#extinct plants

I recently saw the movie Rapa Nui 1994, which was a box office bomb unfortunately because it’s a really good movie. I really liked how they dressed everybody this really tickled me good. I also love that the movie was shot on location in Easter island.

The score sounds so amazing like oh my God . I do remember in the Birdman competition when they go to Motu Nui.

I noticed that the bird in the picture above is a booby bird, but not the Tern that is mentioned in the lore.

This begs me to ask the question that could they couldn’t afford the Terns ?.

But I really loved the movie. I liked to see, especially how they handled the main conflict of the movie.

Also, Cliff Curtis, I recently seen him in avatar and I love him. I’m glad now that I have Cliff Curtis submerged into a DVD disc, even though he doesn’t say much he is very expressive in his character as the short ear.

The chief who is the grandfather of the main protagonist is simply amazing. I like him he is a bit mad because he keeps on demanding for bigger and bigger Moai but he is a bit funny .

He also leaves on a giant iceberg that shows up after the bird band competition. They called his iceberg the white canoe. 

And around the end of the film, the main final straw for the short ears was when the priest who is in the first picture by the way request for the next building of the Moai that it be bigger and with beards.

Like they did not wanted to do that shit . And it’s understandable like these long ear people are not working. They don’t manually build this shit. They just ask and ask like oh that doesn’t look right do it again and it takes six months just to build one of them. 

But I’m giving away too many details honestly 10 out of 10 movie although there is some booby, not the bird although the bird is in the movie for some reason, I have no idea. The landscape of the movie since it was shot literally on location in Easter. Ireland is honestly beautiful.

10/10 movie 

 

Oh yes, I forgot to explain some pictures. 

The one with the palm tree is a representative to be the last tree on Easter island, but unless you include the Toromiro which is native to the island which is still currently around they are replanting it, although is still listed on Wikipedia as extinct in the wild.

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. Basically, I'd already moved on to human history, but I'd periodically get a pre-homin suggestion, hence the occasional random item waaay out of it's time period, rather than reopen the category.

In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had. (Invention ofs tend to fall in an earlier grouping if it's still open. Ones that imply height of or just before something tend to get grouped later, but not always. Sometimes I'll split two different things from the same culture into different polls because they involve separate research goals or the like).

So--if you were going to bring back any extinct species of animal, plant, etc., without any negative environmental repercussions, which would it be?

Excerpt from this story from National Geographic:

From before the rise of Athens to the height of the Roman Empire, one of the most sought-after products in the Mediterranean world was a golden-flowered plant called silphion. For ancient Greek physicians, silphion was a cure-all, prized for everything from stomach pain to wart removal. For Roman chefs, it was a culinary staple, crucial for spicing up an everyday pot of lentils or finishing an extravagant dish of scalded flamingo. During the reign of Julius Caesar, more than a thousand pounds of the plant was stockpiled alongside gold in Rome’s imperial treasuries, and silphion saplings were valued at the same price as silver.

But just seven centuries after the adored plant was first documented growing along the coast of Cyrenaica, in what is now modern Libya (according to one chronicler, it was in 638 B.C. after a “black rain” fell) silphion disappeared from the ancient Mediterranean world.

Since the Middle Ages, botanical explorers inspired by ancient accounts of this remarkable plant have sought it on three continents, and always in vain. Many historians view the disappearance of silphion as the first recorded extinction of any species, plant or animal, and a cautionary tale in how thoroughly human appetite can erase a species from the wild.

But is silphion truly extinct? Thanks to a lucky encounter almost 40 years ago, and decades of subsequent research, a professor at Istanbul University suspects he has re-discovered the last holdouts of the ancient plant more than a thousand years after it disappeared from history books, and nearly a thousand miles from where it once grew.

The root ball—the chemical factory of the plant—perfumed the air with a pleasant, slightly medicinal odor, halfway between eucalyptus and pine sap. “To me, the smell is stimulating, as well as relaxing,” Miski explained. “You can see why everybody who encounters this plant becomes attached to it.”

Miski’s hunch that Ferula drudeana would prove to be a chemical gold mine turned out to be correct: Analyses of the root extract identified 30 secondary metabolites—substances which, while they don’t contribute to the primary business of helping a plant grow or reproduce, nonetheless confer some kind of selective advantage. Among the compounds, many of which have cancer-fighting, contraceptive, and anti-inflammatory properties, is shyobunone, which acts on the brain’s benzodiazepine receptors and may contribute to the plant’s intoxicating smell. Miski believes that future analyses of the plant will reveal the existence of dozens of yet-to-be-identified compounds of medical interest.