Bumbles Bounce

Happy holidays! Christmas was great, we saw old friends and hung out with the family (there was a slight tragedy involving the death of a peanut butter cookie, but otherwise things went smoothly), and we've all been eating enough junk food to last us until next year. However, the most interesting Christmas tradition that my family holds to is, by far, that of the moving Bumble:

(I couldn't figure out how to rotate the picture, I'm afraid)

The Bumble (as seen in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) came from my aunt's garage sale, about two years ago. Mom pulled him out for Christmas later that year, and about three days after that, I found him underneath my towel when I was trying to get out of the shower. Since then, hiding the Bumble has become a holiday tradition. About the same time the Christmas tree goes up, the Bumble comes out from his storage box along with all the other decorations, and then promptly disappears. I'm usually the first victim. He'll appear in places where you least expect (found him in the freezer once), and once he's found, he'll disappear again for the next person to find. Usually, it's between my mom and me, but we've dragged my dad and brother into it from time to time. Some of them are pretty mean. This year, I decided to document the whole thing for your enjoyment:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

S.R. Koch

Thanksgiving at the Anderson's

A late post, I know. Science Olympiad (my nerd convention) was this weekend, and I spent the rest of the time moving back into my room (I've been stuck in the attic for about three weeks). I wrote this the day after Thanksgiving in a fit of boredom. I wish my Thanksgivings were really like this; all we actually do is eat and then fall asleep from the tryptophan. 

Thanksgiving at the Anderson’s house is always interesting.

            Actually, I don’t think ‘interesting’ quite covers it.

            I went along with my friend, Tilly Anderson, to her family’s Thanksgiving feast. Not a meal—a feast. I was going to school in her hometown, and I wasn’t able to go back home for Thanksgiving, so Tilly invited me over to help with the cooking and join her family for the feast and competitions. I asked her what she meant by competitions, and if that meant they were going to be watching the football game. She said, no, they weren’t watching it, and that I would have to wait and see.

            I arrive ten minutes early, but when I got in, I discovered I was actually late. Tilly’s entire family was already there, bustling around like bees inside the huge, linoleum-floored kitchen with its soaring ballroom ceiling. The architecture was grand enough to leave me staring for a full five minutes, considering the fact that the Andersons’ house was a tiny, scruffy bungalow perched on the corner of Livingston and 5th. I would have stared longer, but Tilly noticed me about then, and she swooped down and seized me by the arm, grinning and talking excitedly about what they were cooking. I didn’t hear a whole lot, as my brain was still frozen on the impossible size of the inside of her house, but I did catch the fact that she and I were supposed to be dressing the turkey. I used that little bit of normalcy as an anchor to reality, and was able to focus on that as we shoved our way through the crowds of Tilly’s relatives. We bumped into people wearing togas, Medieval half-armor, and several who appeared to be partially or completely covered in scales or fur. I didn’t have any time to assimilate all this, so I didn’t end up freezing again and was able to get to the turkey with relatively little mishap.

            We finally reached the table where the turkey was begin dressed, and I had to do another double-take as I realized it was about the size of a half-grown cow. Tilly handed me a baster and a pot of honey mixed with spices I’d never smelled before, and told me to start glazing the bird. I did so in a sort of half-dream, noting as I did so that there was the occasional bluish, metallic-colored scale stuck to the pan underneath the turkey. Tilly picked up a bowl of stuffing she’d been mixing before I came and went to work on that, chatting happily with me and with anyone who happened to poke by and see how the main course was coming. A young boy with skin the color of an eggplant stopped by and tried to filch a bit of stuffing out of the bowl, but Tilly gave him a smack with her wooden spoon and he took off running, shooting dirty looks behind him. She simply snorted and went back to her work, commenting on how difficult Mr. Weisner’s chemistry tests had been this past semester.

            When the turkey was done, Tilly grabbed a couple passing men (she called them ‘uncles’) who looked to be half-dragon and asked them to help her with the bird. Between the four of us, we managed to heave the hundred-pound platter of meat off the counter, across the crowded kitchen, and into the waiting mouth of a huge, black, iron oven. The heat kicking out of it was enough to sunburn my face, and Tilly and I had to tuck our heads under our arms and let the dragon uncles (who were immune to the heat) guide the platter in. Tilly closed it with a loud clang and wiped the sweat off her face, grinning and thanking her dragon uncles in a deep, guttural language that I couldn’t understand. They replied in kind, smiling, and then turned to me with jagged, pearly white grins.

            “Merry Christmas!” one told me in slightly slurred English, and the other raised one hand in the Vulcan salute. They then both walked away with their heads held high, their tails swinging behind them with every step. Tilly told me that they’d been working on their human languages lately, and that they were very proud of their progress.

            The turkey was ready two hours later. By then, just about everything else had been cooked and laid out in the dining room (which, unsurprisingly, was even bigger than the kitchen and was decorated with malachite columns that stretched between the tiled floor and an arched ceiling painted in the likeness of the Andromeda galaxy). The dragon uncles and a pair of women with red skin, pronged tails, and delicate, curling horns jutting from their shaggy black hair worked together to pull the turkey back out of the oven, not a one of them using a hot pad. The rest of the family formed a huge procession behind the main course, cheering and stomping their feet as they paraded into the dining room. The turkey was set down in the middle of the table on a gigantic Kevlar hot pad to keep it from burning the table, and everyone swarmed the tables and took their places. I sat next to Tilly somewhere in the middle, across from one of the dragon uncles and next to a very attractive young man dressed in a black robe with a cowl drawn over his head. At least, I tried to sit. The instant my rear touched the seat, the mahogany chair gave a rattling shiver, and with a querulous creak, it darted backwards underneath me and bucked me over the backrest, sending me sprawling on my face on the floor. The little purple-skinned boy I’d seen before scampered out from underneath the table, laughing, and took off running with the chair loping alongside him down the length of the hall and out the door. A woman with purple skin just like him shouted and lurched out of her chair, yelling after him in another foreign language as she ran after him. Tilly found me another chair, apologetically explaining that I’d just been subjected to one of her cousin Id’s practical jokes. Apparently, he and his pet chair Somi pulled that one every year, though everyone had started getting wise to the joke. I was a newbie, and so he knew he could get away with it.

