Saved comments during December 2021

[neonvincent]

My comment on Mouse Lemurs in the Mangroves at Synapsida.

This is the second time in a few days that I've run across small lemurs in my feed. The other was the latest episode of Bizarre Beasts on YouTube, which posted a video about fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, calling them "The Primate That Might Hold The Key to Long Distance Space Travel" because of their ability to hibernate. They're not mouse lemurs, but they are in the same family, Cheirogaleidae. Here's the URL of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-8IIWySAJM

My comment on Miocene (Pt 30): Horned Armadillos and Marsupial Dogs.

Your posts are proof that even professionals like me, who worked at Rancho La Brea, can learn something new from a dedicated amateur like yourself. If I hadn't been reading this post and then followed up on Wikipedia, I might not have known that sparrasodonts are Metatheria but not part of the crown group of marsupials, that dryolestoids were therians that branched off before the eutherian-metatherian split, and that such creatures as Gondwanatheria like Patagonia even existed. Thank you, I feel much smarter as a paleontolgist and evolutionary biologist for knowing these facts.

Looking forward to you final post for the year, which I expect will be Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2021. I've found those to be important posts, because they inspire a lot of your writing about fossils for the next year. May this year's follow in that tradition.

My comment on Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2021.

Since I spent four years working at the Tar Pits museum and walked past its wall of dire wolf skulls more times than I can count, I find the news about the most common predator at Rancho La Brea to be the most intriguing of this roundup. "It now looks likely that dire wolves descended from some native American animal..." The usual suspect is "Canis" armbrusteri, but I haven't seen anyone move the species from Canis to Aenocyon yet. Maybe that's because it requires DNA or collagen protein testing and even the youngest specimens are too old at 250,000 years old to perform that research. Maybe no one has thought of it yet. Maybe someone has and just hasn't completed the study and published it yet. I hope we find out!

My comment on All the World's Deer: Small Deer of South America.

My first encounter with the word Mazama, the genus name for brockets, was for the stratovolcano that stood where Crater Lake now sits in its caldera. I originally thought the name was the original Native American one for the now imploded mountain and the deer was named after it. Not at all! The direction of the name runs the other way, from the deer through a mountaineering club with the name, who took it to mean mountain goat instead of brocket, which is what Mazama means in Spanish as well as at least one Native American language that borrowed it from the Aztec language Nahuatl, to the prehistoric mountain, as they named it after themselves. If your series on deer hadn't inspired me to do this research, I may never have found any of this out! By the way, since I'm also a geologist and lecture on Crater Lake in my classes, I can use this information when I teach. Thank you!

My comment on the last Magic Monday of 2021.

I stumbled across a YouTube channel featuring music tuned to A at 432 Hertz earlier this year. That number piqued my interest, so I searched the net for it. I found claims with scientific support that it calmed people and helped them concentrate and occult explanations that it did so by interacting with different chakras than music with the standard A=440 Hz tuning. Have you heard of this and, if so, what do you know about it?

My comment on Notes on the Lemurian Deviation.

I'm glad you mentioned the scientific origin of Lemuria, showing how science influences the occult. I suspect its adoption by occultists probably didn't help its acceptance by science before plate tectonics, demonstrating that science has defenses against ideas moving the other way, at least after Issac Newton. It also didn't help that Eduard Suess had come up with an earlier and larger land bridge, Gondwanaland, that occupied much of the same area. That's the hypothetical land mass that Alexander Du Toit repurposed as the name for the southern supercontinent and is the one scientists use today, not Lemuria. Ah, the contingent nature of history!

Speaking of which, I know of another lost continent, Mu. When I looked it up, I found that its advocates thought it was both another name for Lemuria and another location for it entirely, in the middle of the Pacific. I can easily think of material reasons that refute its existence, such as the lack of flooded continental crust in the area — advocates of the idea might be better off moving it farther south to New Zealand, which has that geologic feature — but I don't know what the occult reasons for its disadvantage relative to Lemuria are. It's certainly not in the scheme of the sequence of five civilizations you mentioned. Do you have anything that could shed light on Mu not being as accepted in occult circles as Lemuria, if that's indeed the case?

Before I leave, I looked up the major language family thought to be from Sundaland. It's Austronesian, which makes sense in terms of its current distribution, but not in light of other evidence, which points to Taiwan. That's the one most linguists accept. Do you know of a way to reconcile those two views?

My comment on BREITBART COMMENTERS: THE COLORADO WILDFIRES WERE CAUSED BY CALIFORNIA LIBERALS.

"...plus BLM!" If they were complaining about the Bureau of Land Management, they would at least be barking in the right forest, if not up the right tree. However, it's Breitbart, so management of federal land isn't likely what excites them. Instead, I suspect it's the other BLM that upsets them. I don't know what that has to do with wildfires, even if they do associate the movement with liberals.