What the gold rush means to most people: Prospectors! Dusty mine cars on tracks in the wild west! Gold nuggets!
What the gold rush means to an archaeologist: Hmm, where on this 100-acre plot of land covered in contaminated mine tailings do I think these clowns might have buried barrels full of literal cyanide?
How dare you leave this nugget hiding in the notes!
Why were they burying barrels of cyanide? How and why would you even compile enough cyanide to fill multiple barrels???
My friend let me introduce you to the terrifying process of cyanidation, wherein finely crushed ore containing traces of gold is made into a slurry by adding water, then transferred into vats known as “slime separators,” where potassium cyanide is then added to leach the gold into a liquid. Slaked lime is used to prevent the cyanide from going into full Murder Mode as hydrogen cyanide. The gold is then separated from the cyanide through one of a series of processes that I’m not really qualified to explain, but I think there are a few websites that talk about them if you want to google them.
But the key point here: from what I can tell, cyanide has been the main method of getting gold out of the ground for the last 120 years. (Yes, this process is still used today.) Before this technology came along, instead a thin coating of mercury was spread onto a copper plate, and the ore was allowed to wash over it. The gold stuck to the mercury, creating an amalgam, and then the amalgam was scraped off the plate and the mercury was boiled off (urk) to leave the gold behind.
And when processing mills shut down historically, why bother to dispose of your leftover deadly chemicals properly, when you can just bury them in your local tailings pile, which is already contaminated with mercury and arsenic? The known case of this happening in my local area was revealed through a bloom of “Prussian Blue” (ferro cyanide) on the surface of the tailings. Luckily, this is a fairly stable form of cyanide. Unluckily, geologists are crazier than archaeologists and they went ahead and dug a sample test unit right next to it, even knowing what it was, because science.
When I said to myself, “I’ll be an industrial archaeologist. It’ll be cool,” I did not foresee the terrifying knowledge it would unleash upon me.
I’m from Goldrush Country and I didn’t know this. All the gold-mining-related historical attractions around here are about good old-fashioned panning and pick-axes. Now I’m incredibly glad I’ve never had any urge to go explore the suspiciously colorful hills left in the wake of various mining operations.
Eek! Please don’t play in tailings piles and outflows folks, they are Bad News. “Oh but it’s lovely sand we want to take our ATVs out on it and let our kids build sandcastles” NO. DO NOT.
Reblogging because some desert-dwellers might not know this. Yes, those pretty hills are probably within ATV driving distance of Amargosa, Ocotillo, Buttercup, Superstition or whatever other recreational area you might be camped out at, but rainbow-colored dirt is usually rainbow-colored for toxic reasons!
Absolutely! And bear in mind too, not all tailings are brightly coloured - the ones in my area are just light grey. “Sand in spots where sand isn’t common” is sometimes the only warning sign.
I’m reviving this post because I’m doing up a Health & Safety protocol for digging near a mining site and folks. I did the math based on some recent soil tests. The tailings near my test site contain enough arsenic that ½ teaspoon of soil (tailings) easily contains a fatal dose of arsenic for an adult. Please stay safe and wash your hands thoroughly before eating/drinking/smoking if you aren’t 100% certain what the dirt is like where you’re digging.
And this is why we found a whole quart of mercury in my grandparent’s basement! Old timey prospectors would really just do shit.
I can’t stop thinking about this reddit post on soapmaking dude
I cannot express what an insane recipe that is. No one else could grasp it either
Like beeswax doesn’t. It kinda just stays as beeswax in the soap. The lye has nowhere to go with it. That liquid seeping out of the soap? The brown and clear drops?? That’s lye. That’s straight up lye. This mf made the soap equivalent of the Chernobyl elephants foot.
Quick reminder that if you touch lye with your bare hands, it will react with the fatty oils on and in your skin to create soap molecules.
That means it will give you chemical burns while creating human soap.
OP’s comment about the soap equivalent of a Chernobyl elephant’s foot is on point.
Lye (aka sodium hydroxide) turns hydrocarbons/fats into soap.
You are a hydrocarbon.
Please be careful when making soap, because You are a thing that could be used to make soap. And nobody wants to bathe in human soap, no matter how much rosemary you put in it.