            Without further mishap, we settled down for the meal. We said grace (which took forever, because there were so many different cultures assembled and each one had a different religion), and then everyone eagerly lunged for the food with forks, knives, and bare hands. I managed to snag a couple cranberries right off the bat, and Tilly snuck me some corn off her Aunt Sylvia’s plate to her left. There was no order to the whole ordeal. You grabbed whatever passed your way and hoped you liked it, and you guarded whatever you did snatch carefully for fear of your neighbors stealing it. I didn’t guard myself carefully enough at first, and for a while all I was able to eat was what I could stuff in my mouth with each passing of the platters. I got some of the turkey, which tasted like turkey, and some mashed potatoes (but no gravy) that didn’t taste like mashed potatoes, and I managed to hang onto a mug of some sort of hot liquid that tasted the way pine trees smell. Eating was exhausting work, but in the end, I managed to utterly stuff myself, and judging by the sated looks of the rest of the table, they did too. There were a lot of leftovers in the end, which a troop of avian women in white robes set about packing up, stuffing everything in Tupperware containers for people to take home with them at the end of the day.

            The rest of us remained at the tables, talking. Tilly was talking with her dragon uncle, and so I ended up in conversation with the cowled man sitting next to me. I found out that he was from a world someone in the region of Alpha Centauri, and that he’d been going to college as an artist for the past three years. I was majoring in art as well, so we hit off well, and I must admit, I found him attractive. He had the dark hair I tend to like in guys, and dark purple eyes that looked green in certain light. We were interrupted from time to time by Tilly’s dragon uncle, who was still trying out his English at every opportunity. Whenever he recognized something we said, he would tap me on the shoulder, nod emphatically, and say, “Platypus”, to which I would reply, “Very good” and nod back encouragingly. I passed a very pleasant hour or so this way, and was almost disappointed when it came time for the competitions to begin. Almost.

            Tilly’s father (who worked at the college and whom I had met on several occasions) stood up at his place at the head of the table and tapped on his glass with his fork for attention. He announced that the competitions were about to begin, and that we should all move to the auditorium. The cowled man I’d been talking to (his name was Rennac, I’d found) grinned and told me he was participating in the Sukil event this year, to which I replied that I had no idea what any of it meant. He just grinned again and told me to wait and see.

            The whole family got up as one with a collective noise of scraping chairs and clattering plates, and we all moved as one into the next room over—the auditorium. The place was built like a Roman theater, with a round, flat stage down at the bottom and layered benches surrounding it in a circle. Most of the place was filled even before I could make it in, and so Rennac, Tilly and I had to find a spot near the top back. I wasn’t disappointed, because I had a fantastic view of the entire auditorium and could people-watch at my leisure. Once everyone was settled, the games began.

            First up was a group of Asian-looking people, who were dressed in tight, glossy black jumpsuits that looked to be patterned with scales. They competed against the avian women who had been cleaning up earlier, performing a series of acrobatic maneuvers. They went back and forth, each group one-upping the other until one of the avians fell (she took off flying, so she wasn’t hurt), and the Asians claimed victory. Next was a wrestling match, in which both dragon uncles, a skinny, mouse-haired young boy, and three men who looked like Vikings took part in, wrestling one another in turn and eliminating down to two. In the end, it was one of the Viking men versus the mouse-haired boy, and the boy won with a move somewhere between a pile driver and a half nelson. The Viking shook hands with him and walked away, looking disappointed but not overly surprised. Tilly whispered to me that the boy (her second-cousin Eli), had been the champion for four years straight, and it was everyone’s dream to beat him someday.

            The Sukil was next, which I found was a form of martials arts that apparently originated from Rennac’s home world. He fought one of the avians, cousin Id, two professors that I recognized from the college, and Tilly’s dad, and beat everyone until he came up against Mr. Anderson. Tilly’s dad was a tall man of about forty, with black hair shot through with gray and a pretty good physique, and he beat Rennac like it was the easiest thing in the world. The two of them were set in the middle of the stage facing one another, each armed with a long, flat bat like a cricket bat that was covered with blue paint. They began circling one another, knees slightly bent, and the paddles held out to one side and dripping little lines of blue across the stage floor. Rennac moved first, which was his mistake, and received the first splotch of paint across his back for his trouble. Tilly’s dad moved out of the way when Rennac tried to return, and received only a faint splatter of blue across the front of his shirt. They went back and forth like that—dodging, lunging, and trying to smack one another with the blue paint. Towards the end, Rennac had only one small patch of non-blue on him (under his armpit) that he was frantically trying to guard. Mr. Anderson hadn’t gotten more than the droplets on the front of his shirt. In a desperate attempt to turn the tides, Rennac tried to feint and then dodge behind Tilly’s dad and get him in the back. Mr. Anderson, however, anticipated the move, and he spun with the smaller boy and scythed his paddle up so that it slipped underneath Rennac’s tightly-clenched arm and scored the final splotch of paint under his armpit. The match was called, and Rennac slunk off the stage like a beaten dog, hiding his blueberry-colored face. I didn’t see him again after that. Tilly told me later that he left immediately after the Sukil.   

            The rest of the competitions were much like that. There was storytelling, music, more fighting, and even a spitting competition that a froglike man with oversized eyes won. Cousin Id and Somi won a problem-solving event together (they had to reach and disarm what looked like a bomb strapped to the ceiling in under five minutes), and one of the dragon uncles won one of the feats of strength. The grand finale involved everyone; we all had to gather around the upper ring of the bleachers, and try to throw a ping-pong ball all the way into a little iron bucket in the middle of the stage. I didn’t get it, but I got pretty close (my ball hit the rim and then bounced off). Tilly and twelve others made it in, and they each got to choose a song for the avian women and Tilly’s mom to play on their assortment of instruments. Tilly chose Carry on my Wayward Son, someone else picked Stardust, and the rest were either earth songs I didn’t know or were from a different planet. I sang along what I knew, faked the refrains of others, and stomped in time to the beat along with the rest of the family. When the last song played, everyone concluded by pelting one another with the extra ping-pong balls we’d been given.

