I now love German eBay. My lockdown treat - the history of life and landscape. I’ll tweet some details from this wonderful collection of palaeoart. Where to begin? 🌎🦕🌋
Forget PowerPoint and zoom - this is the future....
The Precambrian saw the emergence of complex multicellular organisms. It is now an informal term that encompasses all of #EarthHistory from our planet’s formation to the Cambrian Period – some 4.6 billion years and about 88% of geological time.
The Cambrian Period, first proposed by Adam Sedgwick, saw a great explosion of weird and wonderful complex life forms - the preservation of even soft body parts can be remarkably good despite their great age. Trilobites appear in the Early Cambrian #EarthHistory 🌏 🏴
The Silurian saw plants and animals emerge on land. Marine biodiversity recovered after the end Ordovician mass extinction. Huge coral reefs developed and fish evolved jaws. Very high CO2. Supercontinent Gondwana dominated the SH. No Ordovician on my chart! #EarthHistory 🌎🐟
The Devonian saw Earth’s first forests as lycophytes, horsetails and ferns grew to large sizes. The first ammonites appeared in the oceans and cartilaginous fish such as sharks and rays were abundant by the late Devonian. Lots of tectonic activity and Pangaea began to form 🌎
I really need to finish this thread! 🌍
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BREAKING: Another extinct ice age beast exhumed from the permafrost. Exceptionally well-preserved carcass of a juvenile woolly rhinoceros discovered in Yakutia. Its internal organs and stomach contents await investigation. Photos by Valery Plotnikov. siberiantimes.com/other/others/n…
“The juvenile rhino with thick hazel-coloured hair and the horn, found next to the carcass, was discovered in the middle of August in permafrost deposits by river Tirekhtyakh in the Abyisky ulus (district) of the Republic of Sakha.”
“It is the best preserved to date juvenile woolly rhino ever found in Yakutia, with a lot of its internal organs - including its teeth, part of the intestines, a lump of fat and tissues - kept intact for thousands of years in permafrost.” #IceAgeExtinction
“A circular map with the North Pole at its centre details 24 different cultural groups wheeling around the Arctic circle; some 400,000 people.”
“No other human cultures experience such seasonality, such extremes of midsummer light and midwinter dark. No other cultures use ice in so many ways: for transport, building material, food preservation.”
A century or so ago, Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch hypothesised the long-term effects of changes in Earth’s position relative to the Sun are responsible for driving shifts in ice age climate climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/mila…
“Specifically, he examined how variations in three types of Earth orbital movements affect how much solar radiation (known as insolation) reaches the top of Earth’s atmosphere as well as where the insolation reaches.”
“These cyclical orbital movements, which became known as the Milankovitch cycles, cause variations of up to 25 percent in the amount of incoming insolation at Earth’s mid-latitudes.”
“Our fear of wolves is out of all proportion to the danger they pose us.” Why landscapes need the wolf... theguardian.com/environment/20…
“If the trajectory of the European wolf is dispiriting, it is also familiar. We have become well acquainted with graphs that plot the advance of humans against the decline of all else.”
“But over the last century, a different narrative has been writing itself into existence. In Europe, patterns of farming and land use have been changing on a grand scale, as marginal land – too steep or too depleted to be worth the effort of farming – falls into disuse.”
Plant fossils reveal that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have not been this high for at least 23 million years and have never risen so rapidly newatlas.com/environment/co…
“Lately we’ve been breaking a lot of records in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. In 2016 the South Pole became the last region on Earth to exceed a concentration of 400 parts per million (ppm).”
“In May 2019, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii picked up a record new high of 415.26 ppm. Currently, levels are the highest they've been in all of human history.”
WOW! Mass grave of at least 22 ice age giant ground sloths discovered on southwest coast of Ecuador gizmodo.com/mass-grave-of-…
“Many of the bones were disarticulated and had the type of gouges to suggest trampling by other creatures after they had died. Something catastrophic caused 22 giant ground sloths—many the size of modern elephants—to perish at the same time and in the same place”
“Fifteen of the giant ground sloths were adults; the rest were subadults and juveniles, a couple of them so tiny that they might have been newborns or even fetuses.”