Tea at Trianon: A Mammal That Lived Alongside Dinosaurs

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

Sunday, October 27, 2024

A Mammal That Lived Alongside Dinosaurs

From Phys.org:

The researchers, led by the University of Colorado Boulder's Jaelyn Eberle, published their findings Oct. 23 in the journal PLOS ONE. Eberle and her colleagues named their discovery, which they identified from a piece of jawbone and three molar teeth, Heleocola piceanus. The animal lived in Colorado roughly 70 to 75 million years ago—a time when a vast inland sea covered large portions of the American West. (Fittingly, "Heleocola" roughly translates to "swamp dweller" in Latin).

"Colorado is a great place to find fossils, but mammals from this time period tend to be pretty rare," said Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the CU Museum of Natural History and professor in the Department of Geological Sciences. "So it's really neat to see this slice of time preserved in Colorado."

Compared to much larger dinosaurs living at the time like tyrannosaurs or the horned ancestors of Triceratops, the new fossil addition to Colorado might seem tiny and insignificant. But it was surprisingly large for mammals at the time, Eberle said. She's also glad to see Rangely, which sits in the northwest corner of the state not far from Dinosaur National Monument, get its due. (Read more.)