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Nobody wants to bathe in human soap, no matter how much rosemary you put in it.
@botanyshitposts so what exactly is a quillwort, and what’s the big deal on this particular one?
imagine if there was a single remaining mammoth species on earth, and it only was able to get by into the modern era by sacrificing it’s status as a huge landscape-changing roaming herbivore to evolve into a small animal the size of a dog. it looks a lot like a dog, actually. people often mistake the tiny mammoth species as a dog, and will just casually say it’s a dog.
small-mammoth enthusiasts, however, will avidly remind people that they are notin fact a dog, and their organs, although shrunken to the size of a dog’s organs, are still wooly mammoth organs. you actually have to seek out special vets for the small wooly mammoths because even though it looks remarkably like a dog to the untrained eye, when you’re faced with the internal anatomy it’s so far deviated from anything living today that it’s difficult to understand and work with.
this is because there is, quite literally, no animal anatomy quite like the small woolly mammoth’s left alive on earth. this means that there’s no living approximation of how their organs work, or what the fuck is going on in there, even though they look like a dog from the outside. the closest living relative of the small woolly mammoth is so far deviated from it’s anatomy that’s literally of no help to anyone to compare the two, because the only thing they have in common is how they reproduce. scientists studying the wooly mammoth’s anatomy are forced to debate with each other constantly about what a certain organ mightdo, or what it at least used to do based on the fossils of the giant wooly mammoths that once dominated the landscape, but they just…have no idea.
so the small woolly mammoth is not at all like a dog, even though it looks like one. how it works, how it reproduces, how it functions on a basic anatomic level are so utterly and completely prehistoricthat they’re not at all like any other living animals. this makes them the subject of infinite fascination to paleontologists trying to approximate the biology and ecology of the giant woolly mammoths that once lived…but it’s incredibly challenging. it’s also incredibly challenging to explain why they’re different to people who just don’t care, or just see them as dogs because they look like them, because the significance of something like it is so easily lost when something looks ‘normal’.
isoetes –Quillworts– are that tiny wooly mammoth. their ancestors lived 400 million years ago and included the giant prehistoric spore-reproducing trees lepidodendron,which made up the bulk of massive prehistoric forests that were eventually compressed into the coal we’re still using today. they’re so old that the roots aren’t roots, they’re leaves, and it took botanists 100 years of bickering to finally confirm this. they’re so old that the change that weeded out all the giant 100+ foot tall members of the lineage was literally the original shifting of the continents, as in, like, when pangea split. they’re so old that it reproduces through ENORMOUS spores contained in spore packets on it’s leaves. they’re so old that we just have no fucking idea how to process it.
quillwort anatomy is, quite literally, that of a comically small 400 million year old spore tree with the trunk squished into a woody structure so small that you could miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for on a dissection. the anatomy of this genus doesn’t function like any other modern plant genus on earth. quillworts have organs and cell structures that we still don’t understand in the year 2019.
quillworts are incredibly valuable finds to paleobotanists because they’re so easily passed over in botanical surveys, and their habitats are constantly being threatened, making a great deal of species endangered. although they’re still around on almost every continent– see the earlier point on them evolving before the continents split– there are a lot fewer of them out there now; like anything, they can be more common in some areas than others, but my state has only found one recorded colony in the past 50 years to give an idea of what we’re dealing with here.
@sad-excited-corvid Yes! Relatives of these little guys made up the massive coal forests of the Paleozoic (the Carboniferous is literally named for the forests these plants were the dominant part of), and the arborescent lycopsids could be huge: some species grew up to 50 meters. And they are very cool and very, very weird.
It’s never too late to learn the right way to do things: button sewing technique via imgur→more…
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE
I feel like I just reblog this every time it is on my dash, with hope that one day I will stop being such a goof about sewing buttons.
You mean someone don’t do it like this?
Yeah I was taught to just sew them flush against the fabric. It didn’t work as well as I thought it should…
Yeah, I’m so downloading a copy of this post because buttons and I do not like each other.
I worked as a costume designer and assistant in a costume shop for 2 years and honest 2 god this will save your life.
I am a professional tailor and I approve this message.
