer limestone, and anyway the first evidence for Mesozoic birds. Studying this feather Hermann von Meyer proposed the species Archaeopteryx lithographica in 1861, even if today it is not clear if it can be related to the found skeletons in the same formation (this fossil is today hosted in the collection of the Paleontological Museum Munich, the counterpart is treasured in the collection of the museum for Natural history in Berlin).

To be continued...

The greatest show on earth

No excuses more, because now you mustn´t even read: "The greatest show on earth: the Evidence for Evolution" by Dr. R. Dawkins as audiobook.

Picture by Darius Whiteplume's Tumblr.

Street Mammoths...

A graffiti representing a couple of Mammuthus on a wall of a trainstation in the vicinity of Bologna (Italy). Seen by and on Go Go Dinosaurs.

Bring me Edelweiss !!

The Edelweiss (Leontopodium nivale subsp. alpinum), today found in the Alps on carbonatic substrate in heigths between 1.800 up to 3.000m, reached the Alps during the ice ages, when a open steppe biom was developed between the place of origin – the himalayan and tibetan mountains, and Europe.

Found on the Sas de Pütia – this time without snow.