Posts Tagged "old"
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T-Rex DNA Not digitally preserved: Why Jurassic Park Will Never Happen
Not digitally preserved: T-rex with feathers. We got lucky with our last two photos: Mammoths were in the news big today with a major find in Idaho (when this was originally published). Since we have DNA for many mammoth species (and elephants) we can use data science to study mammoths. Fans of the film Jurassic Park will be disappointed to learn that it looks like the same can never be said about T-rex DNA. The half-life of DNA is thought to be around 42,000 years, even in ice, whereas T-rex died out 60 million years ago, so all of its DNA is completely gone. Mammoths (and early humans like Neanderthals) have only been extinct for tens of thousands of years, so their DNA is still available for study. Why does it matter? There are tons of interesting questions about T-rex and dinosaurs that could best be solved by DNA. There’s the endless debate, for example, of whether T-rex as warmblooded or not-quite-warmblooded.… Read the restPaleo Diet Photo Blog: Mammoth and Rembrandts
After our last post, we wanted to try out the Paleo Diet near headquarters in Los Angeles, California. Look what they dug up from the world famous La Brea Tar Pits (Wikipedia) at the Page Museum! This is right next to the LACMA art museum, where we photographed the sunset over the Levitated Mass sculpture, one of our all-time most-liked photographs to date (when this was originally posted as an IG post). In addition to ancient mammoth fossils and giant pet rock art exhibits, there also are Picassos and Rembrandts in the same city block. (But apparently no Vermeer, although they did show the Vermeer documentary we discussed earlier. This is also a photographic follow-up to our earlier, much more serious Woolly Mammoth post on 11,000-year-old prehistoric art and preserving extinct species’s DNA.) Unfortunately, none of the restaurants nearby serve mammoth (and the ubiquitous Starbucks across the street from the mammoth’s bones also was out of their usual cold, shrink-wrapped mammoth sandwiches).… Read the restCaveman diet: data preservation of a woolly mammoth
No, this isn’t our sketch of an elephant. This is an 11,000-year old drawing by a Cro-Magnon prehistoric caveman (caveperson?) of a woolly mammoth in the Combarelles caves near Dordogne, France, as captured in the sketchbook of French archaeologist Joseph Déchelette (1862-1914). Apparently, this guy experienced the caveman diet and paleo diet first-hand. The gene sequences for the woolly mammoth and several related species have been available since 2008. Random gene drift is a type of molecular clock, and analysis of this genomic data allows the dating of the split between mammoths and African elephants. That happened six million years ago, around the time chimps split from what became humans. Mammoths did really well for a long time. They were imposing creatures, probably not easy to kill for most animals. Unfortunately, after six millions years, our ferocious ancestors’ hunting technology caught up to mammoths. (Unfortunately, the paleo and caveman diets weren’t too good from the perspective of the woolly mammoths.)… Read the restSextant: data and historical old ship GPS navigation
Continuing from our last post on models of historic civilizations and data, we’re drawing a line from Carl Sagan to the Conquistadors (and modern TV documentaries’ theories about them). This historic photo is an antique sextant from 1890. This historical navigation device worked by measuring the angle between the sun (or stars) and horizon using two mirrors. It was the GPS (or Apple Maps) of its day. And, as we learned from Apple Map’s initial glitches, then as now, successful navigation required a lot of information (or data) to work correctly! Since the Internet didn’t exist, this data had to arrive by some other means, which we’ll talk about in a future post. (So we’re also continuing on our earlier mirror theme.) The use of two mirrors’ reflection to align the image of the object with the horizon (when the sextant was set at the correct angle) enabled accurate measurements when on a moving platform, such as by a sailor on a boat at sea.… Read the restRecent Posts
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