Is there a better way to start a holiday weekend than taking pictures of a moth on a mirror? Of course there are, but you have to admit, this looks kinda awesome.
bit o’ fun
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Mystery Flora: Tiny Treasures
On my long ramble along North Creek a few months ago, I noticed a sort of purple aspect to some of the plants alongside the trail. I bent down for a closer look. These were among the tiniest flowers I’ve ever seen.
Mystery Flora: Red Bark, Red Heifer
This isn’t a flower, but it’s still flora. Lockwood would like us to figure out what this sort of bushy tree thingie is. And I told him you guys would be completely capable.
Unidentified (non) Flying Dinosaur: Walking's Fine, Thanks
Eskered has sent you a treat, my darlings: we haz a photo and a video! From New Zealand! And you know the UFDs are a little weird down there, not to mention some of them don’t even fly.
Continue reading “Unidentified (non) Flying Dinosaur: Walking's Fine, Thanks”
Fun With Disasters
Several days ago, Woozle shared this post with me on G+, jokingly wondering if I could identify the “rock formation” this hand sample came from:
And I was all like “Ha ha ha Woozle you are teh funneh – wait. I have something that looks very much like that.”
Mystery Flora and UFD Double Header
I promised you a two-fer today, and by West Coast standards, it is still today. See? I keep my promises sometimes! Sorta.
So here’s flora: little star-like flowers with a purple stripe, gracing the trails on the summit of Marys Peak in Oregon. I see flowers like these everywhere round the Northwest, and you may have identified something like these, but if so, I can’t remember when or what they are.
When we have enough entries, I might put together an e-book. That would be pretty awesome, actually – an ebook full of flowers you lot have identified, which we can all download and use for things like field identification and bragging rights. I might very well do it in the future. So if you want it to be less Northwest-centric and have a few mystery flowers of your own, you’d best send me some of your unidentified beauties. Put “Mystery Flora” in the subject line and send to dhunterauthor at yahoo dot com.
Right. On to Unidentified Flying Dinosaurs (which we should also do a book on someday). This is both a joy and a fuuuck. We saw it whilst driving down a road up near Quartzville.
You have to keep in mind, I’d spent the entire trip trying to catch sight of a bird, and all I’d gotten to that point was tittering from the trees. The birds in Oregon are worse than the ones on Washington for staying hidden while lustily singing at the top of their little lungs to let me know on no uncertain terms that they’re there but they ain’t gonna give me the satisfaction of a photo. Little bastards. One particularly beautiful and strange one flew overhead at Marys Peak, timing its flight so that it would be long gone by the time I got the camera aimed. So when we saw this one running down the road, I stopped the car and got out as quickly as I could – just in time to see the baby bird following it dive into a ditch. Fuuuck.
But at least Mama was too busy sussing out us potential threats to realize, “Aha! That’s Dana, with a camera – I should go hide and then start singing at her before she gets the camera turned on!”
And then, just when I’d snapped the first photo and was getting better positioned for a second, she started for the underbrush.
And I was all like, “NOOOOO!!!!!!!!” and she said, “Okay, fine, just one more then, make it snappy, you freak, I’ve got a kid to track down.”
And verily, I rejoiced.
It’s a good thing you lot have been sending me UFDs, the way the ones up here treat me like I’m radioactive. Maybe I’ll try putting on a birdseed suit next time I’m out, but I suspect that will only lead to becoming coated in squirrels. And raccoons. And corvids and seagulls, because they have no shame when it comes to food. I’ll have to make sure someone’s following me with a video camera, because the resultant war over my body should be hi-larious. Help me avoid that, and send me more UFDs, please! Same email address as above, o’ course, only put “UFD” in the subject line.
Also, does anyone know where you can purchase birdseed suits? Cause I would totally wear one anyway.
Macrobug Miscellaney
You know, I meant to have something substantial and meaty up for you today. I even had some research done. Then, silly me, I decided to delve a bit deeper, and now I’m several books deep and busy yelling at one of them, “You mean the Farallon Plate, you nimrod! Not the Juan de Fuca! The Juan de Fuca Plate didn’t even exist then! Look, you’ve even got the Farallon Bloody Plate in your diagrams, for fuck’s sake!” Of course, in order to be able to yell this, I first had to go back and make sure I was actually right about when the Juan de Fuca Plate came into existence. This took some doing.
