Quarantine entry #19 - April 9

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Not only COVID-19 is still going on strongly, this morning we had a very nasty snowstorm. Fortuitously, we stayed inside, and now the storm is over, (it is the beginning of April, after all), and nature is coming back out – the birds are flying, singing, fighting over their nesting territories en masse, showing just how resilient life on Earth. The storm passed and is over; COVID-19 too will pass and be over and life will return to normal. …Well, relatively so, seeing how the politicians, businessmen, and who else have you, are trying to take advantage of the lockdown and all, are trying to take advantage of the lockdown, and it is all coming down like a great big mess; people are fleeing into the literal woods to escape both COVID-19 and everything else. What next?

Let us talk about the giraffe. Why the giraffe? Because it is unique. There is no other mammal on the modern planet like it. If the modern elephants represent the last scions of an ancient dynasty of herbivorous mammals that fell due to the competition with the artiodactyl mammals, then the modern giraffe is one of those evolutionary cousins of the main dynasty – aka the antelopes, gazelles, wild cattle, sheep and goats – that had its’ heyday in the past, (the Miocene & the Pliocene epochs), but is largely gone, these days.

Pause. The entire taxonomic-biological family of the giraffe consists of the giraffe, and the okapi, aka the forest giraffe. Frankly, the latter name is not used very often, because the okapi is only like the giraffe in the most generic ways; you can see the family similarity, but nothing more. With an effort, you can confuse an Asian elephant with an African one, or an Asian rhinoceros with an African one, but an okapi with a giraffe? Just no. …The families of the okapi and the giraffe have diverged during the Miocene slash the Pliocene, around 11.5 MYA, and the two have never been in contact since.

The okapi family is represented by a single species – the okapi itself. The giraffe, on the other hand, is murkier, as people in charge of biological classification still have not made their mind as to if there is just a single giraffe species, or four of them, or what. Even if there is just a single giraffe species, it may have up to nine subspecies, which is a lot. …Of course, with humans hunting them for all sorts of reasons, or even without any reasons at all, because we humans can be assholes, they may not be around for much longer, but that is not a good thing.

…Yes, COVID-19 has hit humans, even in Africa, hard, so they may not be up for the giraffes, but no one knows exactly how it affects other animals; for example, a tiger in Bronx zoo was discovered to have it; and with giraffes slash okapis, it is anyone’s guess.

So, why is the giraffe so unique? Because it is a very specialized animal – it is not big: it is tall. A good portion of the giraffe is its’ disproportionally long neck and legs; the neck, I think, amounts for about half of the giraffe’s body length, (while in case of the okapi it is about 30%, on average). Just like a human’s, the okapi’s and the giraffe’s neck consist of only 7 vertebra, but the giraffe’s are the most massive one out of the three by far, both in size and in weight. Isn’t trivia fun?

What next? …Um, aside from the humans, the main enemies of the giraffe are the African lion and the Nile crocodile; no one else really wants to tackle and fully-grown giraffe – compared to an elephant or a rhinoceros they may look like great big fragile land kites or something, but their head-butts are painful, and their kicks can be deadly. African lions, however, are known to tackle African bush elephants, (not fully grown, but not just calves either), who are even stronger than the giraffes are, and so they do overpower giraffes by working as a team, on occasion.

The Nile crocodile, on the other hand, is more of a case by case situation – it is a solitary hunter; crocodiles of these species may gather together to feed, (their anatomy of jaws and teeth makes it easier for them to feed together, rather than separately, on something bigger than what they can just swallow whole)… where were we?

Ah yes, unlike the African lion, the Nile crocodile is a solitary hunter, but a social feeder, especially if the prey is big – say, a dead African hippo. Then the not-quite-social crocodiles gather and tolerate each other, more or less, as they feed – with ‘tolerate’ being the key word here. The African lions hunt together, (though there is plenty of case-by-case variation there), and their society is quite complex, (cough, TLK is full of baloney, cough), but they and the Nile crocodiles do not have anything in common aside from both of them living in Africa.

…Yes, we have discussed the ‘African lion vs. Nile crocodile’ AFO episode a while back, and spoiler alert – the lion lost, (and the giraffe was not involved at all), which is fair: a male African lion is a fighter, but it is a team fighter, and on its own, it rather has a disadvantage against the crocodile. Plus, on that episode team AFO really did its’ homework, and their deduction that the Nile crocodile was a better fighter than the African lion was justified, so there!

