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Andre
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Homotherium latidens or; it's dangerous in RotterdamNext week Friday a very special exhibit will open in the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam. Dick Mol is research associate over there and has organized it all together with Remie Bakker , Klaas Post en Rene Bleuanus . It's about the extinct Scimitar cat or the European Sabretooth tiger.
It's a great story and I'll tell about here later today and tomorrow. Stay tuned.
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Andre
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This is why it's dangerous in Rotterdam:
Picture courtesy of René Bleuanus, Bleudesign, The Netherlands
(he has tons of good stuff)
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Andre
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The model is made by Remy Bakker. More pics here (click on "reconstructions", to the left).
This is the official press release, due tomorrow:
| Quote: | Danger in Rotterdam!
A scimitar cat prowls the Natural History Museum of Rotterdam.
Exhibition is 01 September until 25 November 2007
Climate change, higher temperatures and higher sea levels are hot items in the daily news. We have to protect ourselves against the rising North Sea. Geologists, and paleoclimatologists know that this is no news. Climate change has happened through the ages. In the recent geologic past, the British Isles were connected to the continent of Europe. We would have been able to walk from Rotterdam to London without getting our feet wet, some 28,000 years ago. Fossils on the North Sea floor prove this. Thousands of remains of mammoths, bison, rhino, giant deer (Irish elk) as well as fossils of predators are being recovered from the mud of the sea floor. The analysis and interpretation of these fossils give us a picture of the landscape with the biota of that time: vast dry grassy plains, hardly any trees, large herds grazing while being stalked by large predators. Now the picture is submerged. It is a landscape 30 meters below sea level, the current North Sea.
Some years ago fishermen collected the lower jaw of a scimitar-toothed cat or European saber-toothed tiger. With carbon dating it was determined that this specimen roamed this region some 28,000 years ago. As the prevailing scholarly view was that this animal went extinct 270,000 years earlier, this was sensational news.
Using scientific research and the fossil record of this species, Remie Bakker, a Rotterdam resident, modelled a life-sized replica of this powerful and impressive predator. This saber-toothed cat will be on display in the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, along with the original North Sea jaw, its evolution throughout the millennia, and a lot more. The exhibition demonstrates which large predators turned our past landscape in to a very dangerous place. When the North Sea area gradually became sea again, some 10,000 years ago, the danger from predators diminished. But was replaced by the danger of a rising sea. Fortunately modern structures are in place that serve to protect us!
(Dick Mol) |
The routine is as follows, Dick writes it in Dutch, I replace those words with English equivalents and then Joanne transfers that into English mother tongue. Then René Bleuanus transfers it into a wonderful, perfect, lay out. We have done four books that way and several other publications. Infortunately, three books are still due for publication, the Woolly Rhino, The Yukagir Mammoth (published in Japanese) and the Making of the Yukagir model. Publishers don't always keep promisses. Any ideas?
The one that made it is called "Discovering the Siberian Mammoth" ISBN 90-808949-1-5
This is the legendary, unique, lower jaw, the hand is Dick's:
The poster is made by René Bleuanus (Gevaarlijk=dangerous):
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scpg02
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Andre
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Andre
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Okay, the opening is 3 hours from now, preparing to go and I'll report on it tomorrow
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Andre
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Still offline at home but anyway,
Okay, the exhibition is awesome. Well worth a look. Remy Bakker, on the right here, ..
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...the artist who made the replica, classified himself as a “forger”. After all, the replica of the sabre tooth cat is a fake It would have been nice if he was around all the time, explaining very dynamically gesticulating how the bite of the sabre tooth tiger would have worked anatomically.
A victims view.
Look at that tongue. Is it really a fake?
Dick Mol (r) and Rene Bleuanus (l) are overlooking the scene. Dick is the first author of a complete book about this animal. Rene did the pictures and the lay out. It will be printed soon. An English translation will be made eventually. Guess who is asked to translate it.
The little jaw bone that started it all. Definitely Homotherium and some 200,000 years younger than it’s next known youngest specimen.
Touching prohibited, or don’t push the button. Naughty kids are rewarded with a loud roar of the beast.
Pictures all mine.
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scpg02
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| Andre wrote: | | It would have been nice if he was around all the time, explaining very dynamically gesticulating how the bite of the sabre tooth tiger would have worked anatomically. |
Great pictures Andre!
There was a recent program on the Science channel that talked about how the cat used its K9s. BBC production I believe. They built a machine to duplicate the bite so they could test the different hypotheses. It didn't kill the same way big cats do today.
A belly bite was not possible. It bit anything at all there it was skin, not a killing bite and the cat was vulnerable to being kicked. They also showed the cat had lower back and hip problems. They determined that the cat was wrestling its prey to the ground then severing the jugular with its teeth. The animal would bleed out very quickly. They also suggested the cat hunted in groups as do lions though not necessarily in prides.
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NileQueen
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Hi Andre,
thanks for posting the news and some great pictures about that exhibition.
Joanne
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NileQueen
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The feline with the longest canines living today is the
clouded leopard. It can also jump incredible heights.
Virginia Naples at Northern Illinois U. is studying them.
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Andre
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You're welcome,
We're translating now, this book, so you can all read about every detail of this animal in a couple of months.