            After the songs, people began trickling out of the house, returning to their respective homes, galaxies, etc. I stayed for a while, talking with Tilly and one of the dragon uncles (his name was U’Gamar), and exchanging stories about campus life. When I finally left, I had a Tupperware container of leftovers (stuffing, turkey, and something blue and gelatinous I was told was from a planet somewhere in the Rigel star system), which Tilly’s mother told me would keep for a month so long as I kept it refrigerated. I received several different forms of goodbye from various people on my way out (the dragon uncles apparently thought it customary that parting friends should stomp on one another’s feet. In a friendly way, of course), and was told to come back next year for the next Thanksgiving feast.

            Despite Tilly’s invitation to come back for Thanksgiving, I never took her up on it. My family likes having me home for Thanksgiving, and though they aren’t quite as interesting as the Andersons’, they are my family, after all. New Years, however, is quite another matter, and I must admit, the Anderson New Year party tops their Thanksgiving.

            Believe it or not.

THE END

Happy belated Thanksgiving, and happy reading!

S.R. Koch

Seeing Spots

            I was recently sitting in a chair with a cat in my lap, staring at a passage in a book without actually reading it, when an Asian Beetle suddenly landed on my hand. My first instinct was to flick it away, which I did, but a second one immediately took its place (Seeing as how I was sitting next to a fluorescent lamp and the stupid bugs infiltrate old homes like mine in droves). I was about to flick that one away as well, but for some reason, I arbitrarily decided to watch it and see what it did. I’m a bug fanatic, so it was interesting, watching the way the little club antenna poke around at the ground and its jointed legs moving in perfect synchronization. I watched it like this, enthralled, while it wandered across my hand, and after about a minute, it decided to bite me. I promptly flicked the little ingrate across the room. I got an idea out of it, though.

            Why are ladybug spots always different? Granted, the species currently crawling around my house in shiny, sickly-orange mobs is not that of true ladybugs, but rather of the invasive Asian Beetle breed (Harmonia axyridis) that have been spreading across the U.S since 1992. Unfortunately for me, it’s currently late November, so my wildlife sampling scope is somewhat limited, and I had to make do.

            My first step was to collect some bugs: 

            After that, I had to photograph them. Unfortunately, my camera has only a rudimentary zoom system, so I had to create an elaborate jerry-rigged setup to hold the bugs steady whilst getting close enough to photograph them. Lighting was interesting—I had to use my desk lamp as a flashlight, and the shells of the ladybugs gave so much glare that it was impossible to photograph both sides at once. As a result, there are two pictures of each specimen.

            When I finally got all of my photographs, I uploaded them to my computer and went through them on powerpoint. What I found was this: Out of ten specimens, there wasn’t a single pair between them. Two had the same number of spots, but the size and distribution was different. Some of them, of course, had been dead when I found them, and so their carapaces were too faded to count spots, but barring those, there were no patterns.

            So the question remains: why are ladybug markings different?

            The internet has no clues for me. I was able to find why they have spots, period. It is surmised that the spots, coupled with the bright orange/red carapace, works as a warning system to predators, alerting them to the fact that ladybugs are bad-tasting and slightly poisonous. There are many other species that work this way: blue-ringed octopi, green-arrow frogs, hornets, and monarch butterflies. The method discourages predators from eating anything brightly-colored after their initial encounter with a poisonous individual, leaving everyone else in peace. Some species, like the viceroy butterflies that have developed patterns very similar to the monarchs, piggyback on this concept by imitating species that are actually poisonous.

            As to ladybugs, a possible theory as to why their spots are different is identification, though that would not explain why other beetles, which appear in every respects identical to the human eye, are capable of telling one another apart regardless. Another theory (which, in my opinion, seems more likely), is that the patterns are simply random. If I were to collect enough ladybugs, I might, in time, find two that are exactly alike. In short, I do not know the answer to my original question, though I learned a few things in the finding of this conclusion. If any of my readers do know the answer, I implore you to post the answer below in the comments section for posterity.

Thank you for reading, and happy Thanksgiving.

S.R. Koch.

Resources:

http://www.ladybug-life-cycle.com/ladybug-spots.html

With special thanks to Eric Sloane’s America, Poems of Byron Keats and Shelly, H.W Janson’s History of Art, The Webster’s Dictionary, The Poetical Works of Browning, and Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, for propping up my photography background during my haphazard picture shoot.

...And here's the photos I took of my Asian Beetle sampling (note: specimens six and three were old and faded): 

           

Dark Lords and Such

I was sitting in study hall last week, not doing my homework while staring at the back of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I happened to see the word "Dark Lord" somewhere on the description on the back. That got me thinking.
Dark Lords...they have to go to school for that, right?

Darkness, Evil, and Such

Dark Lords are, by definition, evil. They have no emotions, save for maybe greed, spite, shiftiness and a lust for power, and are known for being totally merciless and uncaring of the people they conquer.

            Sylvester was a Dark Lord. Not a very good one, mind you, but a Dark Lord nonetheless. He went to a four-year university and got his bachelor’s in World Domination, with a minor in Evil Architecture. From college, he went out into the workforce and found himself an internship under Dark Lord Moyro, who led an evil campaign against the Good elves of Glantios in an epic battle for the fate of North Glianto. Sylvester went along and took notes, got Moyro’s coffee, and occasionally played cards with the slaves Moyro employed to haul around his evil litter. Sylvester became good friends with one of them in particular, a fellow named You There.

            After finishing his internship with Moyro, Sylvester adopted the name “Sauron” and went on in an attempt to lead his own campaign of evil. He was shot down for copyright violations, and was forced to take a job as an accountant, totaling plunder for the seafaring Dark Lords near the coast of Grom. After several promotions, he managed to scrape together enough funds for another attempt at an evil campaign, and set out for the highlands to the east.

