This is an Irish Elk. It roamed the plains of Eurasia during the Pleistocene. It stood 7 feet high at the shoulder and it’s antlers measured up to 12 feet from tip to tip. It went extinct at the end of the last ice age.
i’m convinced that the ice age franchise won’t end until the squirrel that always chases after the nut gets an equally hideous girlfriend with Squirrel Tits™ and eyelashes
no….. No
NO
No you don’t understand, I have this entire developed theory about the Ice Age universe which has been cooking up in my mind and has only be reinforced by the latest 5th installment. Scrat is the god of the Ice age universe. The story began with him and the story will end with him. If there weren’t hints before, in this latest installment, it becomes clear that Scrat’s actions dictate what happens on Earth and to the protagonists. Yes, maybe Scart’s only goal is to get the nut, but his actions SHAPE what happens in the film. If we needed any further proof then may I point out something Buck said in the 5th film along the lines of “we’re 6 mins early! Somebody up there likes us!” That phrase is usually used to refer to a god and in this case it’s used to refer (unknowingly) to scrat!
However, there is an ALTERNATE theory that I have been working on. What if Scart isn’t the god of the ice age universe, but rather, the NUT is? As i have already said, Scart’s actions shape the course of the story but what motivates Scart? That’s right: the nut, it is truly because of the nut that Scart does what he does that leads to the events that take place in the story. This would create an interesting metaphor here. Scrat is chasing the nut like man chases divinity. So when will the Ice Age saga end?? When Scart finally gets the nut for good. When man catches God.
i didnt even read this but im laughing at how many times scrat is typoed as scart
“what motivates Scart? That’s right: the nut” is the funniest fucking string of words I’ve read in my life
In the final days of Blue Sky Studios, a small team of artists came together to do one final shot. This shot is a farewell, a send-off on our own terms —— Blue Sky Studios
You were said to be descended of his descendants, though no one who lives was there to see him born or raised. You know of his early life only because he told you stories of his youth. Threaded between the gaps in his recollections, the long pauses as he struggled to feel around for his memories, was his supreme age.
The Grandfather of All Cats, a mysterious figure seen in a recent and still developing vision by a few Court cats.
Why are these rocks out of place? They just do not fit the environment in which they are. The sea waves that moved the medium to coarse sand that is now the sandstone that surrounds these boulders, are not strong enough to move boulders. There is a huge contrast in mass between the sand and the boulder. So, the only explanation is they were placed here by some other means. For this reason, such rocks are called ‘dropstones’, as they were dropped/placed into their current position, rather than being transported along with the surrounding sediment.
One explanation how this could have happened, is the sea ice. During Permian (~300-250 million years ago) this region was under ice age conditions, with glaciers covering the continent from land to sea. So, whether it was glaciers sliding into the sea, or sea ice enveloping loose boulders around the coast and moving them off into the sea; it is impossible to say exactly. But, because ice floats on water, it provides a good candidate for a mechanism of moving these heavy boulders from the land to the sea bypassing the sea wave transport.
The Saalien, also known as the Saale glaciation was one of the three largest glaciations that occured in Europe during the Pleistocene. The whole epoch lasted between 300,000 years to around 128,000 years ago. It was one of the largest glaciations in European history, the ice sheets reached the modern day city of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, pushing the permafrost border halfway through France and Switzerland making most of Europe too cold and too barren to live in.
It was also during the Saalian that the Homo Neanderthalensis evolved and thrived in Europe, Asia and the middle east. The name Saalian comes from the Saale river that flows through northern Germany, a branch of the Elbe river. Only people in Northern Europe use the term Saalian however. Other places in Europe use local names such as the Wolstonian in the UK, Moskovian in Russia, Rissglacial in the Alps and Illinois Glaciation in northern America. The Dutch briefly used their own therm as well, Drenthien.
The reason why so many parts of Europe have their own names for this time period is because of the deposits which are often related to the closed glacier or local rocks/landscape. It was also the epic Saalien glacier that brought stones down to the Netherlands which would later be used to build dolmens during the neolithic, these dolmens are still visible today. The glacier also left its marks in the European landscape, since I live in the Netherlands I will give a Dutch example.
