paris

La Marsellaise

catdynamics — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 23:04:31 +0000

La Marsellaise

catdynamics Fri, 11/13/2015 - 18:04

Jules Verne at Disneyland

aardvarchaeology — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:20:43 +0000

Jules Verne at Disneyland

Though I really enjoyed my late 70s childhood visits to Disneyland and Disneyworld, I am no friend of disnification, and I've always seen the Paris Disneyland as a bit of a joke. But my mom wanted to treat my kids to a visit last week, and so I came along too.

The Paris Disneyland has five sections. The US small-town nostalgia section full of Disney memorabilia shops, the faux-16th century fairytale section, the adventure movie section and the wild west section didn't do very much for me – though the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is admittedly hugely atmospheric, and the Small World ride provided a strongly hallucinogenic (though not altogether pleasurable) experience.

The Nautilus and the moon cannon

The best part of Paris Disneyland is instead the retro-futuristic section, because it's the least disnified one, and because its design largely builds upon the characteristic settings and illustrations of sometime Parisian Jules Verne's novels. We went on board the Nautilus and we got shot out of the moon cannon onto the Space Mountain 2 roller coaster – where the security seat couldn't quite accommodate me, so I hurt my shoulders pretty badly in addition to being scared witless.

The kids though, 15 and 10, were very happy with it all.

See also Jules Verne's awesome grave monument.

Parked Vernian dirigible

aardvarchaeology Wed, 09/11/2013 - 08:20

The majestic Megatherium

laelaps — Tue, 18 May 2010 05:40:22 +0000

The majestic Megatherium

A restoration of Megatherium from H.N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters.

For over a century and a half dinosaurs have been the unofficial symbols and ambassadors of paleontology, but this was not always so. It was fossil mammals, not dinosaurs, which enthralled the public during the turn of the 19th century, and arguably the most famous was the enormous ground sloth Megatherium. It was more than just a natural curiosity. The bones of the "great beast" represented a world which flourished and disappeared in the not-so-distant past, but, as illustrated by Christine Argot in a review of its history, illustrations of what Megatherium looked like have been in flux since the time of its discovery.

No doubt humans have been finding the remains of giant ground sloths for quite some time, but the story of Megatherium as we know it began in 1788. It was in that year that Manuel Torres discovered the nearly complete skeleton of an immense, strange animal on the banks of the river LujÃ¡n about 65 kilometers west of Buenos Aires in northern Argentina. The following year it was shipped to the Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, Spain where it was assembled and illustrated by Juan Bautista Bru, and it was on the basis of these illustrations that the French anatomist Georges Cuvier was able to determine what this spectacular animal was. He gave it the name Megatherium americanum, and appraised it as an extinct, peculiar creature most similar of the small arboreal sloths which still clung the branches of South American rainforests. As Cuvier did not accept the idea of evolution there could be no genetic connection between the ancient monster and the living sloths, but the similarity between the two could not be denied.

Megatherium, based upon Bru's original illustrations, as it appeared in the second edition of Cuvier's Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles. From Argot 2008.

Yet Cuvier's work on Megatherium was largely descriptive - it would be up to other naturalists to reconstruct its lifestyle and habits. One of the first to do so was another French paleontologist, FranÃ§ois Jules Pictet de la Rive (often simply referred to as Pictet), who considered several hypotheses about Megatherium in the 1850's. The first was that the sloth living underground, burrowing through the soil like an enormous mole. It certainly had the claws for digging, but this idea was too absurd, especially considering how populations of these creatures might undermine the landscape. (Though, in his 1836 contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises [which is not mentioned by Argot], the English geologist William Buckland envisioned Megatherium as an animal which dug into the ground for roots.) An alternative was that, like living sloths, Megatherium lived in the trees, but again its large size seemed to preclude this possibility; what sort of tree could hold such a large animal?

A reconstruction of Megatherium as conceived by Gaudry and still on display in the Museum of natural history in Paris. It is very similar to the mount of Megatherium in London's Natural History Museum, as well as numerous subsequently-reconstructed skeletons at other museums. From Argot 2008.

The only viable hypothesis was that Megatherium was a terrestrial animal which used its large claws to tear off branches or even uproot trees, perhaps sitting back on its tail (a part of the skeleton which had been unknown to Cuvier) to munch on leaves and treelimbs. Indeed, in his own analysis of the mammal made around the same time as Pictet's, the English anatomist Richard Owen proposed that Megatherium could stand up on its hind limbs in some instances and was not wholly constrained to a quadrupedal stance.

The image of a shuffling Megatherium which could rear up to feed was fleshed out by the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. His restoration depicts two rotund individuals with slightly elongated snouts, one Megatherium on all fours and another reaching up to the branches of a tree, giving life to the hypotheses which Pictet and Owen had developed. H.N. Hutchinson also presented a colorful portrayal of Megatherium in his popular work Extinct Monsters in which he described the attack of a short-trunked, long-tongued Megatherium on a tree:

...it is not difficult to form a mental picture of the great beast laying siege to a tree, and to conceive the massive frame of the Megatherium convulsed with the mighty wrestling, every vibrating fibre reacting upon its bony attachment with the force of a hundred giants; extraordinary must be the strength and proportions of the tree if, when rocked to and fro, to right and left, in such an embrace, it can long withstand the efforts of its assailant. It yields, the roots fly up, the earth is scattered wide upon the surrounding foliage, and the tree comes down with a thundering crash, cracking and snapping the great boughs like glass. Then the coveted food is within rea,ch, and the giant reaps the reward of his Herculean labours.

