Ice Balls

Crazy things happen when it gets cold enough. 

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary / The Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) boundary

All around us is a concentrated layer of iridium compacted deep in the earths soil.  It's seen as a dark line, twisted and crooked from the undulating magma beneath it.  Iridium, a non corrosive mental, is found at these high concentrations in three places: the earth's core, in space, and here--at the K-T boundary.

Running in homogeny with the tan, red, and brown compressed rocks and minerals, the dark K-T boundary (also the K-Pg boundary, but I don't think that sounds as nice) stands out as a lone ranger, the product of catastrophe and our universe.  Who is responsible for such an obtrusive scar in our geography?  Most likely an asteroid.  Who got the shit end of the deal?  The Dinosaurs.  But on the plus side, we exist.  

It's a fascinating marker of time and a reminder of our place in the universe.  In the same way astronauts look at our meager planet from outer space, observing our disposition against broader universe and maybe for the first time grasping time and distance with some universal perspective, the K-T boundary is our reminder the circumstances of our existence.  Where we are, who we are, and how we're here.  We see the passing of time--the 66 million year old event bluntly displayed along side the relative calm geology of the rest of our history.  We see the reality of our place among the stars, part of the stars, and admit our ignorance to the events of the past, future, and everything outside our planet.  Staring at us from our cliffs and valleys, it taunts us to examine our broader history and our acknowledgement of being inseparable from space and nature.

Mysterious, peaceful, and powerful--how nice that Time bookmarked a page for us, only to erase all the words.

Evolutionary time hurts my brain.

I found myself getting really frustrated while watching "nature" video's on Dinosaurs.  Imagine a CG animated Velociraptor bouncing around in the woods cocking his head like a cute puppy,  squeaking and grunting to display emotion.  The voice-over would say something like "The Velociraptor is a very curious dinosaur.  But don't get in the way when he's hungry!"

What?!  Stupid/annoying.  I wanted to learn some hard facts about new findings on dinosaurs but all I keep getting is catered toward ages 5+


I recently read Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Were Dinosaurs Dumb?" and it began an obsession with dinosaurs that I've really never ever had before.  When we take into account the 200 million years that dinosaurs existed, the image of a slow, lumbering beast just doesn't make sense for all that evolutionary time.

Yes, during those 200 million years some dinosaur species died out, some evolved, some stayed put, but what we're slowly finding out is how bizarre and diverse of a species they are.  Dinosaurs are closely related to birds (we all probably know that theory) but then there's this gem:  They were possibly warm blooded.  Plus, some might have had social structures more similar to that of large mammals like elephants and lions rather than birds or reptiles.  That could mean sophisticated hunting methods, mating rituals, and social structures, really changing the typical imagery from your elementary school science text book.


Of course, all of these theories are totally arguable, but it really makes one thing clear, we have no idea what dinosaurs were really like.

So, look at this scale that we've all seen in high school or college bio 101:

Now try and really grasp how many living species would clutter this list if we could write ever single one down--the approximate year of evolving and appearing, and the approximate year of extinction, throughout Earths entire history.  The number would be infinite.  And then there we are, the last thin slice of the graph.  What we see, know, and experience in a blink in evolutionary time.


Now think about the labels we use to define living things.  Cold blooded, warm blooded; mammal, reptile; live birth, laying eggs; plant, animal.  With all of the millions and billions of animals that have walked, slithered, or swam on earth, are these groupings forcing extinct species into a present-day mold we've set up for them?  Are we pigeonholing our extinct or alive-but-weird creatures?  I've looked around and found some animals that muddle our understanding of traditional species categorization.  So, now I present, ROGUE SPECIES OF 2014!

Startin' off simple with the popular Platypus!  Underwater, furry, warm-blooded, egg-laying, with poisonous talons and excreting milk-pores instead of nipples??  Yup!  Un-categorisable.  I wonder though, given all of the many bizarre creatures in the world, how the Platypus got to be the one that got turned into mascots and stuffed animals?  I suppose duck-bills are pretty funny.




Ok, I admit, the Platypus is an obvious one.  Then I find the Echidna, which just looks like a mini Anteater at first.  Like the Platapus, they're warm-blooded, egg-laying, duck-billed critters that milk their young out of milk-patches.  Then I read this nugget from a BBC article:

"Half of an echidna's brain is made up of neocortex - the so-called grey matter that allows mammals to reason, learn and remember. A human brain is about one third neocortex."

Wait, what?!  Are they brilliant?  Is that the reason that they are the longest surviving mammal, "existing for over 120 million years"?  Or is it because they're the only land mammal that can sense the electromagnetic signals emitted by all living things?  Sharks can also sense elecromagnetic signals, but they're totally lacking a neocortex (Echidna - 1; Sharks - 0).  These little guys could hunt you down, outwit you, then lick your face with their long anteater tongue.
Endangered, incredibly rare, and only surviving in Papau New Guinea (and maybe Australia?), the Echidna has proved difficult for scientists to study.

Side note: Read the Wikipedia article if you want to hear about its terrifying penis. 

So far, we've seen the pairing of mammal, furry, and warm-blooded.  Then we meet the extinct Cave Goat.

Looks normal, right?  Wrong!  Cold-blooded!  Yup, a cold-blooded "mammal".  At a foot and a half tall, the cave goat grew super slowly, moved super slowly, and would have pretty much been extinct in a second (rather than living for 5 million years) had it lived on an island with any major predators.  The particular island in the Mediterranean where the goat lived was super barren.  So, with little food and no predators, apparently the cave goat adjusted a super slow and flexible metabolism, like a reptile.  So slow, in fact, that rather than growing at a consistent pace, like warm-blooded animals, it grew in spurts based around food availability, as cold-blooded animals do.