            The highlands, most historians agree, were a tactical mistake on Sylvester’s part, as they were poorly populated and didn’t provide much profit after the meager resistance was squashed, the villages ransacked and the people enslaved. Undaunted, Sylvester (now Tyrone the Great) didn’t let that discourage him. He had a Dark Castle built halfway up the tallest mountain he could find (the air at the very top was too thin), and settled down to rule his Evil Kingdom (Now Tyronia) as the resident Dark Lord.

            Tyrone the Great’s evil reign, tragically, was a complete and utter failure, and his Helpless Subjects lived happily and in peace under his tyrannical rule for forty long years. Tyrone the Great took a wife from among them, and the two of them had three beautiful children whom they groomed to inherit the Dark Kingdom after them. Though he was widely regarded as a failure at his career, Tyrone the Great was satisfied with his achievements, and would have lived on quite happily until retirement to see his son take over the Dark Lord position. His reign was cut short, however, by the arrival of the Good elves of Glantios.

            The elves brought with them a host of soldiers when they marched into the Dark Realm of Tyrone the Great, and a wide swath of pillaged villages and trampled crops was left in their wake. They assembled before the Evil Castle of the Dark Lord of Tyronia, and demanded that Tyrone the Great step down and deliver his enslaved subjects to the safety of their rule. Tyrone the Great, as was his duty, sent out his forces of Evil to meet the elves in battle, but his soldiers had become soft from years of peace and were torn apart by the armies of Good. Tyrone the Great, as was the custom, was publicly executed and his family sent into exile. As was their duty, jubilant throngs turned out at his execution, though their elated cheering for the demise of their oppressor was reported as somewhat flat and half-hearted. The formalities thus dispensed with, the Good elves settled down in place of Tyrone the Great as a ruling Council of Good, and went on to create a Kingdom of Peace and Prosperity.

            For two years after the fall of the Dark Lord, the Kingdom of Peace and Prosperity found itself rapidly declining into poverty. The ruling Council of Good became corrupt, and soon riots were breaking out across the city. Weapons were stolen from government armories, and a year later, a full-scale revolt was staged and the Council overthrown. The people of Tyronia tried to reestablish the government from before the Council of Good, but every attempt they made ended in rulers more corrupt than the last and ultimately ended in ruin. After countless government upheavals and the rise and execution of twelve separate rulers, the Kingdom of Tyronia finally fell into a rigid dictatorship, and continued living under the unbending rule of Tyrone XXI until the arrival of the silvercough plague wiped out the entire human population, two hundred years after the fall of Tyrone I.

THE END

Nothosaurs

I have not posted in a very long time, and I’m afraid I need only two words to explain that: college applications. Things may remain like this for a while.

On a different note, I was recently given the opportunity during an oceanography class to research anything ocean-related that I wanted. The only stipulation for this project was that I must ultimately present my research is some way to the class at some point during the semester. Once a week for the entire quarter, the entire class was given free reign with laptops and whatever supplies the teacher had in her classroom. For me, this was the result:

            I tend to gravitate towards animals and fantastic monsters that don’t seem like they could possibly be real, so I naturally decided to start in the Triassic. I started surfing the web and collecting information, and eventually ended up with a Word page filled with jumbled facts about nothosaurs. Nothosaurs are a less well-known species of ancient reptiles—not dinosaurs—that I stumbled across while looking for large species of marine and coast animals. My original intention was to do a comparative analysis of Triassic-era to modern-day ocean life; to find an animal from each time period that more or less matched up, and then list the common traits between the two. As I worked, however, I realized that I’d been spending almost all of my time researching nothosaurs, and that I had almost no information on placodonts, mosasaurs, or ichthyosaurs. I decided to switch.

            Nothosaurs were a species of aquatic reptile that lived during the Triassic (240-225 million years ago). They spent most of their lifetime in the water and were physically adapted for swimming, but many of their fossils have been found above ancient shorelines and suggest that they laid their eggs on land much like modern-day crocodiles and alligators. They’re classified under the family Sauropterygia and the genus Nothosauria, and there are over a dozen known individual species. Their name, originating from ancient Greek, means ‘false lizard’.

Nothosaur skull

Physically, nothosaurs were built like modern-day lizards: four legs oriented outward, with a low, dragging belly, long, sinuous neck and equally long tail. Their legs were adapted for swimming, with longer forelegs and webbed toes that they used as rudders. Their swimming motion was very much like that of modern crocodiles and alligators—a horizontal undulating motion of the body, head and tail that utilized their tail for propulsion and their feet for steering. Their heads were designed for swimming and fishing—they were long, narrow, flat, and triangular, with jaws that extended all the way back to their cheeks and long needle teeth that were longer in the front and locked together like a bear trap. They were very aerodynamic, and their teeth were designed for nabbing fish—their primary food source—out of the water. Like crocodiles, their eyes and nostrils were located on the tops of their heads, an adaptive trait that allowed them to breathe and see over the surface of the water without exposing the rest of their heads. To give you an idea of scale, I will recount that they have been known to be anywhere from a few inches to twenty feet long (a normal school bus is about forty feet).  

Crocodile skull

            Now, a comparison to crocodiles does seem to cover many of the physical details that describe a nothosaur, but there are certain details in habit and structure that appear to separate the two. Both are reptiles, but the manner in which their skeletons are oriented is very different. Crocodiles, when they swim, look like a straight, flat log with their nose and neck perfectly level with their back. Their legs are held either tucked flat against their sides or allowed to splay out directly sideways. Nothosaurs, by comparison, appear to swim more like seals, with a slight arch to the neck and their legs tucked downward. Seals also happen to share the upward-facing nostrils and eyes that both nothosaurs and crocodiles display, though they are (obviously) mammals, and their skulls are much rounder and shorter. (Note: this comparison is mostly my own conjecture, and may not be accurate.) All three animals shared similar lifestyle habits, raising their young on land but primarily living and hunting in the water. Similar living species during the Triassic include the Askeptosaurus, which were very similar in appearance to the nothosaurs save for their much narrower snouts and long, whip-like tails. There was also the plesiosaur (the loch-ness monster is supposed to be one of these), which paleontologists surmise may have evolved from nothosaurs. Fossils of nothosaurs have been found in Europe, North Africa, and Asia embedded in sea rocks, which further supports the theory that they were aquatic reptiles that came onto land to lay their eggs.

