Said Jude Sparks, age 10,
interviewed by the NYT about the stegomastodon fossil he tripped over when he was 9.
Jude said that he went through a phase — between the ages of 5 and 8, to be exact — when dinosaurs and fossils excited him.... “I’m not really an expert, but I know a lot about it, I guess,” he said...
If you don't like going to the NYT,
here's the story at Fox News, with a different interview with young Mr. Sparks:
“I tripped on the bottom of the tusk and fell flat on my face... It looked like large chunks of bone.”
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14 comments:
Wow, I didn't know Hillary got out that far west, what with being a dinosaur.
--Vance
It's not a dinosaur. It's a mastodon.
That boy is boyspreading and boysplaining. He needs to check his white male privilege.
It's just an elephant. They PT Barnum Circus is older than we thought. Has The Hindu Spirit of Elephants demanded its sacred grave be restored yet.
I had to look up the difference, but it's not a mastodon, it's a stegomastodon.
Stegomastodon (not to be confused with the American mastodon, Mammut americanum) was the last surviving member of a lineage of primitive tuskers called "gomphotheres" which first entered North America 15 million years ago. By 1.3 million years ago (the approximate age of the Trenton site), these marvelous animals had all but disappeared from North America, supplanted by a recent immigrant to the new world, the mammoth (a modern, true elephant). Indeed, the Trenton Stegomastodon was one of the very last of its kind, and for this reason it is of special scientific interest.
You would have immediately recognized a stegomastodont – had you the chance – by its burly, robust shape (neither as lithe nor as tall as an African elephant), by its broad, upward-curving tusks, and by a profile that was lower to the ground, and more tank-like, than any mastodon or elephant.
He's been interested in dinosaurs since he was a kid.
He's too young to be interested in mastodons.
Offense committed by the deleted commenter: "don't do that thing of putting in a lot of extra line breaks."
You cannot just leave blank space as your way to create comic pauses. It's a strict rule. Don't violate it. The visual matters around here.
You're free to repost the same text.
Someone once found a tooth, then through liberal indulgence in inference and extrapolation, created a sea monster.
That said, it's not uncommon to discover extinct species. Hope strings eternal.
Ann Althouse said...
You cannot just leave blank space as your way to create comic pauses. It's a strict rule. Don't violate it. The visual matters around here.
How . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . about . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .horizontally?
I found a piece of a gomphothere tooth on the beach a few years ago.
That Raquel Welch movie poster from 1,000,000 B.C. is where I first discovered stegomasturbatorodon.
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