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The La Brea Woman was found in close association with the remains of a domesticated dog. Her remains have been dated to between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago. Were there dogs that early in North America? How long ago were dogs domesticated?
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Fossils aren’t just remains of animals. Some of them are materials and marks left by organisms as they went about their lives. Called “trace fossils,” they are, instead of a snapshot of death, a snapshot of life.
Here are some articles about the traces humans left on our moon.
On the Moon, Flags & Footprints of Apollo Astronauts Won’t Last Forever
New Images Offer Sharper View of Apollo Sites
Here are some articles about some 190,000,000-year old dinosaur footprints.
Visit This Massachusetts Park With Dinosaur Footprints
And here are some articles about some 3.7-millean-year old footprints, left by some of our early ancestors.
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In the previous episode we talked about where the oil that formed them came from. Today, we talk about the fossils found in them. Located in the middle of a major city, the La Brea Tar Pits have given up fossils as much as 55-thousand years old.
Here’s a link to a 5-minute video that shows how material is processed from the tarpits, including the large bones and microfossils.
Behind the Scenes at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum
Here’s a link to the Page museum, where fossils and reconstructions from the tarpits are on display.
Between technical difficulties, research and recording, I’ve just barely managed to squeeze in some time to do some little chores with the code for my artificial life experiment software. I call my subleq based digital organisms “figures.”
The very next thing is to implement save and restore functions, so I can keep a population and play with it later. I hope to take care of that by the end of the weekend, but no promises.
Once that last little chore is done, I’ll zip up and archive figures0.3. Closing in on the end of this round, my thoughts have been drifting toward the next.
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Around the same time that the ancestors of humans branched from the apes, organic sediments were being laid down that would eventually turn into oil. Some of this oil worked its way along fault lines, and began seeping out of the ground at the surface. Located in L.A. these tar pits would capture animals, preserving their bones for the descendants of those early apes to puzzle over.
Here’s a link to an article about the down side to building a city over an oil deposit that is seeping out of the earth.
The Fiery Underground Oil Pit Eating L.A.
Here’s a 13-minute video about the 1989 explosion, caused by methane gas from the oil deposits under the city.
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The Burgess Shale is a deposited of shale that was formed from large underwater avalanches that berried organisms around a half-billion years ago, preserving the soft parts of the bodies. However, the fossils have been squeezed down to a thin layer of carbon, leaving shadows of what the creatures once were.
Here are a couple of links to more information about the Burgess Shale.
Smithsonian Institution Burgess Shale Home Page
The Burgess Shale – Royal Ontario Museum
Here’s a link to an episode about the Cambrian explosion.
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Not all fossils are large bones of things like dinosaurs or mammoths. Some of them are small enough to require a microscope in order to identify them. Called microfossils, these tiny fragments, and even remains of single-celled organisms, can tell us a good deal about things like the climate, the vegetation, the temperature, and chemical composition of the water and air when a given layer or strata of rock was laid down.
Here’s a link to an article about using microfossils to solve the mystery of what killed the last of the mammoths.
The last woolly mammoths in North America didn’t starve – they died of thirst
Here’s an article that talks about the use of microfossils for finding oil deposits.
USING MICROFOSSILS IN PETROLEUM EXPLORATION
And here are some articles about a few different types of microfossils.
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When I was a child, my family visit a dig site. They were excavating fossils of mammoths. Before we get back to examining natural history, we’ll spend a few episodes finding out where the evidence for the story comes from.
Here is a link to the hot springs mammoth site.
Here are some other sites that were discovered accidentally.
A 130,000-Year-Old Mastodon Threatens to Upend Human History
Mammoth Discovery Could Revise Earliest Date of Humans in the Americas
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Sometimes, very different organisms can end up having traits in common, even though they didn’t share those traits with an ancestor. Instead, different systems, solving similar problems, can come up with similar answers.
Here’s a link to the episode on eyes.
Here’s a link to an article about the similarities between human and squid eyes.
How Humans And Squid Evolved To Have The Same Eyes
Here’s a link to an episode about a large single-celled creature that came up with leaf like structures.
Ep 141: The largest of the small
Here are the best links I could find about the antlered fly. There was surprisingly little information about them on the internet.
In episode 144, I oh so casually mentioned that I was getting some runtime errors. They don’t happen in every run, but the fact that they happen at all is a problem. My artificial life system will eventually be running for days at a time as I do different experiments, and I can’t have these errors causing my system to halt.
What does one do when one sees output like the following?
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