            In conclusion, will state that my knowledge of this species is very incomplete. This was a high-school science project, the internet was my main source of information, and a lot of the conjectures I offered up could be completely, fantastically incorrect. Furthermore, if any of my readers are, in fact, well-acquainted with the order Nothosaurioidea, I would greatly appreciate any input and will repost an update in two weeks on what people have to offer. Feel free to leave comments below.

            In the meantime, I’ll try my best to keep up on blog posts through the perpetual bog of schoolwork I’ve been slogging through, and I wish you, as ever, happy reading.

S. R. Koch

http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/palaeofiles/fossilgroups/euryaps/notho.html

http://dinosaurs.wikia.com/wiki/Triassic_Period

http://www.seaworld.org/animal-info/info-books/killer-whale/diet.htm

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinos/Nothosaurs.shtml

http://crocodilian.com/cnhc/csl-maps.htm

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/nile-crocodile/

http://www.factmonster.com/dk/science/dinosaurs/below-the-waves.html

http://www.dinosaurfact.net/Marine/Nothosaurus.php

A Hound of Hell

Cross country has been going on for awhile, and we recently ran the Mondovi golf course, closely followed by the Durand golf course two days later. I do not exaggerate when I say that the Mondovi course is evil. It is designed to thoroughly destroy the morale of any and all who run it, and it was not made any better by the fact that girls had to run 5-K, rather than 4-K. I lived through it, though, and I got a good story out of it the next night, when I was lying in bed, wondering how I could have made myself go faster....

A Hound of Hell

By S.R. Koch

 

Waiting for a race to start is terrible. It goes beyond nerve-wracking into the realm of insane, and I don’t know why I do it. I stand there, waiting for the dumb gun to go off while my stomach does somersaults in my chest cavity and I promise myself that I’ll quit and never run cross country again. After the race, though, I’m always so happy and satisfied that I just end up doing it all over again. In the meantime, though, my gut usually goes through a sort of clenching, twisting feeling as the ref. announces the fifteen and ten-second marks, and we all stop moving and wait for the gun.

On the day of my best race ever, the gun went off at the seven-second mark. That was highly unusual. The ref. normally counts down to five and goes quiet, and we have to wait for an indefinite amount of time for him to actually fire the gun. Sometimes he shoots right away. Other times, he leaves you hanging for an additional eight seconds or so, and people end up false-starting and tripping over the starting line. It’s extremely nerve-wracking, and I’m pretty sure they do it just to get us wound up. On the day of my best race, the gunshot at seven startled us all, but we were too pumped with adrenaline and too dazed by the sudden rush to get going to pause and consider what was going on. In retrospect, I suspect that what we thought was a gunshot was actually the tree behind us snapping in half, because I vaguely remember there being a belated gunshot a half second after the first as the ref. realized that the race had started without him. I didn’t pause to consider it, though, because I was well up the first hill by that point and trying my best to close on a girl from Mondovi.

            Running cross country is interesting. It’s a team sport, but everyone is isolated in his/her own little bubble of mental agony as we plug along down the course. I usually start out thinking pretty positive, something along the lines of, “I got this, no problem, pass that girl, tough as nails, I got this,” and gradually pass into the realm of, “Why the hell am I still doing this dumb sport?!” I’m a slow starter, so the first half-mile I spend mostly picking off runners as I work my way up to my usual place. On the day of the race, I was in the process of cutting off a particularly stubborn little Asian girl from some school with an orange jersey when the first hint that there was something amiss with the meet caught my attention.

            Usually at cross country meets, there’s a bunch of parents gathered at corners with cowbells, posters, and cameras so they can yell at us for a few seconds before running on to the next cheer spot. Well, they were there this time as usual, except none of them were cheering, and they were already in the process of turning tail and running when the first half of the column of runners went by. I wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that I realized they weren’t even running for some other part of the course—they were running towards the woods that bordered the trail we were running on, apparently with the intention of getting out of the open. Distracted, I lost my Asian girl to a tight corner I should have had her on. I was twisting my head around over my shoulder, trying to get a glimpse of what the spectators were running from. A moment later, I ended up passing the Asian girl up a nearly vertical hill, going at sprint speed with my head lowered. The girl stared at me with wide eyes as I passed, half surprised that I would be stupid enough to sprint halfway through a 5-K race and half shocked that a tired, teenage human girl was even capable of producing that much speed. I didn’t care one way or the other, though; I’d just caught a glimpse of what the parents had been running from.

            Have you ever seen a wolfhound? They’re very cool dogs—big, long-legged, with narrow faces, big black eyes, and shaggy gray coats that make them look like grizzly-haired old men. They’re usually fairly friendly in a regal, dignified sort of way, and I’ve always enjoyed making friends with them.

            The thing galloping up along the line of runners was not a wolfhound, or at least not any kind I’ve ever seen before. It was huge—bigger even than a mastiff—with fur the color of coal and eyes that literally burned red in its skull. This wasn’t some Hound of the Baskervilles-type prank, either; the animal was nearly the size of a horse, and in the late evening sunlight, I could pick out every detail of its monstrous, shaggy body. There was foam dripping from its pearly white teeth and the long pink tongue lolling from its jaws, and wherever its massive, jagged-nailed paws touched the manicured golf course lawn, the grass hissed and withered black as if touched by fire. There was no hint of dignified good nature in this thing; this was something out of myth and legend thought to be mere superstition by modern man. A word came unbidden to my mind as I watched it lope towards me, its jaws spread in a wide, doggish grin: hellhound. One of the dogs of Tartarus. Somehow there was no doubting it, just as there was no doubting the fact that it was coming after me.