Other things the Cave Goat had to save energy:

• super small eyes
• tiny brain
• inability to run, jump, or move fast
• super, super small babies that take a really long time to reach maturity

Obviously, the lil fella was killed off pretty easily when humans arrived. 

What else lived around the Cave Goat?  Just a giant doormouse, no big deal!   Oh, the evolutionary beauty that is a predator-less island...


Next we have the Adactylidium, a mite with strange birthing habits.  So...um...in lieu of shock and a loss of words, here is the Wikipedia article:

"The pregnant female mite feeds upon a single egg of a thrips, growing five to eight female offspring and one male in her body. The offspring devour their mother from the inside out,^[2] and the single male mite mates with all the daughters when they are still in the mother. The females, now impregnated, cut holes in their mother's body so that they can emerge to find new thrips eggs. The male emerges as well, but does not look for food or new mates, and dies after a few hours. The females die at the age of 4 days, when their own offspring eat them alive from the inside."

And there you have it! Would you even consider this "birthing"?  I just...I just have no words.  But, what all of this--Platapus, Echnida, Cave Goat, Adactylidium--says to me, is that I don't think I've ever grasped the massive life span of the earth clearly enough.  And I don't know if I ever will be able to.  I can't expand my mind enough to imagine what other animals could have lived, what earth could have been.  It's really beyond my comprehension and imagination.  What if there were tons of tiny cold-blooded, furry, live birthing critters running around for millions of years?  Small animal fossils are quite hard to find due to their fragility and size, so we easily wouldn't know.  If we know electromagnetism is the way the Echnida and sharks find prey, what other chemical or physical senses have animals had in the past?  Rather than the past, what about now?  And my god, what other methods of birthing have there been?!?



I'll end with an awesome quote from Stephen Jay Gould comparing our small glimpse of live on earth to the day-long life of a Mayfly in April:

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock.  Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages burried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.  

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I'm totally going to paint a cave goat:

These are normal warm blooded goats.

Possible Cave Goat painting.  Lil odd-one-out cutie...

Walrus....

Ew, I wish they didn't have stupid music playing, but I think this is pretty incredible.  Look at that walrus bod!!

Family Guiding and New Years!

Here's my January article for familyguiding.com!


A Toast to Being Human

New Year’s Eve was always my favorite holiday. No presents to worry about, no high-pressured feasts to prepare—just champagne and good company.  Of course, the one thing that always seemed to impede on my fun was the question of the new years resolution.

Bringing that kind of pressure into my favorite flippant holiday really bummed me out.  To me, resolutions seemed fake and the timing, forced.  How do you contemplate a new beginning when nothing “new” has actually happened?  How do you declare a new principle on one day out of the year when life’s events aren’t timed by the calendar?  Do we make resolutions just as a way to kill time until spring?  Or, to help with small-talk at New Years Eve parties?  Does anyone actually follow through with this?

I sit here with the clock ticking behind me and facts about mammals looping in my head.

The length of a mammal’s life corresponds almost equally to its size and heart rate.   All mammals live for about the same biological length of time.  All mammals breathe about 200 million times in their lifetime.   The year is almost over, I have so many things to do, there’s not enough time.

A mouse, with its heart pumping fast to keep its little body replenished with blood, only lives for around two human years.   A humpback whale (massive body, slow heart) can live 50-100 years.   Both breath about 200 million times throughout their life, just one breathes fast, the other slow.   But, two years or eighty, we can assume that both animals live very full lives on their own biological time.  The slow, aching, 30 minute song of a humpback whale could equate to our memorization of a minute long commercial jingle, or a mouse’s memorization of a very quick set of squeaks.  The lifespan of a creature is only accurately measurable by that creature alone.

Humans are different, though.  Considering our size, we take more breaths, develop much slower, and experience far more throughout our lives than most other mammals.  We stretch our breath to fill almost a century, small bodies living at our own tempo, constructing our lives at the pace of our own personalized biological clock.

The tension of life compresses me until I feel half my size, a portion of my age.  As my mind skims through the unfinished paintings, unconnected facts, and patchy ideas of animal imagery in my head, I squeeze my eyelids in effort to slow my thoughts.  Like the shifting prisms of a kaleidoscope, my brain shuffles through ideas and imagery, colors and composition.

I hear the clock again, and think of all the things I didn’t accomplish this year–not painting fast enough, not writing fast enough, not calling friends often enough, not eating healthy enough.  The New Years resolution, in all its oversimplified, whimsical glory, may be exactly what I need to shake off some of the negative, burdening thoughts and clear my mind to be at peace with the past.

So, this year, I’m giving myself the selfish privilege of developing on my own clock and letting others do the same.  We can run, jump, and play, contemplate, create, and stress−we’re blessed with these little agile bodies that endure lives the length of whales. Molding and bending through phases, we have the time and mental capacity to explore our brains and souls as our lives gracefully tick on.  Feeling off track?  That’s ok, there’s actually time to get back on.  Seems like college was just yesterday?  You lucky human and your incredibly memory, chill out.

The pressure’s off.  It’s time to take advantage of the amazing, slow, long, and malleable lives that we were born with. Pour some champagne and make a toast−we’re all human.