Paleo artists often "shrink wrap" fossilized animal depictions
The T-Rex, Utahraptor, Triceratops—popular depictions of each of these animals shows skin so close to bone that it might be unrealistic
So let's shrink-wrap existing animals🧵
Can you guess what this is?
Preemptive note: All of this artwork is from C.M. Koseman, whose book (which is way more extensive than this thread) and some other material is linked at the end of the thread.
The last animal was a rhinoceros—the thing with the cooling heat sail!
Any idea what this animal is?
That last one might seem to be a dog, but it's actually a horse.
It's not so clear what this graceful beast might be.
The last picture was of a cow.
What about this monster? Its jaws can crush a steel car.
That metal-breaker was a hippopotamus.
This pack-hunting animal has a killer stare and wields a set of five switchblade claws on its forefeet. What might it be?
That was the house cat.
This one's a bit more mysterious, and clearly adapted to be a stealthy predator, right?
If you guessed that was a spider monkey, kudos to you. Future paleontologists might consider it an arboreal variation on humans, its cursorial relatives.
What of this one? It's not clear to future paleontologists if it's quadrupedal or bipedal.
That's the toad, which paleontologists might consider to be a long-legged forest ambler.
Any idea what this one is? Without preserved feathers, guessing might be hard!
If you guessed "Vulture", you're correct. But you probably didn't guess that!
You almost certainly won't guess this one.
That was a species of casque-headed hornbill, and paleontologists might suspect they use the casque for mating rituals. But we don't even know what they do with them in many cases today!
How's about this twofer? Note predator and prey:
If you guessed the "Swan" and the "Tadpole" (mistakenly believed to be a form of fish), then you were right.
What about this cute little predator?
That was an iguana, and due to fur being found on other small vertebrates like rats, it's assumed to have fur too.
Who's this courser?
That was a rabbit, but we wouldn't know it because posture is poorly preserved in fossils!
Now this one is simultaneously reassuring and disheartening. What might it be?
That's a python, and it might be assumed to have feet to support its body, much like the lizards its skeleton resembles. After all, we only have fragmentary remains!
Who's this guy?
That's a manatee. Remember, habitats change. A sea creature might be found in what's now a forested mountain. We might also only have remains like skulls.
This guy has a balloon-like facial sac. What might he be?
That's a bull elephant, and because no other animals have long, muscular appendages, he ends up with a face sac instead of his well-known trunk.
Time to dive underwater.
This one might seem to be a dolphin, but think outside the box.
It's a sperm whale, incorrectly believed to be a hunter of large pray. You know, like sharks.
What's this kelp forest stalker?
Why that's a bowhead whale of course! And as we know from its skeleton's extensible jaws, it must prey on animals as large as itself!
Going back to the land, who are we looking at now?
Because of its complicated nasal sinuses, the baboon might be assumed to have had venom glands and to have been a coursing hunter!
These guys have curved foot claws, sometimes serrated bills, and wings shorter than their legs. They must be vampiric!
But that's not the case, it's just an odd animal. It's a hummingbird, the only animal in its strange niche, and thus a prime candidate for misinterpretation!
Finally, who the hell is this?
That might be the first example of shrink wrapping and distorting the fossil record: the animal proposed to be pre-flood man, or Homo diluvii by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in 1726
But though he thought he had evidence for the flood, he was describing the fossil of a salamander!
How we think about ancient animals is probably distorted by a tendency to shrink wrap their depictions and a desire to find function in form.
But much of what we observe in animals today, we still can't explain. Skin also drags, and feathers and fur abound (but not universally).
If you want to see more on this subject, I recommend the whole book, which contains many more illustrations and details for all of them.
And if you're interested in speculation about possible futures, C.M. Koseman's All Tomorrows is spectacular. You can see it summarized on YouTube, here:
Koseman isn't the only person to have illustrated this issue either.
This opossum, for example, comes from the HowStuffWorks Tumblr:
There is an error in describing sperm whales in the thread:
The issue is more that they would probably be thought of as behaving like sharks in the far future, but they're actually pretty social and frequently team players.
The whole "nanny dog" thing is made up and there is no historical evidence that pit bulls were ever bred to be stewards or friends to children.
The evidence for that myth is basically 'someone said it on Facebook.'
Even many sources that are favorable towards pit bulls or active promoters of them will occasionally admit there's no real basis for the "nanny dog" claim.
Yesterday was Juneteenth, a federal holiday in the U.S. dedicated to celebrating the day the last slaves in America were freed when the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced in Texas.
Economically, what were the fates of slaves? What about slaveowners?
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Starting with slaves, a paper that came out last year looked into the matter.
The paper used Census and administrative records from 1850 to 2000 to compare Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved for different amounts of time.
Compare these trajectories:
One thing that stands out is that, in terms of literacy, there's a lot of convergence. In terms of occupational quality, not so much.
Depending on how you think, this might be obvious or a surprise.
In 2014, David Graeber wrote an article for the Guardian in which he argued "Working-class people... care more about their friends, families, and communities. In aggregate... they're just fundamentally nicer."
The Economist put up a similar article at the time.
Were they right?
To make his case, Graeber wove a nice little narrative together about how the rich don't need to care, so they don't, and thus they're bad at empathy and they do things like hiring out the sons and daughters of the poor to do the job when empathy is needed.
The meat of Graeber's case was a set of two social psychological papers.
The first was a set of three studies in which the poor appeared to outclass the rich at tasks like the Mind in the Eyes, or figuring out the emotions of people they're talking to.
Over a decade ago, researchers started a trial to see if they could prevent peanut allergies
They gave a few hundred kids peanuts from ages one to five and told parents of another group to have their kids avoid the stuff
Peanut consumption reduced peanut allergy rates by a lot:
The initial trial and assessment (ages 1-5) was called LEAP. The follow-up at six years of age was called LEAP-On, and it involved asking kids to abstain from peanuts for a year to see if allergy rate differences persisted.
As you can see above, they did.
By the long-term follow-up, we still see a roughly 70% reduction in rates of peanut allergy.
So this annoying condition (for both sufferers and those who have to accommodate them) can be mostly eliminated by mere exposure.
In 1942, the U.S. government forcibly removed more than 110,000 ethnically Japanese people from their homes and sent them to internment camps in remote parts of the country.
People are resilient, but losing everything is hard.
How did victims' lives turn out?🧵
First, we need background.
Japanese citizens began arriving to the U.S. in the latter part of the 19th century.
The scale of migration was substantial. By 1942, 40% of Hawaii was Japanese (Hawaii wasn't a state until 1959).
This influx of immigrants quickly became a political problem.
1886-1911, more than 400,000 Japanese set out to American lands. Citizens called for an end, resulting in the Gentleman's Agreement of 1907:
The U.S. wouldn't harass its Japanese and Japan would restrict emigration.
2024 is the hottest year on record, and it's been hotter than 2023 in part because of a global ban on shipping fuels containing sulfur dioxide.
Problem: SO2 causes acid rain, but it cools the globe. How can we just stay cool?
A new company might have found the solution.
🧵
Acid rain has been on the decline for many years, but in order to finally put the problem to rest, it'll be crucial to knock out sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping.
Globally, those emissions have been concentrated in these boxed-in regions where ships go to-and-fro.
When the International Maritime Organization 2020 regulation went into effect, roughly 80% of sulfur dioxide emissions from international shipping went away overnight.