Unidentified Flying Dinosaur: Nature Red in Beak and Talon
****WARNING: This UFD may be upsetting to some viewers. This is red, raw nature. Look, a bird’s gotta eat, and when you haven’t got hands, it gets messy. This is a prime example of why I laugh every time someone tells me we should emulate Nature.****
Continue reading “Unidentified Flying Dinosaur: Nature Red in Beak and Talon”
Derpy Caturday
I had to make a choice: blog, or watch classic Doctor Who whilst scrubbing shiny rocks to make them shinier. Considering my brain decided at the end of day Friday that it was done for the week and clocking out early, I chose the shiny things with aliens. And today has consisted of pounding on shiny things to extract more shiny things, and create smaller slabs of shiny things to give away to folks who like shiny things but don’t want monster-sized rocks to haul around.
I’ve done a desultory bit of research in preparation for showing you waterfalls and other delights, so those will be forthcoming as soon as I’ve got the photos selected and edited. In the meantime, I shall distract you with a delightful find via the Bloggess: Derpy Cats, wherein you will find delights such as this:
And this:
Why, yes, you can say sayonara to the rest of your productivity. You’re welcome.
The Answer to a Geologic Riddle
You have no idea how impressed I am. I tossed a rather difficult puzzle at you, and within the first few comments, you’d solved it!
Cope was on the right track with a guess of “siliceous petrified wood.” Then RQ nailed it: “Carbonized wood fossil. Like really, really old charcoal. Or something. I’m having the gut feeling that carbon is really important here.” Bam! Three comments in, and y’all had it solved.
This is permineralized charcoal.
Carbon is, indeed, really important. So is silica. Lockwood, who studied this stuff in depth and wrote up a paper on it for Oregon State University, sent me the following in an email:
The key here is the term “permineralization,” and more specifically, “silicification.” I think those wikilinks will be clear, but the idea is that all the void spaces, including pores between the cell walls have been completely filled with silica, probably quartz. The reason that the pores are important is that it’s those interconnections that give the rock its overall coherence, toughness, and strength. Otherwise, each individual cell would easily break off from its neighbors. As you’ve seen, they don’t. As a proportion of mass and volume, the carbon is probably only a few percent of the total. So there’s enough exposed on fresh surfaces to smudge your fingers, but the bulk of the rock is crystalline quartz, and is very hard and tough. Incidentally, the carbon *will” eventually get rubbed off, and won’t smudge anymore, until you open up a new fresh surface.
You’re screwed if you wash it, too. I’d scrubbed those samples at work and then tried to demonstrate the trick, only to discover that it no longer performs to specifications. A bit mortifying. You can rub two samples together and achieve the smudge effect again, though, so that’s a little bit of all right. Coworkers were appropriately awed.
The Rose thought it might be fusain, and Lockwood ran with that in the email he sent me:
I don’t think this qualifies as “fusain,” because my read on that suggests that term does not cover permineralized material. On the other hand “permineralized fusain,” while it may be a novel word combination, is probably as accurate as “permineralized charcoal,” which is what I’ve used in the past when I wanted to be as clear and technically accurate as I could be.
We may have just coined a new term, people. Be proud!
Lockwood will be giving us some more detail on this remarkable fossil soon, including a photograph he took of a thin section showing the cells, which are perfectly intact, although a bit squished by compression. This stuff is amazingly detailed: you can see the grain of the wood, and on some samples, you can see the tree rings:
At the outcrop, which either Lockwood or I will describe in some detail later, you can see what look like logs of the stuff dotted throughout a sedimentary layer:
This is one of the reasons I love geology, people. Take a closer look at some ho-hum looking gray rocks with black rocks in them, and suddenly you’re looking at the scene of an ancient forest fire, where logs were turned to charcoal, then silica preserved the remains perfectly. You know how delicate charcoal is. Yet with silicification, it turns in to something that can gouge steel.
Lockwood should have a more thorough write-up on this stuff later – I’ll link when he does. He can give us some amazing details, considering he’s the one who studied it in depth for OSU. I’ve got a big-picture sense, a rather blurry one (did I mention this stop came at the end of the day when we were all utterly exhausted?), but he can give us cellular-level detail. And as we delve into the geology of the Quartzville area, we’ll discover why Rob had me applauding with his second guess.
But it’s going to take me some time to pull things together, and I’ve still got to get some research done for our next Prelude to a Catastrophe installment, so we’ll be on with sneak peeks. What’ll it be next? Wild pillow basalts, waterfalls, the weirdest cinder cone ever, or the story of a rather angular erratic?