Today, while working on my thesis, I found a handwritten note of a student on the inside of a cover of textbook from the 18th century. I always like to find these handwritten notes. I don't really know why. Maybe because it creates a connection with the subject of my thesis and also a connection with history that is much more personal. Just wanted to share it with tumblr.

It says:

"Hunc inventuri vestrum ne dicite librum;

Sed benefacturi reddite, quaeso, mihi,

Carolo De Goes Bruxellensi 1786"

Practical Geometry

The first dinosaur fossils were discovered in 1824, but it wasn’t until 1991 that the Chicxulub impact site was finally linked to their extinction. So 167 years passed in which we knew dinosaurs existed, but had no clue how they went extinct. As you can imagine, people had all kinds of guesses and ideas

My mother found a book of stories and nursery rhymes for children that she had growing up, and one of the stories was about the dinosaurs. At the end, it says we don’t know about what happened to the dinosaurs. One of the theories it proposes is that the dinosaurs may have starved from overconsumption of resources, because they’re so big that they must take a lot of food to sustain. My grandmother and another old person I asked both said that they learned a little bit about dinosaurs in school, but the subject of how they went extinct was conveniently left out

I have a book from 1901, entitled “The World’s Book Of Knowledge And Universal Educator”. This book is actually how I came up with this subject, because it has a very, very interesting theory for how dinosaurs went extinct. And honestly, for the time period, this theory makes quite a lot of sense. I love how creative it is. They did what they could with the knowledge they had

On page 593, the book says “In the days before the flood, the ichthyosaurus existed with eyes measuring one foot in diameter”

You likely noticed something about that: the sentence starts with “In the days before the flood”. This was my main point in all this. Here is what some people thought happened to the dinosaurs before we discovered the crater in Mexico. Notice anything? “In the days before the FLOOD, the ICHTHYOSAURUS existED…”. Some people thought the dinosaurs died out in the Noah’s Ark flood!