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Andre
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Okay just an update,
I'm approaching halfway translating. On 13500 words of a total of 29000 words. It's very good stuff, highly informative. Even I did not know that the North Sea was a subtropical paradise one million years ago according to the recoverd fauna picture. But hey, the Pleistocene from 2,6 Million years ago (last definition) to 11,500 calendar years ago is supposed to be about cold ice age. What the heck is going on?
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scpg02
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| Andre wrote: | | What the heck is going on? |
Politics and money making.
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Andre
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| scpg02 wrote: | | Andre wrote: | | What the heck is going on? |
Politics and money making. |
Got to 17,660 words today. Hopefully the majority of those words are the right ones.
Politics is certainly an element in the global warming stuff but having a sub tropical North sea in the ice age is just about unthinkable. With thinks like this you can ignore it or you could try to figur out what is going on.
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Andre
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Got to 19,443 words today but the regular job was a bit more demanding.
Two fractions that I did yesterday, not belonging to the original text, but a free enrichment:
(raw text pre edit and pre review)
| Quote: | The definition of the border between the Pliocene and Pleistocene
The precise transition from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene epoch is subject to considerable debate. The propositions range from 1.6 to 3 million years ago depending on the definition. Most used are 2,5 and 1,8 million years ago. Geologists use changes in deposits as indicator, Paleo earth magnetic field specialists point to the date of the Earth magnetic field reversal from the “Gauss chron” to the “Matuyama chron”. Paleontogists point to the trek from the Mammoth out of Africa and other major changes in the faunas. Paleo climatologists consider the Pleistocene as the ice ages and point to the first indications of glacial expansions. The latter got internationally accepted in June 2007, where the Pliocene Pleistocene border was established at 2.6 million years ago. This is fortunate for the paleontologists who defined the border at 2.5 million years ago. This means that the indications like “late Pliocene” or “early Pleistocene” generally remain correct and don’t need revision. |
| Quote: | The hippo (Hippopotamus antiquus)
The discovery of remains of the large extinct hippo is always spectacular. After all, the hippo is currently an animal of the tropical environment of Africa, well known from the zoos where they are almost always in the water. The finds include several molars, some fragments of canines and some two dozens bones. These remains reveal that this animal was yet larger than the modern hippo (Hippopotamus amphibious). Although the modern hippo can stand cold reasonably well, its way of living requires the availability of open water throughout the year. It is likely that the hippo would leave a biotope in which the rivers would freeze over in winter time. Therefore it may be assumed that the presence of this hippo as well as the southerly mammoth signifies that the climate must have been rather mild, in a savannah type biotope, with enough water available around the year for the hippos to stay in during the day, like they still do in Africa nowadays. |
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Andre
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23.386 words now, that's a lot for one day but I guess at the end the book will count a lot more words. I keep adding goodies.
Quote of today, another addition:
| Quote: | Steppe or Tundra?
The Mammoth steppe fauna lived on a cold dry steppe, much of that area, North Siberia, nowadays is arctic tundra. On first sight it doesn’t seems that there is much difference between the two, just large, virtually empty plains. Actually the Russians talk about the “tundra steppe”. So who cares whether they are different or the same? Closer investigation reveals a lot of difference though.
A steppe is basically grassland with little or no trees and perhaps a few shrubs. The grasses are very sturdy and cold tolerant and can survive severe winters as well as severe droughts but these require some moderate spring and summer warmth to grow. Steppes can extend into fairly high latitudes depending on the geography. Steppes can endure heavy grazing animals. Grasses grow directly from their roots and recover easily from cutting and grazing. The dung that the grazing animals return stimulates new growth, actually the grasses depend on that. Grazers also minimize the growth of trees, thus protecting the grass. In wintertime there is not much snow and much of the long grass stems remain visible above the snow, allowing the animals to survive.
So the interdependence of steppe and grazing animals may be pretty strong. If the grazers disappear, the steppe may change into another habitat, like forests or moors. Typical cold steppe or prairie is found in the North of the USA and the south of Canada. There are also large steppe plains in Mongolia. The present day cold steppes do not have permafrost underneath. When there is permafrost, the rain and melt water in summer time cannot drain into the soil and the area becomes very muddy. The paleontological evidence does not suggest such an occurrence for the mammoth steppe. Furthermore, there is also some dispute about the reason that mammoth steppe could have extended so far north to the coasts of the arctic sea in Siberia. Apart from different weather patterns, several complicated sub-cycles in the earth orbit (Milankovitch cycles) causes also variation in the amount of solar radiation in summer and wintertime, so at times the Arctic regions may become warmer.
Tundras may look like steppes but real grasses are rare or absent. Sedges are more common. Actually mosses and lichens are the basic faunal elements for the tundra. In the Arctic, these plants do not recover from grazing easily as the growing is very slow and damage to the plants may remain visible for months. Moreover, the permafrost underneath the tundra makes the area very muddy in summertime, not a place to be while in wintertime the snow may burry all the fodder. So the capability for the tundra to host big herds of large grazing animals is very limited and only a few small groups of musk ox and reindeer manage to survive.
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Andre
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I just finished the last of the 27000 words for the firdt rough draft.
But as usual the first 80% of the work is done in 20% of the time, the last 20% takes 80% of the time.
Fine-tuning is starting
It's a very informative book and I made it even more informative.
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