New Blog Name, Same Blog Taste!

The first of these go all the way back to 2020, when I started at my current office job and needed colors in my cubicle that weren’t just Greige (Grey-Beige); these were almost exclusively drawn from memory, and a lot of them are pretty doofy as a result. Others I took a bit of creative liberty on. Proportions and perspective tend to be weird on most of these… but they all still ended up holding a special place in my heart. ^w^

You have no idea how hard it was not to draw him some little snake pants for his doofy little snake legs.

Since we don’t know if Thrinaxodon was fluffy or not, I decided to split the difference and give him a sort of “cape” or “crest” of some kind of fur-like integument on top, and let him be a little bit more ambiguously-textured on the bottom? Kinda helps break up the silhouette a bit, I like how he turned out and the fluffy crest seems like a comfy place for his little Broomistega buddy!

In my heart, these little guys come from a universe where they didn’t die together and fossilize, and got to keep being friends and live long and happy lives together. Maybe they could even become the time-traveling paleo protagonists of a children’s cartoon or something. 😅

Bit of a charming story behind this one too.

My Boss’s Boss (name redacted here for privacy) is retiring on Friday, so I asked him if he wanted me to put an extinct friend of his choice on the wall in his honor.

He is a lifelong sport fisherman, and asked me if I had any information on whether there were ever any “dinosaur salmon” - I suggested ol O. rastrosus here, mentioning that they had Saber Teeth and could get 6-8 ft long according to some estimates; he was absolutely GIDDY at that revelation, said he thought it was a shame he’d missed them by a few million years, and mused to another Grandpa-Aged coworker over how you’d go about landing and cooking a salmon that big and whether it would be any good to eat at that size.

He was a nice guy, I’ll miss him, and I’m happy I was able to make him smile before he retires with my own “Big Fish Story.” 😁

I’m also not sure if the pose is even SLIGHTLY correct, ref images are all over the place and I had to take a few creative liberties to get him to fit on a sticky note, but I hope I at least got the idea across? These are such goofy little guys that I had to have one on my wall, maybe I’ll try another pass at one with better colors another time. 😅

The rexes sadly turned into a bit of a disaster coloring-wise, but hopefully he likes them anyway? I went with the increasingly popular “Downy Baby, Bald or Mostly-Bald Adult” Interpretation here, and the mostly illegible “fun fact” is related to that. At least the poses are still pretty cute, ruinous attempts to fix coloring mistakes aside.

The person who wanted Velociraptor is also getting a bonus Protoceratops, because I’ve been meaning to draw these two fighting in reference to the famous fossil for a while now, and I actually really like how the poses turned out! I think it was @strange-kaleidoscope who once said they liked that my extinct creatures were always happy.. I apologize for letting you down in that regard this time, friend, but I hope the cool battle stances make up for it at least? 😅

Fictional small town in the middle of nowhere in real country: par for the course in any genre

Fictional major city in real country: standard fair, but it's usually clearly based on a real city

Fictional suburb of real major city in real country: strange but I can see the application

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

you know

this

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.

Since I’m seeing a few people tagging or commenting with the assumption that this post is about US history: this is a Canadian blog, based on my experiences in Canada, and this mine waste phenomenon is, unfortunately, a problem in much of the world. Nova Scotia, for example, had three separate “gold rush” phases from the 1860s to the 1930s.

Also, bonus content for those who are startled/fascinated by the arsenic concentrations, here’s a sample page from the Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) report by Mike Parsons et al., showing arsenic concentrations at Mooseland, which isn’t a site I’ve worked on, but is noteworthy because one soil sample was over one-quarter arsenic. The site I worked at with a “tablespoon of soil to kill six people” calculation was less than half of that.

And for added context, the “acceptable and safe” concentration of arsenic in the soil on an industrial site, if I remember right, is 31mg/kg in Nova Scotia. The lowest sample shown here is over 6,000mg/kg.

okay