Ignis Aurum Probat

Some guy in 1893 reading Dracula for the first time: Huh.. What a strange fellow…why doesn’t he drink wine?

“Tell Yoshi bedtime story now.”

More fun, more positive, more genuine, and everyone is clearly having a good time.

They kinda came and went and that’s it.

It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.

Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.

They smother every other living plant to death

Those trees under there are dead, they can’t get sunlight. Kudzu takes over and steals everything from these trees, and becomes them. It’s creepy as hell. These plants are basically straight out of a horror novelist’s wet dream tbh.

The bodies of everything the kudzu has slain.

What used to be a house

Someone attempting to drive a four wheeler through it, to give you scale

It’s an ornamental plant kept in check in china, but was introduced to north america where it immediately went rampant and began to spread incredibly fast like a disease, destroying everything in its wake

This little buddy doing his part

“the growth of kudzu as it became a “structural parasite” of the South,[7] enveloping entire structures when untreated[11] and often referred to as “the vine that ate the South”.[13]”

“It has been spreading rapidly in the southern U.S., “easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually”.[2]“

yall it’s been estimated this plant consumes 600 kilometers of the united states every year

These guys are Azhdarchid pterosaurs, and they were some of the strangest reptiles to ever exist. They were perfectly capable of flight, but their physiology suggests that they may have spent a significant portion of their lives hunting on the ground. 

The largest of them could reach over 5 metres tall while standing, and had a 10-metre wingspan. They varied greatly in body type, from the tall, spindly forms of Quetzalcoatlus and Arambourgiania (images 4 and 1-2 respectively) to the heavy brute strength of Hatzegopteryz, a species that may have used its head to bludgeon its prey (images 2 and 3).

There has never been another flying animal before or since to have reached such incredible sizes, nor any predator so intimidatingly tall. Well, not any that we know of yet.

All of these illustrations are by Mark Witton, a palaeontologist and artist who specialises in pterosaurs. This is his blog about palaeontology and the science of reconstructing extinct species. You can find out more about each of these images here, here and here.

The protagonists and a few disposable minor characters are walking carefully through a forest at night, covered by a thick fog. They know there are dinosaurs everywhere, but they can’t see more than three metres in front of their own faces.

Eventually they stop near a small cluster of trees to rest. As they sit there, exhausted, one of the trees begins to move. Everyone freezes, terrified. They have no idea what this thing is.

Then a massive beak slams down, longer than a person is tall, and plucks one of the minor characters off his feet and into the air.

The small group erupts into movement, frantically running away from whatever those things are. There’s two of them now, and as the fog begins to clear the group are able to make out more of their shape. They are huge, with long, spindly necks topped with a massive, daggerlike head. The long legs that they once mistook for trees have an almost mechanical movement as the giant creatures stalk towards them. And then comes the next terrible surprise.