This stone circle is located near the village of Belstone which is on the edge of Dartmoor National Park’s north moor. The nine standing stones surround a Bronze Age burial site. Legend states that a group of nine young ladies were discovered dancing on a Sunday and thus turned to stone.
This petroglyph was found damaged on a burial ground a few hundred meters from the copy that’s now stands at Vallenstena church is Vallstenarum, Gotland. The stone is dated to the migration period and was originally raised at a tomb dating from the 400 or 500 AD. The spirals in the middle are associated with sun worship and the two figures with spears and shields at the bottom of the stone can be associated with pagan rituals and war. According to half a millennium younger Icelandic litterature , the two animals opposite each other could tell us about the stallion breeding sport, which was very popular during these times. But, as we know from many other petroglyhps and sources, these horse-looking animals was often linked to the sun and movement symbolism in the prehistoric religions. This particular one is very similar to another gotlandic stone found in Hadlingbo.
This fantastic shield was found in Nackhälle, Spannarps parish in Varberg, Sweden in 1865. The shield is adorned with beautiful sirats, one of which is perceived to be fifteen swans. It’s dated to the younger Bronze Age through these types of ornaments and is truly an unusual find if you ask me.
The shield belonges to a group of splendor shields manufactured in eastern Germany, the so-called Herzprung shields. These was at first unknown until year 1985, when shields belonging to this group were found in Denmark and Ireland. But the same year, a finding of at least fourteen shields was made in Sweden, the Fröslunda shields. These had several similarites to the Herzsprung shields but also the one found in Nackhälle. This discovery inspired to a after study in 1990 of the Nackhälle shield, over a hundred years later the discovery was made.
Photo by me from the Historical Museum in Stockholm.
These beautiful golden sword details really caught my eye first time I saw them.
All three are findings from Sweden and are dated do the migrationperiod (400-550 AD). Sword pommel found in Skurup, Skåne. The sword mouth in the middle was found in Backa, Bohuslän and the other one in Mellby, Västergötland.
Can’t get enough of all these beautiful golden ornamented objects from this period.
Can a number system be both the new kid on the block and older than written history?
The real number system as it exists today has been with us for a few centuries. In foundation it is monovalent, monophasic, and sequential.
The probable number system dates to prehistory but was lost in the mists of time until recently rediscovered and resurrected. In contrast to the real number system it is foundationally bivalent, biphasic, and cyclic.
The probable number system has considerably more structure than the real number system and is therefore more robust. In this sense, it is similar to the complex number system.
In contrast to the complex number system, the probable number system in its foundation presupposes that numbers can assume wavelike forms capable of constructive and destructive interference operationally through the compositing of higher to lower dimension.
By means of compositing of dimension probable numbers are able to distribute throughout the entire mandalic unit vector cube (which is structurally a superposition of the 6-dimensional unit vector hypercube on the 3-dimensional unit vector cube) a function analogous in important ways to that performed in the complex number system by the centralized imaginary unit i.
Another important way in which the probable number system differs from both the real number system and the complex number system is the absence of nothingness and the zero representing it. In its place we find the concepts of balance and equilibrium. Nullification still exists in form of annihilation and its opposite in the form of creation. But the Cartesian coordinate system of ordered pairs and ordered triads is transformed by this approach to handling number and dimension from a ring into a field of hyperdimensional numbers over real numbers in three dimensions.
Please note: The content and/or format of this post may not be in finalized form. Reblog as a TEXT post will contain this caveat alerting readers to refer to the current version in the source blog. A LINK post will itself do the same. :)
Scroll to bottom for links to Previous / Next pages (if existent). This blog builds on what came before so the best way to follow it is chronologically. Tumblr doesn’t make that easy to do. Since the most recent page is reckoned as Page 1 the number of the actual Page 1 continually changes as new posts are added. To determine the number currently needed to locate Page 1 go to the most recent post which is here. The current total number of pages in the blog will be found at the bottom. The true Page 1 can be reached by changing the web address mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com to mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com/page/x, exchanging my current page number for x and entering. To find a different true page(p) subtract p from x+1 to get the number(n) to use. Place n in the URL instead of x (mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com/page/n) where n = x + 1 - p. :)
I FINALLY finished part 1 of the Evolution of Life poster that I was doing for my class-
it’s been a passion project of mine- I wanted to attempt something like this outside of school, regardless. the history of life on earth has always fascinated me!
This first part shows the transition from simple life to complex life, and the move from sea to land.
I really hurt my hand making this, but I think it was worth it (:
Named just a year after Megalosaurus, in 1825, Iguanodon has remained a fairly iconic dinosaur ever since.
Discovered in a different region of Southeast England, its fossilized teeth were soon recognized as being similar to those of modern iguanas – but much much larger. Partial skeletal remains were initially reconstructed as belonging to a gigantic herbivorous lizard, with what was thought to be a horn placed on the tip of its nose.
1850s
The Victorian Crystal Palace statuesofIguanodon depicts a more bulky reptile with a nose horn, a toothless beak at at the front of its jaws, scaly skin, thick upright legs and hoof-like claws. Much like the Megalosaurus of the time it’s really not nearly so bad of a reconstruction as it’s often accused of being, showing a surprisingly naturalistic and almost mammal-like interpretation of these animals compared to later portrayals.
Technically the particular “Iguanodon” species at Crystal Palace has more recently been renamed Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, but it was considered to be Iguanodon at the time so it’s included here anyway.