@sheinthatfandom I’ll try to explain it, to the best of my understanding. Create an anchor point on the fabric by creating an x with the thread. Then repeat that pattern of stitches going through the button holes Instead of pulling the thread tight between each stitch keep it loose enough you have room to loop the thread around beneath the button when you’re finished. Loop it three times then put the needle between the top loop and through the middle of the threads coming down from the button. Pull it tight and it will create a knot almost like a hangman’s noose. only much smaller. It gives the button room to move without putting excess strain on the fabric or on the thread.
I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.
Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.
Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant George Viccars died from plague.
Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.
So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.
They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.
Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.
However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.
So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.
It gets better.
Here’s the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasn’t as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.
Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasn’tchanged much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.
And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.
High-speed bird wings, common to bird species like swifts, swallows, falcons, shorebirds and ducks are built for speed, but require a lot of work to keep the bird airborne. The long and cumbersome,high-aspect ratio bird wings of albatrosses, petrels and gulls may not get them into the air quickly or easily, but these wings are perfectly designed for soaring long distances with little effort. In contrast, the short, rounded elliptical game bird wings of a grouse, turkey, pheasant or quail can get them off the ground in a heartbeat, but the energy that it takes to lift that heavy body off the ground doesn’t last long. The slotted, high-lift wing of hawks, eagles, swans and geese provides the extra lift that is needed to keep their large bodies airborne or to carry heavy prey. And finally, the classic elliptical wing of your local passerine allows for the quick bursts of flight and high maneuverability that is perfectly suited for life in brushy habitats. Take a look at the five major wing types that follow and see if you can point out the differences in feather shape across wing types.
i want to shake those two little Victorian girl bitchs hands who faked the pictures of themselves playing with fairies and thank them for paving the way.
OP can we please see the pictures
The photos are of (and by) Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith, who were respectively 13 and 11 at the time! Not Victorian, but just after - the pictures were taken around 1920.
Something that amazes me about this story is how absolutely bonkers it is that they got away with it for so long, and how if you just read about the story and didn’t see the pictures, you’d be damn near convinced that they actually took photos with actual fairies or something until basically the very end, and even then you might wonder.
Because most written accounts of what happens goes something like this: they took these photos and someone saw them, and BREAKING NEWS! And now suddenly believers and skeptics alike are itching to get ahold of these photos and determine whether or not they are real, because just looking at the photos had them either completely convinced, or else certain that some kind of photographic trickery must have been used. So there were all these experts who examined the photos, the camera, the film/plates, the whatever, to try and find out how they faked these photos (or IF they faked them). Like, expert experts. Like they got the folks at Kodak to examine them. (Over the next few decades they’d also be xrayed and all kinds of stuff.)
And they couldn’t find anything. There was no evidence of early 20th century photoshop. They examined the photos, the negatives, everything, and concluded that they hadn’t been tampered with. Arthur Conan Doyle was LOSING HIS SHIT because he thought they were real and this proved it. Whether you believed in fairies or not all the experts were coming to the conclusion that the photos were totally real, and the skeptics were getting really really mad about it. Because there was no way these photos were real! Except they totally seemed to be! And the girls were sticking by their story. (And actually Elsie and Frances were 16 and 9 respectively, when the first two photos were taken in mid-1917, and the photos became public in mid 1919.)
Doyle was still losing his goddamn mind and so to put the matter to rest, another believer went to them in 1920, bringing cameras and stuff for them to photograph fairies with. The thinking was that if they were using equipment that had been examined and everything beforehand, and then developed not by the girls, then the opportunity for fakery was cut out and they could determine the truth. And lo and behold, the three pictures they girls took (alone, because “the fairies won’t show up if we’re not alone”), were also verified as being real!!! Okay, okay, you don’t believe in fairies, and believe the photos have to be fake, but still, there is the mystery of how did they do it???
And if that is what you read it’s understandable to be thinking that woah, what did these girls capture on film? Were these children just on to some advanced af photo trickery? What advanced technique did these kids figure out that fooled all the experts? Did they really actually capture pictures of something supernatural?