Certain pits and dents in the landscape have been formed during the Saalien, the Dutch Solse Gat is such an example. The Solse Gat is a large dent in the ground in the province of Gelderland. A puddle formed inside the dent with rare vegetation growing around it. The dent was caused by a large piece of ice, part of the Saalien glacier, that was so heavy that it left a dent behind in the ground. The Solse Gat itself was therefore created and was seen as sacred grounds by the iron age people, Germanics. It was used as a place to worship the sun, Sol (hence the name solse gat). Later during the medieval ages it was thought that Satanists were holding black masses here and even until today, Christians are trying to ban any pagans from visiting the site for religious purposes.
All of Europe must have looked like a truly bizare place during the Saalien glaciation. The middle of Europe was covered by a harsh tundra landscape only survivable by the toughest animals adapted to the cold. In the modern mediterranean areas such as Italy, Greece and Spain, the landscape was covered by pine forests which can now be found in Scandinavia. If you would stand in the place that is now known as Amsterdam, you would be looking at a high wall of ice that marked the end of the gigantic glacier, just imagine the ice wall seen in Game of Thrones.
There were no modern humans, Homo Sapiens, in Europe yet. Our species only developed 100,000 years after the start of the Saalien so Europe was only inhabited by now extinct species, the Neanderthals and the Homo Heidelbergensis. The Saalien would be the last time that the ice sheets moved that far south. It was the second last ice age which was followed up by the Eemian period which marks the last ice age and is perhaps also the best known ice age.
Here are images of: A map that shows how far south the ice reached, How the ice wall in modern day Amsterdam would have looked like, Solse gat, the dent left behind caused by the Saalian ice sheet, A picture that shows how an ice sheet is capable of transforming the landscape, A dolmen made out of rocks transported by the Saalien ice sheet,
Skeletons of hundreds of Ice Age hyena cubs found in Belgian cave highlight severe ecological event that struck northern Europe about 45,000 years ago
Researchers from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, have recovered more than 300 skeletons of cave hyena cubs from a prehistoric cave in southern Belgium. The remarkable number of cub fossils suggests that the cave was regularly used as a birth den by cave hyena mothers, but also points towards a well-known phenomenon in nature: siblicide in times of food shortage and high competition.
A team of international researchers re-examined a collection of thousands of prehistoric fossil remains from the Marie-Jeanne cave located near Dinant, Belgium. The site was originally excavated in 1943 by a team of Belgian paleontologists and were more recently dated by radiocarbon methods in Oxford. Results show that the site accumulated between 47,000 and 43,000 years ago. Not less than 15 different animal species were identified in this collection: horse, bison, woolly rhino, reindeer, as well as carnivore species such as wolf, cave bear, hyena and lion – a rather common faunal spectrum for that time period.
But something unusual caught the attention of the scientists. If cave hyena (Crocuta crocuta spelaea) was a common species found in the prehistoric ecosystems, archaeologists and paleontologists mostly recover adult individuals, sometimes associated with some younger individuals. At Marie-Jeanne cave, not less than 323 hyena cubs were identified – a large proportion of them only being a few weeks old.
For Elodie-Laure Jimenez, lead author of this study and archaeologist at RBINS and the University of Aberdeen, these fossils are an important paleontological discovery. “Whilst fossils of cave hyena are pretty common in prehistoric sites in Europe, the high concentration of newborn cubs here at Marie-Jeanne cave is a phenomenon never seen before on the fossil record… nor the modern one for that matter. It is pretty puzzling”, she confesses.
