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i'm feeling autistic about plants so, maclura pomifera
It's a small North American tree commonly known as the Osage orange or "hedge-apple"
Before barbed wire was invented, it was used to make living fences; when you kept pruning it, it would sprout a thick impenetrable wall of thorny shoots.
The wood's properties are also insane: it's super-strong, burns really hot, and is highly resistant to rotting. It is said to have been VERY valued by Native Americans for making into bows.
However it produces these
DEEPLY CURSED fruits that are huge and inedible. Not poison. They just suck. They're hard, woody and secrete weird latex.
And they produce SO MANY it weighs the whole tree down
Before colonization it was found only in a small patch of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Now they're everywhere. In the Bluegrass region of Kentucky you see them loaded down with fruit all over the place.
HOWEVER we have no idea how it's supposed to spread naturally. No living animal is any good at seed dispersal. It's like the sunfish of trees.
I love Osage oranges so much, apparently they might have been eaten and spread by woolly mammoths, ground sloths, or mastodons but itâs still something of a mystery! I think they have found Osage orange seeds and DNA in mastodon and ground sloth dung though!
The softball-sized fruits of the Osage orange may have evolved to be eaten by extinct megafauna, and their wood is ideal for making archery
Thanks everyone for the kind comments on my last post. Iâve been taking more photos using my magnifying loop. It is so cool to be able to see all the tiny details!
Thanks everyone for the kind comments on my last post. Iâve been taking more photos using my magnifying loop. It is so cool to be able to see all the tiny details!
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I just got a magnifying loop and Iâm learning how to use it with my phone camera to take pictures of fossils, shells and plants and of course lichens!!!
Something unexpected that I really love about Prehistoric Planet is how it stays in a single period in time and explores it, rather than trying to cover the entire Mesozoic and show the world changing. If you showed an alien the programme with the intro cut out and the title censored, they probably would never even guess it was a show about a distant time in Earthâs past. In just being a wildlife documentary that happens to be set 66 million years ago, itâs showing the Maastrichtian world as a living, full-formed, very real world that existed for an unbelievably long time, rather than a phase in an even longer evolutionary process. Now donât get me wrong, I love wide sweeps of evolutionary history like Walking With Dinosaurs too, but Prehistoric Planetâs vibes are very different and I never knew I needed them. In fact, Iâm really hoping we wonât even see a trace of the meteorite in episode five. Let me just go on a little tangent to really get into why.
This is Trix the T. rex. I saw her in the Naturalis natural history museum. She lived and died 67 million years ago. Now, it is very easy for me to see that date and be filled with a sense of impending disaster. âJust before the endâ is a thought that quickly appears. But when you really think about it, thatâs ludicrous. Trix lived her life, and then after she died her species continued to thrive for a million years. Thereâs thrice as much time between her and the Tyrannosauruses who died in the K-Pg extinction as there is between me and the first members of my species! And as for the thousands of years of recorded human history, those are a mere drop in that sea of time. Those years didnât pass any faster back then than they do now, nor were they any less real. There were just as many moments in any one of those thousand millennia between Trix and the meteorite as there were in the millennium between me and Basil the Bulgar-slayer. If a wizard told you your species and your world would continue to thrive for a million years before eventually most of your clade would get wiped out by a terrible catastrophe, would you see your world as a doomed and temporary one about to go over a precipice? I think I would be delighted to know we have such a vast sea of time left.
This got longer and more philosophical than I expected, but the point is that I love the focus on the Maastrichtian as a diverse, living world, rather than the last age of the Mesozoic. We donât know whether Prehistoric Planet is set a million, fifty thousand, or nine hundred years before impact, and it doesnât really matter either. Even though all those dates are, geologically speaking, so close to the end of the Cretaceous we could barely tell the difference between them, they all have more time left than any of the animals can possibly conceive of. None of the animals we see in Prehistoric Planet have ever seen a Stegosaurus, and none of them will die as a consequence of a meteorite striking the Earth.
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INFORMATION I WAS NOT PREPARED TO LEARN. MAYBE WE *ARE* ALONE. BECAUSE WE ARE SO *EARLY*. IF THERE IS EVER GALACTIC CIVILIZATION THEY WILL NOT REMEMBER US AT ALL. BECAUSE WE ARE NOTHING. CELLS, JUST BEGINNING TO FORM LIFE. SORRY FOR SCREAMING. BUT ARE YOU LISTENING. ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT IT.
Well, there were some quirks. It was carbon-based, which was mildly interesting, and Arcâs shuttle readouts told her that it was the plants that had developed photosynthesis, weirdly. The atmosphere had a massive amount of oxygen, and there was all that water, too, more than she had ever seen in one place before. And every planet was, as her trainers had told her, its own unique jewel.
But one thing they had not told her was that all the jewels started to blend together after a while, and after a little longer each one became just another assignment. So the planet was just another assignment. A little ball of water and tumbled stone and flora in a cul-de-sac of the galaxy. One more stack of paperwork for Arc to get through before she could go home to her marital partners and offspring.
Arc aimed her shuttle in the middle of one of the larger continents, away from the mountain range and near a smaller body of (oh, gosh, more) water. As she got closer to the ground, though, her shuttle readouts changed. There were irregular smudges of radiation on the surface, and chemical evidence of constructed materials. Arc squinted, and her tertiary limbs started to shiver in frustration. There were ruins down there. Nobody had told her sheâd be surveying a formerly inhabited planet. Great, she thought. Now Iâm never getting home.