No. They fuckin cut some drawings of fairies out of paper and took pictures with them. There was no trickery detected with the photos or photo equipment because they didn’t have to fake that part. They were genuine photographs….of little girls with propped up drawings. Elsie copied some drawings from a book, added wings, cut them out, and propped them up. You look at these photos today and they look fake as fuck. These are obviously little drawings. They do not look the slightest bit realistic. There are people out there TODAY who will argue that it’s totally possible that these girls took pictures of actual fairies. Because that’s a better story, I guess. But if you hear that version of the story and then see the photos it’s just laughable.
I can only assume that the reason anybody fell for it at all is the same reason that people praised the special effects in old movies that now look ridiculous.
But at the same time….nobody noticed that these fairies looked like children’s book illustrations???? Like it took another fifty years for this to be put to rest, because even if you didn’t believe they were real, NO ONE COULD FIGURE OUT HOW THEY COULD HAVE FAKED THEM. It wasn’t until the fricken 80s when someone tracked down the girls that they admitted to having faked the photos by using little drawings. And even with that admission and the actual book they copied from, plus computer examination revealing that there were little strings and stuff holding the cutouts in place, there are STILL people who will maintain that these photos were real.
For their parts Elsie and Frances disagreed over the veracity of the fifth photogragh (not pictured here). Both claimed to have taken it, and Elsie said it was fake while Frances said it was real. (Even in the 80′s.) The truth is most likely that it was a double exposure and so both girls did take it. Also they apparently kept up the lie because once they had fooled Arthur Conan Doyle they felt too weird about telling the truth. Seriously, EVEN THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND HOW THEY HAD FOOLED SO MANY GROWNUPS. THEY WEREN’T EVEN TRYING TO PULL A HOAX.
Read that last sentence again. They really weren’t. They were just trying to take some fun little photos. And ALL THESE GODDAMN ADULTS WERE FREAKING THE FUCK OUT THINKING THAT THEY HAD PHOTOGRAPHED ACTUAL FAIRIES. AND IT WAS SUCH AN AWKWARD SITUATION THAT THE GIRLS JUST WENT WITH IT. They didn’t keep it up for money or fame or pride, they kept up the hoax because it would be too awkward to tell the grownups they’d fooled them.
THEY CREATED A MYSTERY THAT LASTED LIKE 50 YEARS BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO IN AN AWKWARD SITUATION.
Frances straight up said: “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.”
TL;DR: Two kids were dicking around with a camera and some fairy drawings, accidentally fool top experts in the world with super fake looking photos, feel too awkward at having fooled so many smart people to admit that it was all fake until a few years before their deaths. True. Icons.
This is one of my favourite stories because everyone decided it must have been some elaborate photo manipulation and they ware so focussed on that they ignored the simplest solution
for my fellow psychotics who struggle with thinking someone is in their house, a method I’ve found that really works are these guys:
i put them on my front door and anytime it opens they ring. that way if i think someone has broken in or i see someone who isn’t there i can think back to if the bells have rung, and if they haven’t i can assure myself it’s not real. obviously it’s not fool proof, like if you are prone to auditory hallucinations, but it has really helped me calm down in time to avoid major psychotic breaks. it’s a real lifesaver
nonpsychotics encouraged to rb
Alternatively if you have a door with a handle rather than a knob, you can hook a bell to the top of the door. Gives an old shop vibe, too.
Something more people ought to know is that a pearl is most commonly an oyster’s response to a parasite, like a tunneling tapeworm larva. It’s almost never a grain of sand. They live in the sea, they don’t care about sand!
The eyes-in-the-front thing (usually) only applies to mammals. Crocodiles, arguably the inspiration for dragons, have eyes that look to the sides despite being a predator.
hey what up I’m about to be That Asshole
This isn’t a mammalian thing. When people talk about ‘eyes on the front’ or ‘eyes on the side,’ they’re really talking about binocular vision vs monocular vision. Binocular vision is more advantageous for predators because it’s what gives you depth perception; i.e, the distance you need to leap, lunge, or swipe to take out the fast-moving thing in front of you. Any animal that can position its eyes in a way that it has overlapping fields of vision has binocular vision. That includes a lot of predatory reptiles, including komodo dragons, monitor lizards, and chameleons.
(The eyes-in-front = predator / eyes-on-sides = prey thing holds true far more regularly for birds than it does for mammals. Consider owls, hawks, and falcons vs parrots, sparrows, and doves.)
