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Doctor Frankenstein’s favorite beer The semiprecious stone amber is fossilized tree resin. Sometimes, insects and other small critters are trapped by sticky tree sap, and become encased in amber. Sometimes, microorganisms are found inside amber. Sometimes, they’re yeast that can be revived and used to brew beer. Here’s an article about the yeast, revived and …
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A walk through other dating methods There are different candidates for the oldest preserved human footprints in North America. The older sight has a less certain date than the younger one. Today we look at ways of dating fossils, other than using carbon 14.
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Mystery solve, and dating fossils It took a bit of digging, but I found out why the domestic dog fossil found with the remains of the La Brea woman didn’t cause more of a sensation. Using carbon 14 dating, the dog fossil turned out to be around seven-thousand years younger than the fossil of the …
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Wait… she had a dog? 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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Footprints in the sand, stone, and on the moon 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 …
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The tar pit tar pits 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 …
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 …
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Fossils in fossil fuel 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 …
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Shadows in the stone 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. …
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Learning the most from the least 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, …