 I spent a weekend excavating with researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, after construction workers in Broomfield, Colorado uncovered the remains of a Torosaurus. It was smash and grab work compared with the archaeological digs I'm used to. No careful grid units, level measurements, and detailed site mapping. No total station taking depths for every artifact, or sifting through buckets of excavated dirt to be sure that nothing is missed. We just went at it with picks and shovels. Occasionally, in a gesture of concern for the bones we would switch to small ice picks, or even toothpicks, but the gesture seemed hollow after I heard one of the lead paleontologists say of breaking a bone that "it's no biggie we'll just glue it back together."     The museum has unearthed at least 12 bones, including two horns, from the 66 million-year-old torosaurus. Construction workers first discovered the bones in Thornton on Aug. 25. A rib bone weighing 40 pounds was the first to be completely extracted, and the lead paleontologists described this specimen as the size of a rhino, smaller than the fossils found in Montana and the Dakotas that show torosaurus about the size of a medium elephant. This is a trend for specimens found along the front range.  There were film crews there, recording for a documentary and for the state news. It also made headlines with websites like Nat Geo. Most of the volunteers were inexperienced, weekend warriors who had been lucky enough to grab the first few spots before the museum capped it.     Comments are closed.
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Time in its aging course teaches all things." We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night telling itself stories." Humans are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee." The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship” The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.” The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor." Sports is to war as pornography is to sex." Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary." Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years." Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain." We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land." However many nations live in the world today, however many countless people, they all had but one dawn." ~Anonymous, Popul Vuh Every step you take has already been taken. Every story has already been told. The land is not newly discovered, so old with legends you might mistake them for rocks." ~Craig Childs The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause." ~Henri Bergson Archaeologists may not always see the trees, but we capture the forest with great clarity" ~Robert Kelly The past is never dead; it's not even past." ~William Faulkner No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.” ~Douglas Preston If you go into a museum and look at antiquities collected there, you can be sure that the vast bulk of them were found not in buildings but in graves." ~Leonard Woolley Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” ~Robert Macfarlane We always stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them." ~David Anthony That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away." ~Heraclitus Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society." ~David Lewis-Williams Opened are the double doors of the horizon. Unlocked are its bolts." ~Utterance 220 of the Pyramid of Unas If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." ~Rudyard Kipling The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains." ~John Muir The ecological thinker is haunted by the consequences of time." ~Garrett Hardin Through the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be care-less, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world." ~Iain McGillchrist The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril." ~Niall Ferguson Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are." ~Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared." ~Alfred Russel Wallace Humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences." ~Sebastian Junger Except in geographical scale, tribal warfare could be and often was total war in every modern sense. Like states and empires, smaller societies can make a desolation and call it peace." ~Lawrence Keeley The first people were aware of the signs and signals of the natural world. Their artifacts were projectiles, blades, and ivory sewing needles, either used on animal products, or made from them, or used to procure them. The world around them was a cycle of animals of all sizes, from voles and falcons to some of the largest mammals seen in human evolution." ~Craig Childs The number of herbivores sets a cap on the number of carnivores that can live in a region. Of course, adding an additional predator of fairly large body size, like a modern human, would produce repercussions that would ripple though all the other predators in the area and their prey." ~Pat Shipman When viewed globally, near-time extinctions took place episodically, in a pattern not correlated with climatic change or any known factor other than the spread of our species." ~Paul S. Martin However splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature." Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion- and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings." I have seen yesterday. I know tomorrow." We are fire creatures from an ice age." ~Stephen Pyne Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified." ~Edward Abbey Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go." ~H. Rider Haggard One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be- though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain- because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone." ~ Oswald Spengler All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance." In the long paleontological perspective, we humans must be considered invasive in any locale except Africa." ~Pat Shipman Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy." ~Richard Francis Burton Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its own lifespan and brings about its corruption." ~Ibn Khaldun Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." ~Gustav Mahler As for man, his days are numbered. Whatever he might do, it is but wind." ~The Epic of Gilgamesh There is a cave in the mind." Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come." ~Joseph Campbell I feel again a spark of that ancient flame." ~ Virgil Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it therefore not to be an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning." ~Clifford Geertz In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." ~Carl Jung Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids." ~Arab proverb Few romances can ever surpass that of the granite citadel on top of the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu, the crown of Inca Land." ~Hiram Bingham You don't have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things- to compete. You can just be an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals." ~Edmund Hillary Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going into the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity." ~John Muir To speak of truth sounds too grand, too filled with the promise of certainty, and we are rightly suspicious of it. But truth will not go away that easily. The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’." ~Lain McGillchrist The Sphinx will always have to be looked after." Yes, the pyramids have been built, but if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and 30 years I could build a bigger one." Civilizations exist by geological consent, subject to change without notice." When at last we anchored in the harbor, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless" The best prophet of the future is the past." An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can get. The older she gets the more interested he is in her." Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been." What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain." I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist." Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. "~Joseph Campbell In my experience, it is rarer to find a really happy person in a circle of millionaires than among vagabonds." Always my soul hungered for less than it had" History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs, and wooden shoes coming up." Back home, I'm always focusing on something happening in the future. On expeditions, time stops, and you become like a stone age man, acting on instincts and knowing you are part of the universe." Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies." ~Robert Sapolsky The Land is not old. It only changes, becoming one thing and the next. We are the ones who ascribe age, the brevity of our lives demanding a beginning, middle, and end." Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books." The only thing that belongs to us is the time." To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way." ~Steven Rinella |
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I spent a weekend excavating with researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, after construction workers in Broomfield, Colorado uncovered the remains of a Torosaurus. It was smash and grab work compared with the archaeological digs I'm used to. No careful grid units, level measurements, and detailed site mapping. No total station taking depths for every artifact, or sifting through buckets of excavated dirt to be sure that nothing is missed. We just went at it with picks and shovels. Occasionally, in a gesture of concern for the bones we would switch to small ice picks, or even toothpicks, but the gesture seemed hollow after I heard one of the lead paleontologists say of breaking a bone that "it's no biggie we'll just glue it back together." The museum has unearthed at least 12 bones, including two horns, from the 66 million-year-old torosaurus. Construction workers first discovered the bones in Thornton on Aug. 25. A rib bone weighing 40 pounds was the first to be completely extracted, and the lead paleontologists described this specimen as the size of a rhino, smaller than the fossils found in Montana and the Dakotas that show torosaurus about the size of a medium elephant. This is a trend for specimens found along the front range. There were film crews there, recording for a documentary and for the state news. It also made headlines with websites like Nat Geo. Most of the volunteers were inexperienced, weekend warriors who had been lucky enough to grab the first few spots before the museum capped it. Comments are closed.
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