But it’s not like binocular vision is inherently “better” than monocular vision. It’s a trade-off: you get better at leap-strike-kill, but your field of vision is commensurately restricted, meaning you see less stuff. Sometimes, the evolutionary benefit of binocular vision just doesn’t outweigh the benefit of seeing the other guy coming. Very few forms of aquatic life have binocular vision unless they have eye stalks, predator or not, because if you live underwater, the threat could be coming from literally any direction, so you want as wide a field of view as you can get. If you see a predator working monocular vision, it’s a pretty safe assumption that there is something else out there dangerous enough that their survival is aided more by knowing where it is than reliably getting food inside their mouths.
For example, if you are a crocodile, there is a decent chance that a hippo will cruise up your shit and bite you in half. I’d say that makes monocular vision worthwhile.
Which brings us back to OP’s point. Why would dragon evolution favor field of view over depth perception?
A lot of the stories I’ve read painted the biggest threats to dragons (until knights with little shiny sticks came along) as other dragons. Dragons fight each other, dragons have wars. And like fish, a dragon would need to worry about another dragon coming in from any angle. That’s a major point in favor of monocular vision. Moreover, you don’t need depth perception in order to hunt if you can breathe fucking fire. A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.
Really, why would dragons have eyes on the front of their heads? Seems like they’ve got the right idea to me.
Worthwhile cryptozoological discourse
i want to point out also that crocodiles live in water, which has much more perceptible currents than air does. the crocodile snout is sensitive! some sources say it’s as sensitive as a human fingertip. so they can have a really broad field of vision to scan around, and to gather a maximum amount of data on stuff abovethe water, while their sensitive snout is still below the water, feeling for the turbulence patterns of other swimming creatures. they employ both together.
they don’t need binocular vision to judge how close their prey might be. they have that big enormous triangular snout in front of them to feelit.
tldr; dragons have plenty of good reasons to have monocular fields of vision, possibly including sensitive snoots.
It’s worth noting that apart from the Hobbit piece, most of the dragon illustrations above are either taken from or directly name-checking Dungeons & Dragons, and D&D dragons echolocate. (It’s why they have Blindsight, among other things.) If you need to precisely locate a moving object up close, echolocation is a pretty good way to go.
What a thirty-ton fire-breathing lizard’s echolocation pulse would sound like is left as an exercise for the reader.
Rarely is the real history of the Great Dismal Swamp ever talked about. There is a good reason. It was used for nearly 250 years as a sanctuary for those escaping slavery and colonialism.
In the 1800s the Great Dismal Swamp was a 2,000 square mile tangle of dense brush, swamps and bogs between Virginia and North Carolina. As early as the 1600s Native Americans, runaway slaves and even white indentured servants used the swamp as a refuge to avoid bondage and colonialism.
Rarely is the real history of the Great Dismal Swamp ever talked about. There is a good reason. It was used for nearly 250 years as a sanctuary for those escaping slavery and colonialism.
In the 1800s the Great Dismal Swamp was a 2,000 square mile tangle of dense brush, swamps and bogs between Virginia and North Carolina. As early as the 1600s Native Americans, runaway slaves and even white indentured servants used the swamp as a refuge to avoid bondage and colonialism.
From colonial times through the Civil War the “runaway slave” section of Virginia and North Carolina newspapers (where slaveholders advertised, and offered rewards for the return of their escaped slaves) often mentioned the Great Dismal Swamp as a possible destination.
In 1714 Alexander Spotswood, a Virginia colonial governor described poor whites and indentured servants who joined swamp communities as the “Loose and Disorderly people who flock to this No-Man’s-Land.”
In 1728 Surveyor William Byrd led the first survey of the Great Dismal Swamp. He encountered a family of escaped slaves, sometimes called maroons, describing them as “mulattoes,” and was well aware that others were watching and hiding: “It is certain many slaves shelter themselves in this Obscure Part of the World….”
In 1784 British traveler and writer J. Smyth noted “Runaway negroes have resided in these places for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and fowls….[On higher ground] they have erected habitations, and cleared small fields around them.”
It has been estimated that up to 11,000 escaped slaves lived in the swamp and along it borders. These slaves raided white settlers near the borders of the swamp for food and ammunition, and traded work, tools, food and other goods with nearby slaves and free people of color.