            I’m not being pretentious. The animal was after me and me alone. It ignored the other terrified, screaming runners that it passed, galloping by without a care as they broke off one by one from the track and made for the woods as fast as their feet could carry them. I could feel those burning red eyes boring into my own, and some sixth sense told me that its one and only purpose at present was to chase me down. Don’t ask how I knew it wasn’t after any of the other runners who hadn’t noticed it yet, I just did. If you ask what I did after realizing this, well that I can easily answer: I ran like hell.

            We call the pace we run a 5-K at “race pace”, and it’s usually something between a jog and a sprint. The pace I set the day I raced a hound of hell wasn’t quite a sprint, but it was pretty darned close. My feet flew over the grass like they were on wings, my toes barely touching the ground between strides. I kept my head up, my shoulders forward, and my arms loose as I pelted forward, my lungs, limbs and brain all screaming at me to stop. That faded a moment later, though, and I was just running, my senses overloaded with the need to go faster. I think I went beyond adrenaline into something like the running version of Nirvana. It was awesome, but I really wish I could have had a chance to enjoy it a little.

            By that point, I’d passed everyone on the course, and everyone but me had abandoned the race for the woods. There was no doubt in my mind at this point who the hellhound’s target was—it had ignored every last terrified racer as they broke away, and it remained fixed on me as I continued running along the painted white race line that showed the way through the race course.

            That particular course is a nasty piece of work. It starts on a downhill, and then contrives to take the unfortunate racers up, down, and then back up every hill within a mile radius of the starting line. I usually end up pooping out on the Big Hill, an especially vindictive patch of terrain that goes up, curves around, levels out a little, and then goes up again before plummeting straight back down. The day I raced the hellhound, I flew up that hill, my legs stretching their longest to eat up the hill in long, loping strides. The hellhound stayed with me about forty feet behind, its head lowered to take the hill and its long, powerful limbs matching me stride for stride. It never occurred to me at the time, but in retrospect I find it odd that it could outpace all the other runners, only to slow down behind me and fail to overtake me. I also found it unusual that it never tried cutting corners and heading me off—like me, it stayed following the white line and the corner flags, winding through the course like an ordinary runner. It occurred to me later that, though it was definitely after me, the hound may not have been trying to catch me at all.

            After running for an eternity and an instant, my legs carried me over the second-to-last hill, around a yellow flag, into sight of the finish line. There was a deep dip between me and it, and then a long, steep slope that led up to the finish at the top of a hill. That course is renowned for that finish. That final uphill is what gnaws away at us the entire length of the race, as we know that no matter how many slopes we conquer, there’s always one more waiting for us at the end. I’ve never been able to manage more than a three-quarter speed sprint up that thing, and I always lose people there when my brain starts to give up.

            The day of the hellhound, I sprinted. I poured all my remaining strength into that final hill, going beyond running Nirvana into a realm where all I could perceive was the rasping of my breath through my nostrils, the pounding of my feet against the turf, and the roar of the blood in my ears. The hound was right on my tail the entire way, its wet black nose practically touching my shoulder blades and its hot breath blasting down my neck. I ran as fast as I could, and then went faster, every nerve in my body screaming for me to stop. Above me, the little yellow flags that marked the finish line waved enticingly, drawing steadily closer at what seemed a snail’s pace at the time.

            With one final surge of effort, I crested the hill. There was no one there to mark me—the refs. had disappeared along with the runners and spectators long ago—but the little chip tied into my shoelaces gave a little ‘beep’ as I crossed the electronic pad on the finish line, and the abandoned computer off to my right recorded my place in first and my time of ten minutes, twenty-five seconds. I kept running a few paces out of habit (just to make sure I’d kept my place), and then let myself collapse, my knees buckling and my spine losing all rigidity like a rubber chicken. I didn’t even think about the hellhound for a minute, my brain simply reveling in the bliss of being done and my heart rate still working on coming back down to normal. That was the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever experienced: relief and triumph.

            Things became a blur afterward. People began returning in ones and twos, and my coach found me still lying where I’d collapsed. My team tried to taking me to a hospital, but I just waved them off and insisted that all I wanted was chocolate milk and cookies. They gave me what I wanted, still convinced that I was going to drop dead on them any minute, and watched in amazement as I downed half a gallon of chocolate milk and five chocolate chip cookies. I felt great afterward, and promptly curled up in the fleece blanket I’d brought along and fell fast asleep. The paramedics, when they got there, concluded that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. I’d simply run the race of my life.

            Of the hound, there was no sign after the race. No one knew exactly when or where it disappeared, but disappear it did. The only thing that convinced the spectators and runners that it had been there at all and that they hadn’t simply dreamed the whole thing was the burned paw prints on the ground and the shattered tree that they later found behind the starting line (we suspect that’s where it first burst from the pits of Tartarus and took off after the runners). A lot of the witnesses did try to say that it never had happened, and that the hellhound had been some hallucination prompted by exhaustion on the runners’ part and heatstroke on that of the spectators. That how it was reported in the newspaper the next day: a mass hallucination. Most of the story was credited to me, and my record-breaking 5-K time of 10:25. Reporters asked me a lot of questions: how I’d felt during the race, how I’d trained for it, how I’m motivated myself to run that fast for that long, etc. I knew who to thank, though, and the reporters didn’t believe me.

            Believe it or not, though, that’s what really happened the day of my best race ever. I simply ran as if the hounds of hell were on my heels.

THE END

Ammonites

I apologize for the delay. School recently started, and I’ve been swamped with homework that, unfortunately, must take top priority. In the meantime, I promised to elaborate on the finds my family and I made during our trip to Montana. The pterosaur brain, unfortunately, is still on hold—we’re waiting for input from our paleontology professor friend—but I can still do a Things from the Shelf on the other main item we found: ammonites.