1880s-1960s
A massive discovery of the remains of nearly 40 Iguanodon individuals in a coal mine in Bernissart, Belgium, revealed the full anatomy of these dinosaurs for the first time. Much more well-preserved and complete than the patchy English material, these larger Iguanodon bernissartensis eventually became the official type species for the whole genus – a standard used to help determine whether similar-looking fossils are Iguanodon or not.
The Bernissart specimens were restored as bipedal animals in an upright kangaroo-like pose, with their tails dragging behind them acting like a tripod to prop them up. What had previously been the single “horn” was finally realized to instead be a thumb spike on each hand, interpreted as a defensive weapon against predators.
This image of Iguanodon persisted for decades, with a giraffe-like long prehensile tongue sometimes also depicted (including a particularly bizarre interpretation of it sticking out through a hole in the lower jaw!).
2020s
TheDinosaur Renaissance in the late 20th century corrected Iguanodon’s posture to hold its body horizontally, and it was eventually recognized as being capable of both bipedal and quadrupedal movement. Juveniles were found to have walked more on their hindlimbs, while adults spent more time on all fours but were still capable of running bipedally when they needed to.
We now have fossils of Iguanodon from across much of Europe during the Early Cretaceous, about 126-122 million years ago. Our modern view of this animal is a heavily built ornithopod that grew to around 9m long (~30’), with a horse-like head, a large keratinous beak at the front of its jaws, chewing teeth further back, and cheeks covering the sides of its mouth. Its chunky forelimbs each had a large thumb spike, hoof-like claws, and a prehensile grasping pinky finger, while its powerful hindlimbs ended in three-toed vaguely bird-like feet.
Soft tissue preservation discovered in related hadrosaurs suggests it probably also had a very bulky body with a thick heavily muscled neck and tail, and possibly an ornamental “frill” running along its back. Skin impressions show a covering of numerous tiny pebbly scales, generally too small to have been visible from a distance.
This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees’ range has shrunk by 90%.
(my own photos)
Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.
Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would’ve penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you’ve observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.
You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:
Gingkos as they look today have spent more time coexisting with dinosaurs than they have without! Their fruit doesn’t do well because they evolved before chewing, masticstion, evolved!
wait dinosaurs didn’t chew?
Like modern reptiles, they could move their jaws up and down, but most of the effectiveness of chewing comes from moving your lower jaw sideways and back-and-forth to grind food between the surfaces of your teeth. Doing that requires a special jaw joint that exists in mammals, but not in other vertebrates (see stages 19 to 23 here). Hadrosaurs (”duck-billed dinosaurs”) might have had special hinged tooth batteries that ground against each other in a similar way – which could have accounted for their success, they appeared in the Cretaceous and basically replaced most other large herbivorous dinosaurs – but this in fact happened after ginkgoes appeared.
(The first reblogger in the chain is mistaken – beetles first appeared in the Permian, over a hundred million years before magnolias.)
Depictions of iguanodon, pterodactylus, ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, hylaeosaurus and megalosaurus based on the crystal palace statues as well as their modern counterparts. The crystal palace dinosaur statues constructed in the 1850′s are both very impressive pieces of art as well as a striking demonstration of scientific progress in the field of paleontology, for all their inaccuracies they are still an extremely important piece of paleoart history.
The tiny hadrosaur ajnabia finds itself in a sticky situation stalked by a chenanisaurus, ajnabia is from the late cretaceous of morocco and was described back in october.
A wonderful archaeological reconstruction from my UCD colleagues. Really wish I could have been there to help with it! This house fundamentally questions much of what we think we know about Mesolithic settlement in Ireland and Britain.
You are a mammal. A very very long time ago, you were a fish. You decided that you shouldn’t stay in the water and should go on land, because land is safer because all of your predators are in the water. Oops! You need lungs for that. Okay so you make some lungs, and then some legs. You still need the water though, so you stay by it and go in and out.
Now you are an amphibian. Welcome to being a salamander. But this seems really inconvenient - you lay eggs but you live on land and in water. It would probably be easier to stick to one. So you decide to make your eggs have a hard protective shell, to keep the water in. Thats a good idea! Now do the same thing to your body. Now you have skin. Skin is actually pretty fragile so lets add some protection. Slap some scales on.
Welcome to being a reptile. Its a land full of giant insects. So you stay small and bide your time until the insects get smaller. And then you get bigger. And bigger. Until you’re the biggest thing on land. You look like a lizard but you act like a mammal. You hunt your prey. Some of your prey hunts plants. Works out nice. But it could be better. You still need the sun to warm you up. So why don’t you start making your own warmth?
Welcome to being warm blooded. You start to grow weird long, thin scales that is called fur, while other reptiles start to get crazy big. You decide its better to stay small for now. You can hide. You can run. Your neighbors keep growing, getting bigger, and their skeletons fill up with air pockets. They also make body coverings, but they’re long and flat. They are called dinosaurs. Some of them stay cold blooded and stay near the water, getting harder scales and needing less food to keep up their metabolism. These are crocodilians.
You stay small until space decides to blow up the planet. All the big reptiles are gone, so you take over and get bigger now. You decide its easier to grow your eggs inside of you and give birth to live babies instead of waiting around a nest for that time. But they cant really eat, so you create a special gland for milk. The little reptiles that are left have learned to fly, and now are called birds. Some of the other side stay small. Turn into lizards, snakes, turtles and the crocodiles are still here somehow.
Blah blah blah you start walking on two legs and losing hair. Now you are a person. You are a human being. You have been a reptile, and you have been an amphibian and a fish. But now you are you! And I think thats pretty cool.
The only animal type you didnt get to be was a bird, and thats because they had a better idea at the same time and got to it first. Bummer.
