Tea at Trianon: A New Species?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, November 26, 2021

A New Species?

From Smithsonian:

Around a year ago, a Canyonlands park ranger stumbled across the fossil and reported it to the park. Then, scientists from the Natural History Museum of Utah, Petrified Forest National Park and the University of Southern California teamed up to dig into this discovery. They filed for a research permit and excavated the fossil last month, reports CNN.

"This is cool, because it’s 50 million years older than the oldest dinosaur fossil," Marsh tells the Deseret. "So it’s kind of cool that it’s from a period in Earth’s history where we just don’t have a lot of fossils from in North America especially.”

This creature existed between the Pennsylvanian Period (323.2 to 298.9 million years ago) and the Permian (298.9 to 251.9 million years ago). During the Pennsylvanian era, plants started to colonize dry land by way of more evolved seeds; animals did so through the evolution of the amniotic egg, in which the embryo develops inside a shell, like with birds and reptiles. In the Permian, the planet's continents started to squish together to form the supercontinent Pangea, and the era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history. (Read more.)