            These things are one of the more common fossils found on the earth—so much so that they’re often used as ‘index’ fossils to date rarer ones—but I was still insanely excited every time I cracked open a nodule of hardened mud and saw a spiral of mother-of-pearl buried inside. The fossilization process involved in the making of what we were finding is called the ‘mold and cast’ process, and it is exactly what the name implies; the animal dies, is buried in mud at the bottom of the sea floor, and over time the sediment surrounding it hardens into rock, forming the rounded nodules that we were finding. The animal itself rots away within its casing of stone, leaving its mother-of-pearl outer shell and a perfect mold of its body cavity. In some cases, the cavity is filled completely with mud and becomes a complete cast of the original animal. In others, only trace amounts of minerals seep into the cracks, and the inside of the animal’s body cavity crystallizes like a geode. After finding the nodules that encased these fossils, it was an easy matter to crack the hardened mud balls open and reveal the ammonites, still preserved where they’d fallen to the seabed millions of years ago.

            The species that we were finding was called Scaphites, and judging by the leaf-patterned sutures that connect each chamber of its shell, it was probably from the late Cretaceous. Ammonites first appeared 240-million years ago, and later died out along with the dinosaur during the K-T extinction 65-million years ago. However, there still exists a species today—called the nautilus—that is very closely related to the ammonite. There are only two living species of nautilus, but they haven’t changed in 500-million years and can give us a very close idea of how ammonites once looked and behaved.

            Ammonites were a rather bizarre species. In appearance, they most resembled modern land snails, but unlike snails (who were from the class Gastropoda) their shell, or mantle, was not completely hollow. To put it simply, snails live all the way up their shells. Their body follows the contours of the spiral, occupying the space with a network of nerves, organs and tissues. Cephalopods, by contrast, only live in the ends of their shells. The entire shell is divided by walls of shell called ‘septa’ into chambers the entire length of the spiral, and the animal itself only lives in the outer chamber. The others are filled with gases and connected with a strand of tissue called the siphuncle, and are used for buoyancy and locomotion. If it chose, the animal could pump the chambers full of water to sink or force air into them to rise, and if threatened, they could jet gasses from a funnel-like opening near the mouth and propel themselves backwards through the water. They also possessed ink glands, like modern squids and octopi, and could release a cloud of blinding ink into the water as a decoy when threatened.

            Like modern squid and octopi, ammonites were predatory. They ate small fish and crustaceans, using their long, suckerless tentacles to grasp prey and force it into a beak-like mouth in the center of a ring of around 90 tentacles. They lived in schools, and were hunted by large, swimming reptiles like the Mosasaur. They defended themselves with their shells, which were made of calcium and were constantly growing; like the nautilus, they could draw themselves into that shell in case of danger, and it is surmised that they may have possessed a plated covering (called an ‘aptychus’) that fitted over the opening of the shell. Nautilus are similar, having a leathery ‘hood’ rather than a plate.

            Ammonites are classified under the phylum Mollusca, the class cephalopoda, and the subclass ammonoidea. They were named for the Egyptian god Amun—a local deity at Thebes—because of the resemblance of their shells to the curling rams horns depicted on the god, and the fossils were used at one time as discuses in ancient Greek games. Today, they’re as common as dirt in certain sites scattered across the world, but searching for them was still one of the highlights of my trip to Montana. My thanks to Darell and Ward, for showing us the sites, and to my dad, for dragging me out there in the first sites.

            To my readers: My thanks for your attention, and be sure to always stay curious. You never know what you’ll find out.

Happy reading!

S.R. Koch.

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/prehistoric/ammonites/

http://www.bumblebee.org/invertebrates/Cephaopoda.htm

http://www.fossils-facts-and-finds.com/ammonite.html

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/glossary/Ammonite.shtml

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/amun-re.htm

http://skywalker.cochise.edu/wellerr/students/ammonites/ammonites.htm

The Brain

I alluded last post to some strange find that my dad made while we were in Montana. I was planning on doing a post on it, but we have yet to get full information on the object in question and I would prefer to hold off until we know all the details. However, I will state the basics:

My dad found the fossilized brain of an ancient flying reptile. 

The term for the object is 'endocast', meaning it isn't the brain itself, but a cast of the inside of the skull that was made when mud and minerals seeped into the brain cavity, the mud hardened into rock, and the skull around it weathered away to reveal a perfect brain-shaped lump. We suspect it's some sort of pterosaur, probably related to the species Anhanguera, and we have had the university of Ohio asking to take CAT scans of it so that they might have a digital copy of it to study. We still don't entirely know what to do with it and are waiting for feedback from an old friend who might have an idea, but we are very excited and I can't wait to find out more about the animal it once was.

 I'll report back once I know the facts, but for now, here's a short poem-like thing (that doesn't rhyme) that I wrote once while I was going out of my mind from boredom during math class....

You know me well.

I am the bringer of tempests, of storms and great change.

I make the earth tremble, make fire spew to the skies. 

I raze great cities and topple empires to the ground.

There are none who oppose me, at least not for long.

Egypt knew me as Sekhmet, the Greeks as Ares.

I am the vengeance of the earth,

And I am greatly displeased.

 

Montana and Fossils

All right. I'm back from Montana. I'm very tired. I returned with some seventy pounds of agates, petrified wood, and fossilized sea creatures, and I've also developed a temporary pathological fear of our car or driving in general which I'm hoping will wear off soon.

For those who aren't on facebook, here's what I've been up to the past few days, and why I wasn't able to post this past Saturday:

My dad, my brother and I have been planning a trip to Montana for awhile now. Our goal was to find fossils, which, in retrospect, seems to be what all my family vacations are centered around. The badlands of eastern Montana are perfect sites for digging; the bluffs are filled with untold treasures from millions of years ago, and long exposure to wind has eroded the scruffy prairie grass and the thin topsoil to reveal the sediment where one might find these fossils. However, neither my dad nor I knew exactly where to look, so we enlisted the help of our friend Ward Olson to help.

