Wash! Your! Hands!

It’s very similar in Sweden. I forgot not everyone has ”Christ-heaven-trip-day” (literally how you translate it in Swedish) as like a national holiday where many people are off work.

Also confirmation. I feel like every country do confirmation extremely differently but just like in Norway, it’s more like a ”coming of age” ritual here in Sweden. Not everyone does confirmations, I was the only one in my friendgroup that did, but yeah I went to camp for 3 weeks and everything. And I feel like if an American would see what we did at that camp they’d not even call it ”Christian” cause no one there was very religious in the way they talked and acted.

For a long time there were no hadrosaurid fossils known from Africa.

This seemed to mainly be due to the limits of the geography of their time. Hadrosaurs evolved and flourished during the late Cretaceous, when Africa was isolated from all the other continents, and they didn't seem to have ever found their way across the oceanic barriers.

…Until in 2021 a small hadrosaur was discovered in Morocco, a close relative of several European species, showing that some of these dinosaurs did reach northwest Africa just before the end of the Cretaceous - and with no land bridges or nearby island chains to hop along, they must have arrived from Europe via swimming, floating, or rafting directly across several hundred kilometers of deep water.

And now another hadrosaur has just been described from the same time and place.

Minqaria bata lived in Morocco at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 67 million years ago. Only known from a partial skull, its full appearance and body size is unknown, but it probably measured around 3.5m long (~11'6") – slightly larger than its previously discovered relative, but still very small for a hadrosaur. It might represent a case of insular dwarfism, since at the time Morocco may have been an island isolated from the rest of northwest Africa.

Along with its close relative Ajnabia, and at least one other currently-unnamed larger hadrosaur species, Minqaria seems to be part of a rapid diversification of hadrosaurs following their arrival in Morocco, adapting into new ecological niches in their new habitat where the only other herbivorous dinosaur competition was titanosaurian sauropods, and the only large predators were abelisaurs.

If the K-Pg mass extinction hadn't happened just a million years later, who knows what sort of weird African hadrosaurs we could have ended up with?

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Dinosaur Brachytrachelopan mesai, of Late Jurassic, Argentina!

In a clade known for their long necks, Brachytrachelopan mesai is known for having the shortest neck. This (comparatively) small sauropod comes from a family of oddball sauropods with already shorter-than-average necks, Dicraeosauridae, known best for the famous sail-necked Amargasaurus and Bajadasaurus. Even though Brachytrachelopan was the smallest of its family, with the shortest neck, it was still a large animal, at 10–11 metres (33–36 ft) in length and 5 metric tons (5.5 short tons) in body mass. Brachytrachelopan’s shorter neck was likely an adaptation for lower browsing, allowing it to occupy a niche similar to iguanodontian ornithopods, which seemed to be absent from Late Jurassic Gondwana. Likewise, while North America at the time was abundant with iguanodontians, they lacked Dicraeosaurids. The two clades may have been ecological analogs, resulting from parallel evolution in two distantly related dinosaurian lineages to fill a similar niche.

Brachytrachelopan mesai is known from the Cañadón Calcáreo Formation of Late Jurassic Argentina. It would have lived alongside other sauropods such as Tehuelchesaurus, which would have filled the niche of high browser instead, an indeterminate stegosaur, and crocodylomorphs like Almadasuchus. It could have been preyed on by the enigmatic theropod Pandoravenator, as well as an indeterminate abelisaurid.

I got this message (Take action now to keep access to your channel. Due to a local law, you need to invite a parent to set up supervision in order to have a channel and do things like upload videos or comment.) when I went to YouTube. As you can see, my location is FI (Finland). My channel location also set to Finland. We do not (at least not yet) have any laws that prohibit kids having YouTube accounts. It should not ask for age verification.

When I clicked the read more link it took me to a page that explained that minors must have like some kind of adult supervisor account linked to their account because of local laws in Brazil. Like I said, I am not located in Brazil.

My YouTube account is 9 years old and YouTubes terms of service say that you must be at least 13 years old to use YouTube. So if I had creatd my account when I was 13, shouldn't it think that I'm now 22?

I am using a VPN, but it''s location is set to Finland.

Eurotamandua joresi lived during the mid-Eocene, about 47 million years ago, in the lush subtropical forests that covered what is now central Germany.

When it was first described in the early 1980s it was classified as an anteater due to its close resemblance to some modern species… but there were big problems with this interpretation. Anteaters have a sparse fossil record, but they're known to have originated during the early Eocene in the isolated island continent of South America – so Eurotamandua's ancestors making it all the way to Europe within just a few million years would be pretty remarkable!

Also, on closer inspection it didn't have the distinctive skeletal features of a xenarthran mammal, suggesting it wasn't an anteater after all.

Instead more recent studies have identified it as a close relative of pangolins, part of an early branch of the group that didn't have the characteristic large scales.

About 90cm long (~3'), Eurotamandua would have a lifestyle much like the anteaters it convergently resembled, using its large claws to rip open ant nests and a long sticky tongue to feed.

———

Wait I forgot everyone doesn't do witches for easter. have some:

In the eastern, largely Orthodox Christian, part of Finland there was an old tradition of children going around on Palm Sunday, waving pussy willow branches, wishing a blessed Easter and a good year overall to people, and getting some small reward.

In the western, almost entirely Lutheran, parts of Finland there were a lot of traditions and superstitions about witches ("trullit", ultimately from Swedish troll and trollkarl, "magician") going around between Good Friday and Easter Sunday to curse their enemies or to steal luck from others, with people burning bonfires to scare the witches off.

After the Second World War, Finland lost 10 % of its land to Soviet Union, including most of Finnish Karelia. The people of the ceded regions were almost entirely evacuated and resettled elsewhere in Finland.

This brought the western tradition about witches in the Eastertime, and the eastern tradition of children going around with the willow branches, together and as the old superstitions faded and the society secularized overall, they blended.

So now we have children dressed up as witches (or in other costumes) going around with decorated willow branches, and getting candy and similar in return.

Ancient elephants traveled 300 kilometers across Europe – and Neanderthals were ready for them

When elephants roamed Europe, Neanderthals ran a complex “fat factory,” systematically hunting and processing the giant animals for food.

Archaeotherium

A genus of entelodont (Hell Pigs or Terror Pigs) from Eocene to Oligocene North America. Not actually closely related to pigs, but more closely related to hippos and cetaceans. They were about 2 m. long and stood 1.2 m. tall at the shoulder.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

We rolled out a significant change to how notes work on reblogs, and the reaction has been strong. We're not going to pretend otherwise. 

First things first: We're reversing the change. Your feedback in comments, emails, and especially reblogs, made clear that the rollout created problems we need to address before moving forward. We also should have communicated this differently from the start, and we didn't.

We still believe there's a better version of how reblogs can work. One that gives every voice in a chain the credit it deserves. But we want to get there with you.

In the coming days we'll share more on how we plan to do that,  including ways to work directly with some of you on this and future changes before they ship.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, we’ll keep reading your replies and reblogs, so please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas.

Your creativity has always been the heart of Tumblr, whether you’re the original poster or adding something brilliant in the reblogs, and nothing about this change is meant to limit that.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

EXTREMELY BAD HOLY FUCK.

But this. This changes the data architecture. This changes the SINGLE THING that makes tumblr the "... yes and" website. This KILLS THE COLLABORATIVE POSTING THAT MAKES THIS SITE DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHER MEDIA PLATFORMS.