Tea at Trianon: Dinosaurs Were Thriving Just Before Annihilation

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

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Dinosaurs Were Thriving Just Before Annihilation

From Reuters:

A fossil site in New Mexico with numerous dinosaurs, including the gargantuan Alamosaurus, dates to shortly before the asteroid strike that abruptly ended the age of dinosaurs, according to research that underscores that these creatures were still thriving on the eve of destruction.
Paleontologists have debated the age of fossils found at the Naashoibito site in northwestern New Mexico. The new study used two dating methods to determine that the fossils date to roughly 340,000 years - a blink of the eye in geological time - before the asteroid hit off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period. (Read more.)