The skeletal outline of such an event was impressively put on display at the Museum of natural history of Paris in the late 1860's under the direction of paleontologist Albert Gaudry. He thought that the image of a Megatherium rearing up against a tree-trunk would make the greatest impression upon visitors, and this pose has since been adopted for other Megatherium and giant sloth mounts in museums elsewhere.

As Argot notes, however, there is still much to learn about the appearance and habits of Megatherium despite the length of time it has been known to scientists. While recent studies of its skull have confirmed that it had a long tongue but probably did not have a trunk, the way in which the ponderous animal moved is still somewhat difficult to determine. That it could walk on all fours or rear up on two legs is obvious, but trackways found in South America hint that it may have walked bipedally, too, and one attempt to test its ability to walk on two legs found nothing preventing it from doing so. Over two centuries since the discovery of the skeleton figured by Bru, we are still figuring out how to restore the magnificent Megatherium.

Christine Argot (2008). Changing Views in Paleontology:
The Story of a Giant (Megatherium, Xenarthra) Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology A Tribute to Frederick S. Szalay DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-6997-0_3

laelaps Tue, 05/18/2010 - 01:40

Ah, one of my all time favorite megafauna! Let's not forget it's contribution to the biblical literalists by leaving tracks in what is now Carson City.

Technically the Carson City tracks were attributed to Mylodon, but it is still an awesome story. I have written about it previously here and am rewriting it for inclusion in the Laelaps essay anthology (which will hopefully be ready in the not-too-distant future).

I remember as a small child, my plain brown megatherium and iguanodon plastic toys always had to waltz together, due to the position of their forelimbs (both stood upright). I knew about waltzing from the Muppet Show.

Yes, the Megatherium in the Paris Museum is still there, in the same position. Or at least, it was, on the last time I went there (about 6 months ago). Kind of an old friend...

Man i love that guy. How he hasn't remained a prehistoric symbol is beyond me. I wonder: did it's tail play any in it's bipedal locomotion?

FWIW, there are Old Earth Creationists who are also biblical literalists-- and their exgesis takes many words MORE literally. Don't give biblical literalism a bad name by giving the young-earth-think-tankers the credit for being the one true view of scripture.

Actually, Cuvier was one of the early proponents of evolution. Read his paper on the megatherium, or the abstract of it that appeared in "Monthly Magazine" in 1796. In it he makes the statement that the megatherium proved that ancient animals were very different from those alive in the modern world (I'm paraphrasing of course).

Rick

Rick; I think you are mistaken. Recognizing that life varied over time did not necessarily imply evolution, and Cuvier remained silent on whatever mechanism he thought triggered the succession of different forms (he did not advocate evolution nor did he support multiple creations, and he generally kept his religious beliefs out of his efforts to create a hard-nosed, systematic natural science). More than that, Cuvier was fiercely critical of Lamarck and Geoffrey for their ideas about evolution as it undermined his work on extinction and the correspondence of parts within species - see Appel's The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate for the details on this.

Orjin Krem Bitki Ã¶zlerinin mikro Ã¶lÃ§Ã¼lerde birleÅtirilmesi ile elde edilmiÅ naturel bir Ã¼rÃ¼ndÃ¼r.
Orjin Krem Emilimi Ã§ok gÃ¼Ã§lÃ¼ olduÄundan etkisini dakikalar iÃ§erisinde gÃ¶sterir.
Orjin Krem Bitki Ã¶zleri sayesinde kaslarÄ±n rahatlamasÄ±na ve gerilimin giderilmesine yardÄ±mcÄ± olur.
Orjin Krem 100 ML ve 25 ML set olarak satÄ±lmaktadÄ±r.
Orjin Krem iki kutu bir arada bir kutu iÃ§erisindedir holagram bulunmaktadÄ±r.
Orjin Krem alÄ±ndÄ±ktan sonra bandrollÃ¼ sayesinde sahte olup olmadÄ±ÄÄ±nÄ± kontrol edebilirsiniz.

Faith is something you give away (or often, something that is demanded for free).

Trust is something that can only be earned.

My name is bill and uhmm... I think that this is super super super duper stupid..... Why the fuck would there be a 20 foot ant eater? You stupid smug idiot :D

Signed- Bill

coil, pipe, poles and wrought iron-type door,

International subway system throwdown

bioephemera — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:40:06 +0000

International subway system throwdown

We all know some cities "feel" smaller than others. But this set of subway maps presented at the same scale makes the differences obvious.

Just for fun, I made this image layering four of maps from major world cities in red, black, gold, and blue. Recognize the cities? Answer after the fold. . .

Sizewise, the winner here is London, shown in red. New York, in black, is a close second. The much less complex gold-green pattern is Washington, DC - note that it only approaches the size of New York and London because of the long spindly commuter line reaching north into Maryland. And that dense blue hairball in the lower right corner? That's Paris, mon ami.

Via fakeisthenewreal via rational contemporary.

bioephemera Sun, 05/10/2009 - 11:40