I woke up in the apartment where our parents used to live

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! Too late in the day to suggest it as a serious practice, it struck me that given the quantity of sheer alternative untruth flying around the public sphere these days, the most topsy-turvy thing one could do on April Fool's Day is tell the truth.

I like knowing about both Ghil'ad Zuckermann's work with language revival and the fossil beds of the last day of the Cretaceous.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) is the weirdest combination of feminist horror and stupider-than-ass '50's paranoia tropes. I'm glad Thomas Tryon went on to have a writing career.

Comments

[rosefox]

There is some reason to be skeptical about the fossil story, alas.

https://twitter.com/Laelaps/status/1111749308884279296
https://twitter.com/SteveBrusatte/status/1111736203072729088
https://twitter.com/cricketcrocker/status/1111724951269187587

[sovay]

There is some reason to be skeptical about the fossil story, alas.

Dammit!

[rosefox]

Yeah. :(

[sovay]

Yeah.

I have not actually read the New Yorker article—I saw reportage in the Guardian and then the New York Times, of which I linked the latter because it seemed more extensive—and now I am not very inclined to do so, which is demoralizing. It feels especially obnoxious because the site may be rich in its own right: beautifully fossilized dead fish are not nothing. But its own right is not what's being claimed.

[selkie]

I was going to say, the New Yorker made me enthralled and skeptical in nearly equal parts. One can't fake microtektites, presumably, but the Hell Creek formation has been available for people to scour since my own dinosaur phase (My Visit to the Dinosaurs, Aliki, read circa 1983) and only one guy -- who rocks up to his field dig playing the Indiana Jones theme -- has mentioned this.

[sovay]

(My Visit to the Dinosaurs, Aliki, read circa 1983)

*fistbump*

[selkie]

Second only to Mummies!

[choco_frosh]

I mean - unless you've seen something that I haven't, which is extremely possible - it sounds like it might still be a fossil bed from the last day of the Cretaceous. Just not an answer to the question of whether the [megafaunal] dinosaurs were already on their way out at that point.

[sholio]

Yeah, I was just about to say this. I keep seeing the "debunking" links and I'm really confused, because no one is debunking what is to me the truly breathtaking, exciting thing about it - that this guy claims to have found a jumble of mud, fish, and glass spherules left by the K-T boundary impact asteroid. Everyone keeps saying "But he didn't find dinosaurs!!" and acting like that's a debunking, but the original article I read didn't even mention dinosaurs; it was just talking about a jumble of fish and mud and burnt wood, and that's what I'm wildly excited about.

If it turns out that this is all fabricated and the mud deposit isn't part of the K-T boundary at all, that'd constitute an actual debunking, but at this point I'm just seeing a lot of people seize on the dinosaurs thing, which ... has absolutely nothing to do with anything?! Fish and mud and microtektites are the exciting things here! I totally think skepticism is warranted because of the dude's "lone wolf"/"keep away from my dig site" thing, but so far no one has actually presented any evidence that it's not a K-T boundary deposit. I keep waiting for that and not seeing it.

[sovay]

but the original article I read didn't even mention dinosaurs

Ditto, but it looks like that's because I didn't read The New Yorker.

I totally think skepticism is warranted because of the dude's "lone wolf"/"keep away from my dig site" thing, but so far no one has actually presented any evidence that it's not a K-T boundary deposit. I keep waiting for that and not seeing it.

I found a follow-up tweet series from Steve Brusatte. Nobody seems to be arguing that the smashed fish and tektites are not tremendously cool, or even that we're not looking at a record of an end-of-Cretaceous event. The issue seems to be that the dude really played up the dinosaur angle, the New Yorker ran with it, it caught the popular imagination and was repeated in the press, and now everyone is asking about dinosaurs to the detriment of the tremendously cool smashed fish.

[lauradi7dw]

The stuff I read is very much about the lone-wolf/keep away aspects, with documented side bits about how women doing this work don't get glowing reports in New York-based media, and how Native lands are often violated in the process of these hunts.
I have downloaded a scholarly K-T journal article for airplane reading tomorrow. It's 49 pages and I'm not a paleontologist, but I'll give it a shot.

[sovay]

the lone-wolf/keep away aspects, with documented side bits about how women doing this work don't get glowing reports in New York-based media, and how Native lands are often violated in the process of these hunts.

I saw that in the tweets rosefox linked. But if the question was "paleontologically is this garbage," the answer seems to be "not at all, but it was reported with more dramatic—and dinosaur-focused—claims than the paper actually entails."