Mohamed (Mo)

Critic Michael Schaub says Crissy Van Meter “is a wonderful writer, and her novel is so beautifully written, it’s somewhat surprising that it’s a debut.” Check out his full review here.

Mesozoic (252-66 Ma) means ‘middle life’ and is the middle part of the Phanerozoic (visible life) and is most famously known for the dinosaurs and reptiles that took over the world during this time. I didn’t take too many photo in this exhibit but they had a lot of really amazing skulls of strange creatures. 

A common misconception is that crocodiles (usually people say reptiles but that’s not a real group.. it’s more of a composite of many things, another story for another post) are types of dinosaurs and this simple tree explains it very well. Dinosaurs and crocodiles are both archosaurs and they share a common ancestor but they are not within the same group, unless you are talking about archosaurs! Birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than crocodiles are because they fall within Dinosauria. Archosaurs first came about in the Early Triassic and are still around today, say hi to your neighborhood archosaurs - birds! 

The creature below is called Metoposaurus which translates to ‘front lizard’. This bizarre looking creature is extinct (phew) and was an amphibian known from the Late Triassic (the oldest part of the Mesozoic) of parts of Europe. I failed to get a good scale in here but this creature could be up to 10 feet long and could weigh upwards of 1,000 lbs, if that gives you some context for the frighteningly pointy teeth in its mouth. 

There are two main types of dinosaurs: (1) Ornithischia (bird hipped) and (2) Saurischia (lizard hipped). Guess which group birds fall into? Saurischia - hahahaha, whoopsies! There has been a lot of recent work that suggests these relationships are different from these traditional views but for the purposes of the blog we won’t get into the nitty gritty details. Ornithischians include creatures like Triaceratops, Ankylosaurus, etc. - primarily herbivorous (plant eating) creatures. Where as Saurischia includes the carnivores (meat eating) creatures such as Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor.

The Sam Noble Museum had really great replicas of the hips that you could touch and examine the differences. So a key difference is the direction of the pubis bone - that’s the long thing that sort of juts out the bottom. This is backwards facing for ornithischians to provide more room for their belly - remember, plant eaters don’t get as much nutrients out of the same amount of food as meat eaters so they have to eat MUCH more (in some cases constantly) to perform daily tasks. The pubis bone is forward facing in saurischians to accommodate a different type of motion - bipedal running. The meat eaters needed to be fast and agile to catch their prey! 

Below we see Maggie posing next to an Apatosaurus femur (thigh bone). Apatosaurus is a type of sauropod (long neck) dinosaurs. The information said this creature was not fully grown and was collected in Oklahoma! This specific site had produced many dinosaur bones of the same kind suggesting that they lived in groups. 

The image below shows a reconstruction of Aquilops an early ceratopsian dinosaur (related to Triceratops). This creature is known from only a single fossil - the skull and lower jaw! It is so cool that scientists are able to reconstruct what the animal would have looked like from such limited data!!! This would have been a very small creature and like other early ceratopsians didn’t have the big frill of Triceratops but rather little spikes near it’s cheeks. 

Below we saw the largest (Guinness World Record holding) skull of any land animal ever found - Pentaceratops. This specimen was found in San Juan Co., New Mexico and was really a sight to behold because it was ridiculously large!!! This one looks more like the publicized Triceratops than the cute little guy above. 

Last image for the Mesozoic! We are reaching the end of the Cretaceous now, and you guessed it, there was another extinction event. This event is most memorable for wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs. But our mammal ancestors made it through the extinction event! The scene below is a complex marine ecosystem, it’s easy to forget about the life under the sea but many marine invertebrates suffered great losses during this extinction event as well. 

Golden Age Comic Book Stories

THE RAY

Appeared in Smash Comics #14 (Sept/1940) - #40 (Feb/1943)

Lol, he sent me a message on tumblr over 3 years ago after seeing one of my YouTube videos. Me, being the person I am with strange dudes messaging me, would respond like days later but didn’t ignore him because he was just so darned polite. We ended up talking a little more as acquaintances because we were interested in similar things. And he ended up being a great comfort to me when I was upset on several occasions, sending just very polite and sweet messages of hope. He also helped me out with advice when I was caring for a lady on hospice, which I was extremely grateful for.