Hyena behaviours in perspective
The cave hyena is an extinct subspecies of Crocuta crocuta, the modern spotted hyena living in sub-Saharan Africa. We know today that female hyenas isolate themselves from their clan to give birth in order to protect their offspring from aggressive interactions with fellow hyenas that could be detrimental to the lives of the youngling. Once the cubs have become stronger – oftentimes around 4-8 weeks – the mothers return to the clan with their litter, usually composed of two or three cubs. “The fact that only very few adult individuals were found at Marie-Jeanne Cave and that the majority of hyenas were only a few weeks old indicates that the site was not where the clan lived, but instead was mostly used as an isolated birth den by the mothers. And they did so for many, many generations!” says Jimenez. "This is an exceptional discovery because up until now, we knew very little about the social and reproductive behaviour of this key species of the Paleolithic ecosystem”.
Murder in the den
Since the number of cubs at Marie-Jeanne cave is far greater than what you find in any other palaeo-sites – not even in modern spotted hyena dens – the researchers suspect that an unexpected phenomenon occurred in this region at that time. “During periods of strong ecological pressures and prey depletion in the local environment, the weakest of the siblings end up being killed by the dominant, who then gets access to more maternal resources”, explains Jimenez. “This usually occurs when the mother has to travel longer distances in search of prey and has to leave the cubs behind for longer periods of time”.
During this period of the last “Ice Age”, sub-arctic climatic conditions struck northern Europe and many species had to adapt their behaviour to survive. In the northern latitudes (Great-Britain, Belgium, and “Doggerland”, the vast plains that are now under water in the English channel) our ancestors the Neanderthals largely relied on mega herbivores such as bison, woolly rhino or mammoth to get enough fat, proteins and clothing material. Therefore they were sometimes in high competition with other large predators like cave hyenas and both had to adapt their strategies by migrating long distances or hunting different species.
Humans vs carnivores
Identified for the first time by the British geologist William Buckland in 1823, the cave hyena populated the whole of Eurasia until its disappearance in Siberia, about 14,000 years ago. Due to its odd silhouette and scary “laugh”, the hyena is an animal that is not very present in our social imaginary. However, it was an essential large carnivore of the prehistoric ecosystems in which it played an essential role in maintaining its balance.
The new knowledge generated by this unique discovery and ongoing analyses will allow us to better understand the dynamics between prehistoric human species and large carnivores in northern Europe and how they adapted to the climatic variations of the Ice Age. It’s important to note that the Neanderthals disappeared from our northern latitudes just a few millennia later - around 40,000 years ago – after Homo sapiens had arrived in Western Europe. A combination of various ecological pressures then triggered the “Quaternary mass extinction”, from 35,000 to 10,000 before present, during which most of the mammals weighing over 40kg got extinct.
‘Snowball Earth’ Thawed Out by Wobbling on Its Axis, Researchers Find
The Earth was once like a snowball, completely frozen over, like a vision of an alien world from a science-fiction movie, some scientists say.
The great thaw came some 635 million years ago, eventually giving way to successive periods of flora and fauna, including the dinosaurs. Now, a group of British scientists said a grouping of sedimentary rocks in Norway shows that the melting of the ice was gradual – and irregular – owing to the planet’s wobbling on its axis.
So a few nights ago I had a dream set in the Ice Age universe where our main characters met a big herd of mammoths (that called themselves a tribe for some reason) led by a laid-back experienced soldier of a mammoth who was even bigger and taller than Manny. Also he had several daughters, the youngest of whom befriended young Peaches
So of course I had to draw this out into actual OC’s. The black mammoth in the center is the leader Gabe, the grey mammoth on the right is his wife Lucy. From left to right are his daughters Lennon, Olivia, Julia, and Lizabeth. Only Julia is Gabe and Lucy’s biological daughter, all the rest are adopted
Also I really dreamed up a better idea for a movie than all of Ice Age 4-6 combined
![[TRAILER] ‘Ice Age: Scrat Tales’ Goes Nutty and Bittersweet | Rotoscopers](https://64.media.tumblr.com/cc00671a13d6947a04a6fee960816669/fbeeaa9b773cb9fb-be/s1280x1920/58ee39283fbc8248e821c3fbeb12ff72ca2d5144.jpg "[TRAILER] ‘Ice Age: Scrat Tales’ Goes Nutty and Bittersweet | Rotoscopers")