In 1831 the Great Dismal Swamp became the focal point of slaveholders’ fear after one of the most famous slave rebellions in U.S. history: Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Nat Turner’s Rebellion took place in Southampton County, Virginia in August 1831, a place that borders the Great Dismal Swamp. After killing nearly 65 men, women and children the rebellion was squashed by local militias and government troops in less than two days. Turner succeeded in hiding out for several weeks and was later captured, tried and hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia.
While Turner was evading capture, he claimed he had an army of runaway slaves nearby in the Great Dismal Swamp, waiting his arrival and his order to attack. News of this claim spread throughout the Virginia and North Carolina counties adjacent to the swamp.
In the lead-up to the Civil War southern slaveholders were already in a panic due to constant revolts. This news pushed many of them over the edge.
Can you imagine the fear this prospect of another large slave revolt would have put into the already terrified white population? We don’t have to imagine. The writer Paul Johnson has a firsthand account from his great-great-grandfather John Morgan, who lived on the border of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Morgan was a Quaker. The Quakers had a nearly 200 year history in Virginia and North Carolina. Their fair treatment of Native Americans and their abolitionist sentiments brought them into direct conflict with colonial southerners and southern slaveholders in the lead-up to the Civil War.
After Nat Turner’s Rebellion, towns and municipalities in Virginia and North Carolina made it mandatory for able-bodied men to serve in local militias or town guards. Morgan, rather than serve in the local militia, which was against his Quaker beliefs, hired a substitute. Meeting minutes of the Quaker congregation in Pasquotank County tell what happened to Morgan. John Morgan was charged by his Quaker congregation in 1831 with “hiring a substitute [soldier], offering a reward for every negro he should kill and for not attending Meetings.” The Quakers appointed a committee to investigate the charge and noted in the minutes that John Morgan “justified himself in this conduct.” The rest of the Quakers in his congregation were strongly against his actions. He was disowned by the congregation in December 1831.
After Nat Turner’s Rebellion, many Quakers left Virginia and North Carolina due to the new restrictive laws put in place to enforce slavery and prevent rebellions. Extreme white fear, anger and vigilantism was blamed for the more than 200 free people of color and slaves who were killed after Turner’s Rebellion, even though they had no connection to the rebellion. Many more innocent people were jailed and had their property burned or stolen following the rebellion by disorderly militias and town guards.
The story of the Great Dismal Swamp is just one of many places escaped slaves used as sanctuaries. The Rigolets, a large area near New Orleans, was controlled for twelve years by the famous maroon, Juan St. Malo, from 1773 to 1784. There were also numerous maroon settlements in pre-Civil War Alabama and Florida.
The Great Dismal Swamp is a National Wildlife Refuge. And only recently has a large area of the swamp been opened up to car travel. Archeologists have just begun exploring and excavating some of the site used by runaway slaves.
The history of the Great Dismal Swamp and maroon settlements throughout the U.S. points to consistent, relentless resistance to slavery by a large slave population. If news of these facts had been circulated at the time it would have shaken the notion of white supremacy and dominance to the core. For this reason the history and stories about the Great Dismal Swamp and other maroon communities has been suppressed and very few reliable images of these heroes were circulated.
Besides being a National Wildlife Refuge, the Great Dismal Swamp and places like the Rigolets should be considered historic natural landmarks for African American history, to honor those who resisted and escaped slavery and oppression before the Civil War.
Pterodactylus antiquus was the first pterosaur ever discovered, and in popular culture the name “pterodactyl” has become commonly associated with the group as a whole.
1800s
Thefirst known Pterodactlyusspecimen came from southeast Germany, and was described (although not yet named) in the 1780s. The modern concept of extinction hadn’t yet been established, so at the time unknown fossil species were generally assumed to still exist alive somewhere in remote regions of the world. Initially it was unclear what type of animal this specimen represented, and it was interpreted as being aquatic because the oceans seemed like the best place for such a strange creature to hide undiscovered.