About a year and a half later, he got stationed for a clinical rotation at the medical school of my university. I offered to show him around town figuring maybe we would meet up once or twice during his time in town. Instead, we kept meeting up over and over and over again during that time for lunch and coffee dates and to hang out and realized that we needed to take our friendship to be something more. Every time we would meet, we would just talk and talk. It was completely effortless. And even though we grew up on opposite sides of the world, we were amazed by how much we shared in common.

So the night before he had to leave for his next rotation, he took me out to dinner and told me that he cared for me as more than a friend. We both admitted that we would be interested in marriage but would need to take things slow and tell our families. But by the end of that night, I knew I was going to marry him, and all of the pieces went into place from there. Two months later, he got to meet my family, who absolutely fell in love with him. And a few months after that, we were officially engaged.

So that’s our story. From tumblr to chance clinical rotations to taking little leaps of faith all along the way.

If you want to be as erudite and elite as the Classics Clique, you’d better add these books to your reading pile…

Specific prose/poetry/plays mentioned:

Untimely Meditations by Friedrich Nietzsche, Epigraph Republic, Book II by Plato, Epigraph Tom Swift by Victor Appleton, 6 Paradise Lost by John Milton, 8, 91 Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, 33 The New Testament, 36 Agamemnon by Aeschylus, 40 Oresteia by Aeschylus, 40 Inferno by Dante, 41, 115 Poetics by Aristotle, 41 The Iliad by Homer, 41, 627 The Bacchae by Euripides, 42, 204 Parmenides by Plato, 67 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, 85 Rover Boys by Edward Stratemeyer, 85 Journey from Chester to London by Thomas Pennant, 85 The Club History of London by ?, 85 The Pirates of Penzance by W.S. Gilbert, 85 Bobbsey Twins by Laura Lee Hope, 85 Marino Faliero by Lord Byron, 85 The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, 89 Sherlock Homes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 92, 622 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, 94 Mémoires by Duc de Saint-Simon, 103 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, 110 Othello by Shakespeare, 115 The World Book Encyclopedia, 117 Men of Thought and Deed by E. Tipton Chatsford Invisible Man by H.G. Wells Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up by J. M. Barrie, 180 The Divine Comedy by Dante, 184 Superman Comics, 417 The Upanishads, 441, 466 Perry Mason Novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, 442 With Rue my Heart is Laden by A.E. Housman, 466 Lycidas by John Milton, 466 The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 466 In Flanders Fields by John McCrae, 466 Corpus of Mycenaean Inscriptions from Knossos, 481 Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, 554 The Malcontent by John Marston, 615 The White Devil by John Webster, 615 The Broken Heart by John Ford, epilogue epigraph, 615 Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, 616 The Revenger’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, 616 Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, 619

Authors mentioned:

J.R.R. Tolkien, 6 Ezra Pound, 16 T.S. Eliot, 16 Alfred Douglas, 18 Robert de Montesquiou, 18 Plato, 22, 36 Homer, 23, 36, 49, 509 Dante, 33 Virgil, 33 Plotinus, 37 Marie Corelli, 85 Shakespeare, 91, 615 Alexander Pope, 103 John Donne, 117 Rupert Brooke, 120 Edgar Allen Poe, 132, 200 Hegel, 139 Raymond Chandler, 153 Gregory of Tours, 481 Thomas Aquinas, 509 P.G. Wodehouse, 538 George Orwell, 576-7 Harold Acton, 577 Salman Rushdie, 582 Agatha Christie, 587 Proust, 612 John Webster, 615 Thomas Middleton, 615 Cyril Tourneur, 615 John Ford, 615 Christopher Marlowe, 615 Walter Raleigh, 615 Thomas Nashe, 615

The next one is Selemene in my artpack of the Gods and Goddesses of Dota2. Moon blessings upon the loyal warriors.

Crystal Maiden and Mirana by Kittichai Reaungchaichan