Tea at Trianon: Oldest Dinosaur Yet

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 6, 2024

Oldest Dinosaur Yet

From Popular Mechanics:

When it comes to dinosaurs, the most famous of these gargantuan reptiles roamed the Earth during the Jurassic or the Cretaceous—your stegosauruses, your T. Rexes, and your velociraptors (thanks, Spielberg). But the story of the dinosaur dates back before these two geologic periods, and well into the Triassic, a 50.5-million-year stretch that picked up the pieces following the Permian extinction (a.k.a. The Great Dying) and saw the beginnings of the dinosaur age—only to be cut down to size by another extinction event, known as the end-Triassic.
The Triassic is also the era of Pangea, when all continents formed one, big supercontinent, and living on a particular stretch of Pangea some 233 million years ago was a member of the Herrerasauridae family of carnivorous dinosaurs. This bi-pedal, eight-foot-long Herrerasaurid (though other members of this group could be upwards of 20 feet long) at some point perished in what is now a state in southern Brazil that its present-day human occupants call “Rio Grande do Sul.” (Read more.)