Ward Olson

Ward is a character. He is an old friend that my dad met when he was studying paleontology in school. The man's only a little taller than me, gray-haired, built like a compact little gorilla, and wears clothing that looks like it should have rotted off him years ago. His formerly black hair and beard (now gray) were what originally earned him his nickname 'the troll'. After driving twelve hours through Minnesota, North Dakota, and half of Montana to get to a little, two by four-block town called Rosebud, we were supposed to meet him at a post office on the edge of town at 4:00. He wasn't there. He was expecting us at 6:00, thinking we'd be unable to get moving in time.

Darrell and Carol--Pacing out tipi rings

We eventually gave up on Ward and instead set about looking for Darrell, the man whose yard we were going to be camping in. We managed to get a hold of him, and found his house on the edge of town next to a little marsh.
Darrell, and his girlfriend Carol, turned out to be two of the nicest people we could have hoped for. Darrell is an artifacts collector; He's part Cheyenne Native American, and has dedicated his life to finding and protecting ancient Native American sites and artifacts. During the entire course of the trip, he gave us a running history lesson on all the places we visited--mostly related to the battle of Little Big Horn--and showed us his collections of artifacts that he'd acquired over the years. He had everything from arrowheads, effigies, photographs of medicine sites, to bridle bits from Custer's cavalry, and he told us stories about how he found these things and what they meant. We stayed up for hours after Ward finally arrived, and it was late when we finally flopped down on our sleeping bags out in the tent and dropped off to sleep.
The next day, Darelll took us out to a private ranch that he routinely combed for artifacts and directed us towards a dried-out river bed that looked like it only ran when there was a lot of rain. Ward, Darrell and Carol were gone over the ridge in a heartbeat, while my dad, my brother and I set out more slowly along the bottom of the bed, our eyes glued to the ground. At first, we didn't find much--a few oyster shells and some squiggly rocks that could have been sections from an ammonite--but once we figured out what we were looking for, we began encountering thick patches of exposed sediment and rubble, which, when dug through, yielded what looked like squished sections of tube divided by squiggly leaf patterns:

After we met up again with Ward, we found out that they were something called Bacculites, a genus of cephalopods from the late Cretaceous. What we were finding were the shells, some of which still had the original mother-of-pearl outer shell covering the fossilized rock underneath. In life, the tentacles and eyes of the animal would have jutted out one end, like a nautilus, resembling a squid or an octopus with a shell. I found enough of these things to fill my little blue fossil bag, and Ward, when he came back, was waddling on account of all the rocks stuffed in his pockets. He'd found a lot of bacculites as well, along with another species of ammonite called Placenticeras--also from the Late Cretaceous--which developed in a spiraling whorl with segmented chambers on the inside. We found one too, but ours was broken.

Buffalo

Once we were all back together, Darrell asked us if we wanted to see some ancient Native American petroglyphs that he'd discovered on a bluff just south of where we'd been searching. As if he needed to ask. He drove us up, and we climbed  the side of the sandstone bluff to where the pictures were etched into the rock--a buffalo, a bear, a man with a shield, and elk hooves--along with the carved graffiti from dozens of kids who'd decided to add their names to history...right over the petroglyphs. There once were other glyphs up there, but Darryl said they'd been either worn away by time or cracked off the surface of the rock by sliding chunks of sandstone. It's odd to think that one day, even the ones that are still there will be gone.

After the glyphs, we ended the day by picking agates along a river not far from Darryl's place. There wasn't a lot at first, because we were searching in places that other people had already combed, but once we moved to the harder to reach spots, we began finding Montana moss agates and petrified wood by the handfuls. Between me, my brother, and my dad, we probably collected a good fifty pounds.

Agate picking--Eli in front

It rained that night, and so on Monday, we decided that it would be our last day; we didn't want to set up a wet tent that night. After packing up and saying goodbye to Carol, we left with Darrell and Ward for a little town called Glendive. From there, we turned off to the south and bumped our way along a crushed-shale road that wound through exposed hills and the oil-drilling sites that had been set up out there. It stank of petrol whenever we rolled down the windows. Neither Ward nor Darrell knew exactly where we were going (not exactly the most encouraging thing when your guide drives down a dead-end, stops, and then turns around and goes back), but eventually we ended up at the top of a hill looking down on a burnt-out cedar forest and patches of exposed black shale. Arming ourselves with rock hammers and bags, we set off down the hill.

Ammonite

We hit our stride there. What we found were dozens of large, lumpy balls of fossilized mud which, when smashed open with a rock hammer, proved to be full of clumps of fossilized clam shells. That was interesting at first, and we stuffed our bags with these things, but about a hundred feet beyond our first big find, we stumbled across a vein of rubble that was filled with ammonites--genus Scaphites. We quickly dumped the less impressive clams and began working on the ammonites. By the time we were done, my bag felt like it weighed three hundred pounds, and my jaw actually hurt from the strain on my neck and shoulders. We tramped back up to the top of the ridge tired but very much satisfied, and said our goodbyes to Ward and Darryl at the top. We then had a Ward adventure.

 Anyone who knows him has been through something like this before.We'd been doing pretty good for the majority of the trip, mostly by staying on our toes and listening to Darrell rather than Ward, but we let our guard drop just a little bit towards the end.
"It's only 18 miles from here to Baker," was what he told us. Instead of following our tracks back and heading for Glendive, Ward decided that it would be quicker for us to continue on towards a town called Baker, from whence we could hop onto the interstate and be on our way home. "18 miles from here to Baker" was not the case when we set out. It was an hour and a half later, when we'd gone about forty miles south of where we needed to be, and we'd ended up asking for directions from an oil rig worker (the only other living soul out there). When we got to Baker, we discovered that we were another hour south of the interstate, and had to navigate our way back to Glendive in order to get back on the interstate. We cheered heartily when we hit paved road again. From Glendive, it was another eight hours back home, most of which was done in the dark. I've never been so glad to see home in my life.

Here's to the troll, and to adventures in the future--may they ever be unexpected.

Happy reading!

S.R. Koch



Keep watch for the next post--we found something very unexpected in the final spot we searched, and my plan is to do a full Things From the Shelf post once I've done all the research.