Arc sent a note by ansible to Ecba, her dearest marital partner. A few mins later, as her shuttle settled on the ground, she got back the image of a hand-sculpted message. âMy little machine,â it said, Ecbaâs sweetheart-name for her, and she could see all the love that went into the lettering. âDoes it have to be you?â
Arc put on her enviro-suit and got her surveying monitor. âMaybe not,â she sent. She didnât have the same skill in sculpting that Ecba had, so she just had to trust that her love was conveyed in the digital lettering. âWish me luck. Iâll try to come home to you all soon.â
Then she stepped out into the world.
The first thing she noticed was that the sky was blue. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Blue was for water, and some crystal formations, and nebulae, not the sky. She wondered what it had done to whatever inhabitants used to live here, to have such a bright, unwieldy color as the backdrop of their days. If they used the light spectrum to see at all, that was. Well, she thought as she carried her surveying monitor away from the shuttle, sheâd find out.
The second thing she noticed was that the ruins were invisible from the ground. All she could see for kiloms and kiloms was wildly ambitious vegetation, some rocks, and the melodramatic blue of the sky. The ruins must have been old enough that any wood or rock or even petroleum deposits would have broken down into microscopic pieces, from time or the weather, or been buried. Whatever she was dealing with wasnât just gone, it was long gone.
Arc felt herself start to get interested, despite her desire to go home. Junior surveyors like her didnât get mysteries like this. Ruins were one thing, the residue of a solitary existence before the inhabitants discovered, or were discovered by, other planets and polities, and they left to make a new life among the stars. But mysteries were something else.
She found a flat place to set up her surveying monitor, and set the aperture. Immediately she was surrounded by a hologram re-creation of her surroundings. She figured five thousand years was long enough, to start with. She flipped the dial back, clacked her secondary limbs for luck, and told it to go.
Nothing. The hologram was the same, just ruins and vegetation.
Arc checked the monitor. It seemed to be working fine. She turned it off and turned it on again just to make sure. Then she set it for ten thousand years.
Ruins. Vegetation. Nothing else.
Arc turned the hologram off, and sat back and looked around. The vegetation gave her no answers. She clacked her limbs in confusion, and then thought, Fuck it, and set the monitor for a hundred thousand years. Even if she missed the departure point, the thing she was always told to capture first, at least sheâd get something.
Nothing. Even so far back, everything was exactly the same.
Arc started to get a bad feeling. She tried two hundred thousand years, and nothing. Three hundred thousand years. Then, feeling like she was losing her mind, she set it back five hundred thousand years.
And, there.
It wasnât the inhabitants, but she could see traces of the buildings they had built for themselves, in the process of crumbling to nothing. She started creeping slowly back in time from there: year after year. The weather patterns on the monitor were very different from what she was experiencing now, with scorching heat and hurricanes, the air filled with ash. There was no vegetation. Arcâs bad feeling crystallized into fear.
Finally, finally, she found a living soul. Just one, wandering through the ruins, shielding itself from the blistering sunlight. It walked right in front of her on the hologram, and turned and looked straight through her. She stared at it, trying to understand.
It was a soft, squishy thing, bipedal and barely coming to half her height. It moved like nothing she'd ever seen, and she shouldn't have been able to read any emotion in that strange face and those alien limbs. But she saw grief there, she was sure of it.
Back, and back. The ruins rebuilt themselves, the weather patterns steadied. Arc saw more of those strange bipedal beings, and other squishy creatures that connected to the beings with string. She saw small fauna and stone roads, machines that moved and buildings so tall they blocked out the sky. She found a group of three, a taller being and two very short ones, and watched them for a long time, as they came and went from the image of the building in front of her. After watching them for a while, she realized that they were a family.
Arc found another being, and watched it making something out of wood: a little carving of one of the creatures that moved along on string. She saw beings creating machines that made images, and she saw beings painting colors on walls. She saw beings fighting each other, killing each other, mourning each other. She saw them raising each other, playing with each other. She saw them making and making: creating by themselves, creating together. And all of them so long ago, long before even Arc's people, the oldest civilization she knew, had begun to walk among the stars.
These beings, the ones that had lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, had spent the entire course of their existence alone in the universe. The ruins weren't ruins because they had left for better things. The ruins were ruins because they had died out, all of them, millennia before they could be found.
Arc felt grief well up inside of her, and she began to keen. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Life was meant to find other life; that's what life was for.
How lonely they must have been, she thought, singing her mourning song for them. All that creation, all that art and all that play, the machines that made images, the paint scrawled on walls, the carvings made with strange limbs but with so much love that Arc could feel it even now â and they couldn't share it with anyone. How impossible the galaxy, the universe, must have felt to them.
Iâm sorry, she thought, and keened for them. Iâm sorry you were all alone. Iâm sorry we were too late for you, and that you were too early for us. I'm sorry for all of it. But weâre here now. We have you. Youâre not alone anymore, and youâll never be alone again.
After a while she calmed. The holographic images were still going, and she found herself struck by another family: this one had many large beings and a few small ones, and it was clear in their movements how much they loved each other. That was important, she thought. That love was what was left, after everything. That love was what she was here to preserve.
Arc got up off the ground on shaky limbs, still grief-stricken but feeling stronger. She went back to her shuttle and sent the images she had recorded to her supervisors, along with a note that they needed to send more of her colleagues, now, so that everything could be captured faithfully.
She also sent a note to Ecba. âMy star,â Arc wrote. âI have memories I need to excavate here. I am sorry I will not be home soon. I will come back when I can, but in the meantime know that I love you, and our family.â
Then she got her carving tools, and her clay. She wasn't as good as Ecba, but this memory, these stories, deserved the work of her hands.
Arc went back to her surveying monitor. She turned it on, and wound it back and back, farther than sheâd ever imagined it was possible for life to go. She braced herself for grief again, and for the love she was going to find. She arranged her clay, and picked up her tools. She let the monitor play, showing her the planetâs long, brilliant memory. And then she began to tell the story.