Tea at Trianon: A Complete Dinosaur Skeleton With Intact Skin

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, September 16, 2022

A Complete Dinosaur Skeleton With Intact Skin

From All That's Interesting:

According to The National, the exposed fossil of the large, plant-eating, duck-billed species was found sticking out of a hillside at Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. At the moment, all that’s visible of the fossil is a portion of the dinosaur’s tail and right hind leg, but researchers Brian Pickles of the University of Reading and Caleb Brown from the Royal Tyrrell Museum explained that the way in which the fossil is arranged suggests the skeleton is in a sitting position — and may be fully preserved within the hill.
“This is a very exciting discovery, and we hope to complete the excavation over the next two field seasons,” Pickles said. “Based on the small size of the tail and foot, this is likely to be a juvenile. Although adult duck-billed dinosaurs are well represented in the fossil record, younger animals are far less common. This means the find could help paleontologists to understand how hadrosaurs grew and developed.” (Read more.)