You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘bone’ tag.
It is my birthday this week and, to celebrate, I wanted to share some special posts with you. Unfortunately my schedule is not obliging to help me finish the larger philosophical piece I have been writing, so instead I am going to share a sculpture which I just finished (I was going to save it for later, but, sigh, life is short so let’s look at it now) . This is “Neapolitan Flounder” a sculpture made of wood, bone, and plastic toys. It is one of the extensive flatfish series of artworks which I have been working on, however, unlike the drawings which take a more expansive view of ecology and human history, “Neapolitan Flatfish” examines the prevailing ethos of the time which is to capture people’s money by providing them with exactly what they want (in this case the empty calories of airy frozen confections). Of course these aren’t actually delicious soft serve ice cream cones, they are really plastic junk from the dollar store. Yet given my unhappy history with making plastic toys, and given the ever growing burden of plastic detritus building up in the wild places of Planet Earth, perhaps the message becomes even more germane. The flounder is a predator and a prey animal–the “middle class of the ocean” although serious overfishing is leading to a precipitous decline of populations around the world (which matters little to Treasury Secretary Wilbur Ross, who would not be unhappy if everything and everyone died five minutes after he concludes his own earthly existence as a master of crooked insider deals). Ahem…anyway, sometimes it is a bit unclear who is fishing and who is being fished, but what could be more delightful than the unexpected charm of three different flavors (and different colors) which compliment each other perfectly being placed next to each other in one simple Rothko-like package? Please ignore the bone hook and the glittering blue predatory eyes and get ready for some birthday fun here at Ferrebeekeeper.
Also, don’t forget to ask the Great Flounder some of your own questions.
The artiodactyls are arguably the most successful order of large land mammals (as long as we don’t mention a dominant lone species of large aggressive primates). Just perusing a list of artiodactyl names reveals how universal and important they are: goats, pigs, cows, giraffes, hippos, sheep, Protoceratidae… wait. What? Among the familiar families of artiodactyls there is an unfamiliar name—an entire vast lineage of hoofed animals completely gone forever. These were the Protoceratidae, hooved animals analogous to their cousins the deer, giraffes, and the camels. The Protoceratidae ranged across North America from the Eocene through the late Pliocene (46 million to 5 million years ago). For 41 million years great herds of these animals grazed the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, Appalachia, and Mexico (although the Laramide orogeny was still ongoing as they evolved, and the Great Plains were at first a great forest).
Protoceratidae had complex stomachs for breaking down grasses and other tough vegetation which they grazed upon. Initially the protoceratids were tiny like the smallest deer, but as time progressed some grew to the size of elk. Although the bones in their legs were somewhat different from deer and camels they would have looked similar at a distance…except for a stand-out feature. Male Protoceratidae had a rostral bone—a powerful y-shaped spar of bone jutting from their nose. It is believed that this was a sexual display, meant to impress female Protoceratidae and for sparring with other males for territory and mates (although anybody who has ever been jabbed in the face with a sharpened bone by an elk-size animal would probably testify that the rostral bone could be used defensively). The protoceratids also had a pair of more conventional horns on either side of their head like deer and cattle.
Synthetoceras tricornatus
I wish I could show you more of this extinct family. They lived for a long time and took many shapes and appearances as they spread across the continent into many different niches. A species of particular note was Synthetoceras tricornatus, which was the largest of the protoceratids and which was endemic to most of the continent during the Miocene. Look at how lovely they are. I am ready to move to Texas and start a ranch for them—if they weren’t all dead.
Protoceras
So, what killed off the Protoceratids after 40 million years of success? It seems like they were outcompeted by other, more familiar forms of artiodactyls which developed as the Cenezoic wore on (and which were better suited to vast tracts of grassland—which came to dominate the landscape as the forests died back). The last protoceratid, the Kyptoceras, lived in semi-tropical forests of Florida during the Miocene. Perhaps it was like the Saola, an ever-dwindling wraith that lived deep in the rainforest and was seldom seen until one day it was gone completely. It is an appropriately melancholy picture of the last descendant of a once-great house.
216 Kleopatra
It’s time for Ferrebeekeeper to get back out to space. This grotesque gray hambone-looking thing is a metallic asteroid approximately the size of New Jersey known as 216 Kleopatra. The asteroid was discovered in 1880 by Austrian astronomer Johann Palisa when he was director of the Austrian naval observatory at the great Austrian naval port of Pula (!). The asteroid is 217 kilometers long by 94 kilometers deep by 81 kilometers long (135 miles by 58 miles by 50 miles). It is composed of slurry of metal, dust, and…nothing: between 30 to 50% of the asteroid’s volume is empty space (which makes it sound a lot like the consumer goods for sale in American stores).
216 Kleopatra has been the subject of a fair amount of human scrutiny. In 2008, a team of astronomers working from Hawaii’s Keck observatory (at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii discovered two tiny moons orbiting the asteroid. These moons have diameters of about 5 km and 3 km respectively and they are named Alexhelios and Cleoselene for Cleopatra’s children.
An obvious question is what knocked this doughty asteroid into a strangely shaped cloud of weird slurry and little moons. The most obvious answer is an oblique impact, which astronomers estimate occurred about a hundred million years ago. I wonder what other secrets this giant rubble pile in space is hiding.
Also…it rotates, as seen in this stunning animation.
ferrebeekeeper 