In 1800 it was recognized as instead being a flying animal, with naturalist Johann Hermann creating both the first known life restoration of a pterosaur and one of the first known examples of scientific paleoart in general. He depicted it as a bat-like mammal with extensive wing membranes, external ears, and a covering of fur, and made two different sketches of this interpretation. The first shows an odd rounded wing shape with the wing finger seeming to form a stiff “hoop” around to the ankles, but the second version has some interesting additions – showing an understanding of the wing finger being straightened and stretching out the membrane, and adding a very large colugo-likepropatagium between the neck and the wrist.
In light of our modern understanding of pterosaurs this was an incredibly good attempt at a reconstruction, despite the total lack of soft tissue impressions and the mistaken mammal classification.
The name Pterodactylus was established for this animal by the late 1810s, and while it was correctly identified as a flying reptile by some early paleontologists, others also saw it as being more mammal-like or bird-like.
In this pre-Darwinian time there was no modern concept of evolutionary relationships, and pterosaurs were instead thought to be a type of bat positioned inbetween mammals and birds in the “chain of being”. This “bat model” became influential on the early study of pterosaurs, and some paleontologists depicted highly mammalian versions even as late as the 1940s.
(The aquatic interpretation also stuck around as a competing idea until at least 1930, with Pterodactylus’ wings restored as huge penguin-like flippers.)
1850s-1970s
By the mid-19th century the reptile interpretation had become standard but the bat influence remained, with pterosaurs commonly assumed to have been furry, warm-blooded, and quadrupedal and clumsy on the ground. Fossil evidence of hair-like fuzz had even been found on a specimen of Scaphognathus in the 1830s, but this was later disputed and was only confirmed as being real almost two centuries later.
British paleontologist Richard Owen disagreed with the bat model for pterosaurs, considering them to be scaly sluggish cold-blooded gliders, and in the 1850s oversaw the creation of the heavily-scaled and oddly goose-like Crystal Palace Pterodactylusstatues – one of their first major portrayals to the general public, and influential in the popular perception of these animals at the time.
But even into the start of the 20th century some paleontologists were still arguing for active warm-blooded pterosaurs, with the first popular book on the group in 1901 suggesting they were closely related to birds. German paleontologists continued to interpret pterosaurs this way into the 1930s, but in contrast English and American scientists largely lost interest in these animals over subsequent decades – and depictions of pterosaurs went the same way as non-avian dinosaurs during this period, descending into awkward evolutionary failures that could barely even fly, shown as scaly-skinned or naked, and hanging upside-down from trees and cliffsides like giant wrinkly bats.
2020s
The discovery of definite hair-like structures (known as pycnofibers) on Sordes brought pterosaurs into their own renaissance in the 1970s, and among a flood of new discoveries they were reinterpreted as active warm-blooded bird-like animals. Reconstructions sometimes went a bit too bird-like, though, attempting to distance themselves from the older saggy-repto-bat portrayals, with forced bipedal postures and much more slender wing membranes attaching to the waist.
But early 21st century studies into biomechanics, soft-tissue remains, and trackways confirmed that some elements of the bat model had actually been right the whole time. Pterosaurs had flight membranes attached to their hind limbs and were quadrupedal when on the ground – but instead of being awkward bat-like sprawlers they were actually competent walkers and runners with an energy-efficient upright posture.
We now know Pterodactylus lived during the Late Jurassic, about 150-148 million, at a time when the region of southern Germany was part of an island archipelago in a shallow tropical sea. Fragmentary remains are also known from elsewhere in Europe and in Africa, suggesting this genus had a fairly wide range.
It was a fairly small pterosaur, with the largest adults having am estimated wingspan of around 1m (3'3"), and had long straight jaws lined with numerous pointed teeth. Most known specimens are juveniles, but fossils of larger adults preserve evidence of a soft tissue crest with a backwards-pointing “lappet”, and long mane-like pycnofibers on the back of the neck.
Like other pterosaurs it was fuzzy and warm-blooded, and it had hollow bird-like bones and air sacs lightening its body. Its wings were highly complex with layers of strengthening fibers and muscles that allowed the flight surface shape to be precisely controlled, and when walking on the ground it could fold up its wing fingers and stow the membranes well out of the way of its limbs.
It was probably a generalist carnivore, feeding mostly on small prey like invertebrates, and the shape of the sclerotic rings in its eye sockets suggest it was mainly active during the daytime.
