The news is the usual mix of non-scandals, made-up scandals, idiotic commentaries, and dodging and weaving by the movers and shakers. Just to give you a good take on how important it all is, consider this:
And just to give you an idea of what the world looked in the time of Diplodocus and Stegosaurus:
There's a really neat site called "The Paleomap Project" with maps of the earth through time. It's fascinating, particularly when you think about how they can identify various landmasses -- do you know where Alaska was during the Cambrian era?
I may just spend the next hour browsing through that.
The Mesozoic Era, which lasted from about 250 million to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. As a kid, this brought to mind one endless summer when dinosaurs flourished. And many of the books I read picked one environment from three different periods within the era to represent dinosaur life. Little Coelophysis was the canonical Triassic dinosaur; the huge sauropods and theropods of the Morrison Formation represented the Jurassic, and a Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus versus Triceratops face-off ultimately capped off the succession. With the periods juxtaposed this way, millions of years didn’t seem so very long.(Emphasis in original.)
But let’s unpack some of that scenery. Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and their neighbors roamed western North America about 150 million years ago. This slice of time falls in the latter portion of the Jurassic. The traditional representatives of the latest Cretaceous scene—Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops—did not evolve until about 67 million years ago. By themselves, these dates are just labels, but think of them falling along evolution’s timeline. About 83 million years separated Apatosaurus from Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus from Triceratops. The so-called Age of Mammals—which began when the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out—has been going on for about 66 million years. Less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus.
And just to give you an idea of what the world looked in the time of Diplodocus and Stegosaurus:
There's a really neat site called "The Paleomap Project" with maps of the earth through time. It's fascinating, particularly when you think about how they can identify various landmasses -- do you know where Alaska was during the Cambrian era?
I may just spend the next hour browsing through that.
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