Saturday hike in a rare California rain. Just me and the boy. Couldn’t let it pass. The place, the Los Padres National Forest: mountain grass/woodland – my favorite. Everywhere was a misty Monet, and it only took a few steps to fade into the painting. … We tip-toed through sleepy meadow tallgrass bent under the […]
Category Archives: Prehistoric
In the long, sordid history of scoundrels and rogues, Gilgamesh would be right up there with the worst of ’em. Gilgamesh, a mythical figure* from the first modern civilization, that in ancient Sumer, a.k.a. the Cradle Of Civilization, a collection of towns along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in what was the Fertile Crescent, was […]
The “myth” of a paradisiacal past, or Golden Age, where people once lived in a fertile land/world of beauty, abundance and diversity, is pretty well universal around the globe. The topic, though, is much too complicated for me to do it definitive justice, so instead I’m going to take the lazy way out and copy […]
Hmm. Someone has compiled a rather long list of prehistoric fiction novels (1,406 titles!). For you trivia buffs, before Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs came along, there was James De Mille. His 1888 story, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, is supposedly the oldest published dinosaur novel*. Anyway, I’m wondering if […]
An extension of another post, What Killed the Great Beasts of Prehistory? “In a world without humans, most of northern Europe would probably now be home to not only wolves, Eurasian elk (moose) and bears, but also animals such as elephants and rhinoceroses. “This is demonstrated in a new study conducted by researchers from Aarhus […]
I had to give this wonderful article from American Forests magazine, and written by Whit Bronaugh, some space here. Read and imagine. If you’re done with the article and want to read more, may I suggest The Ghosts Of Evolution Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, And Other Ecological Anachronisms.
As readers of this website know, California in ages past had a large inland sea, a mixture of salt and fresh water, known as the Temblor, and in times past, the San Joachin Sea. It varied in size over the many years, but sat in roughly the middle part of the state, the central valley, […]
My first post. Can’t believe it. Never thought I’d have a blog. Never wanted one, actually. Oh, I was happy enough posting on other people’s blogs (though I haven’t done that in quite a few years) I just did not foresee having my own. What changed? I wrote a book, and they say if you […]
Opalescence 