Stamp of the day: Roasted dinosaurs

Last week was Thanksgiving, this best of holidays in USA.  No presents, just good food and company.  And central to the food is the turkey, which is of course a bird.  And birds are just a kind of living dinosaur.  It is not that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but birds actually ARE dinosaurs.  That is what the most up-do-date science tells us.  So, have you had any good dinosaur meat recently?  We had chicken for dinner, yummy, dinosaur flesh!

The stamp is of course a roasted chicken with some other Czech (I think) food specialties, like beer (which is a food, according to some). 

Bits and pieces on the internet: itchy edition

Fossil discovery: Giant fleas from the Jurassic, that might have sucked blooded from dinosaurs (NY Times). How about meeting some of these 2 cm long creatures on the inside of your wool sweater?

Some of the Republican presidential contenders appear to want to live in a different century.  Like the 1800's or something. This is both sad and upsetting. (NY Times opinion piece by Charles Blow)

Did you know cashmere comes from goats?  And angora from rabbits? So, why are people OK with wearing the hairs from goats and rabbits, but not eating them? Eating the meat, not the hairs, I mean.

Itchy poison ivy doesn't let a simple fence stop it.  In fact, it enforces it and makes it its own fence.

So, what are you readers itching about?

What came first - oysters or dinosaurs?

After the discussion in another blogpost I have been looking into this topic. I was sure that oysters had been around longer than dinosaurs, but that is not so! The earliest oysters (in the family Ostreinae) fossils are from Late Triassic, in a time period called Carnian (228 to 216 million years ago). The first dinosaur (Eoraptor) also showed up in the Carnian.

I found a review of a book about the oysters (see picture on left) and it seems like oysters are as hard to investigate and classify as some plants. Plus they are hard to open, of course.

I love this sentence:
"the most unifying characteristics known for oysters were their fine table quality and their aphrodisiacal value."
These are great evolutionary characters, didn't you know that? The review is from 1977 and was published in Journal of Paleontology (= journal of old, dead and stonied things). Even today scientists can't agree on how many oyster species there are, just like in the orchids, birds, and snakes. Splitter or lumper, what are you? Birdwatchers like as many species as possible so they can cross them off in their books. Oyster eaters don't care about the Latin names, only where they come from: Pemaquid, Kumamoto, Onset, Blue Point... Botanists are still fighting it out.

Snapshot from New York on last tuesday, about a week ago..

LEGS AND BONES:
A snapshot from the American Museum of Natural History:
We all are related to dinosaurs,
we share a heritage from the very first mollusc in the sea.

STARS AND STRIPES:
New York from the airplane lifting off Newark at nightfall.
High above stars were looking down on earth.

The latest science news - humongous palms, dinosaur killing insects, and google brains

A few hand-picked favorites by LS:

Death by flowers: giant, suicidal palm has botanists stumped
"tree grows some six sto­ries tall be­fore sprout­ing hun­dreds of suc­cu­lent flow­ers"
"is so huge it can be seen in Google Earth"
Extra points for silly headline. Stumped, haha!

Google’s kinship with the mind
Our brains think just like a Google search. Maybe. Maybe it was just Google imitating our brains to begin with?

Did insects take down T. rex?
"The rise and evo­lu­tion of these bugs—the bit­ing dis­ease-carriers,in par­ti­cu­lar—co­in­cided fate­fully with the mighty rep­tiles’lat­er days
“In di­no­saur fe­ces, we found ne­ma­todes, trema­todes and even pro­to­zoa that could have caused dys­en­tery and oth­er ab­dom­i­nal dis­tur­bances. The in­fective stages of these in­tes­ti­nal par­a­sites are car­ried by filth-visiting in­sects.”

All from World Science.