Back to the giraffe? Er, did it leave while we were dealing with the lion and the crocodile? Why, we have not even mentioned the non-avian theropod dinosaurs, aka the meat-eaters, are the goal of a real discussion of whether they did hunt together as the African lions do, or just fed together, as the Nile crocodiles? And what did they feed upon? Sauropods, among other things, just look at the second episode of WWD, or the fifth episode of ‘Planet Dinosaur’ (2013), for example! Are sauropods like the giraffe?

No, not exactly. Some are – that is the Brachiosaurus and its’ relatives. Others are not – rather, they are big, (aka the elephant) – that is Argentinosaurus and the rest of the titanosaurs; or they are just long – aka Diplodocus and its’ relatives, (including the Apatasaurus). Yes, we are generalizing here so hard, but the thing is that many of the sauropods were built different from the giraffe, and many of them were not built like it.

Moreover, neither was the extinct Indricotherium, or whatever it is named now, (see the third episode of ‘Walking with Beasts’). Just like the extinct titanosaurs, or the existing elephants, it was big rather than tall, and quite proportionate. Why did it die out? Because not unlike the giraffe it was a specialized mammal, designed to eating foliage, and as the savannas, prairies, steppes, etc. spread, the Indricotherium could no longer survive. With the modern giraffe – it is pretty much the same thing: the giraffe survives alongside all of those antelopes and gazelles by being the best foliage eater in the African grasslands – a very specialized niche, to be sure, but it does allow the giraffe to survive over more of Africa as opposed to the more generalized okapi, which exists only in parts of the African rainforest, and whose overall population is worse off than that of the giraffe. Evolution and ecology sometimes play strange tricks upon animals!..

…Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!

Quarantine entry #7 - March 28

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and your family, alongside you, are stuck right in the middle of it, and if you do not try to fight- do not want to fight- then your life sucks – see before. Now onto the show?

Sadly, because real life sucks, we are all stuck inside, not just because the weather was nasty all night and all morning, but because COVID-19 continues… just continues. So, to do something about anything and to stop the fighting, I got into the 2001 film, ‘When Dinosaurs Roamed America’, and so, on this particular day, we will be talking about the Apatosaurus.

Why? Because of the Brontosaurus. The two names and the two dinos had a very tangled relationship – first one name/species was on top, then the other, until, finally, from 2015 onwards to the present it was described that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were two different genera, albeit the ones who were the closest relatives to each other, (with Diplodocus and the diplodocids being the next closest). What next?

Well, what was WDRA? For the beginning of the 21^st century it was very impressive, a movie stitched together out of five segments, something of a responsa to the BBC’s WWD, released in 1999. Only, whereas the U.K. released a six-part mini-series, (re-released and re-edited a couple of times in the future), the US released – in this case – a single film, each one dealing with a separate time in the Mesozoic. The Apatosaurus appeared in the Late Jurassic segment, (aka 150 MYA), and after the Tyrannosaurus, was perhaps the movie’s biggest showpiece.

Here is the punchline: in each of the five segments, the movie’s scriptwriters tried to make a coherent story, but it was a mixed bag; the Early Jurassic bit was especially lackluster, but the Late Jurassic? It was much better.

Well, for one thing, the Late Jurassic segment had much more dinosaurs to work with than the Early Jurassic segment did. The latter only had Dilophosaurus (yes, that one), Megapnosaurus, (another carnivore, which may have been related to Dilophosaurus), and Anchisaurus – a prosauropod, a more gracile and smaller version of Plateosaurus that appeared at the end of the first episode of WWD, (‘New Blood’). And WDRA used the Anchisaurus as a springboard to introduce its’ sauropods – the already-mentioned Apatosaurus and the Camarasaurus.

…It is also worthwhile to mention that WDRA was good enough to depict the two sauropods differently from each other – Apatosaurus might be longer, but Camarasaurus is taller. Moreover, to be honest, sauropod dinosaurs came in three main varieties: those that were long, such as Diplodocus and Apatosaurus; those that were tall, such as Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus; and those that were just large, such as Argentinosaurus and the rest of the titanosaur sauropods. …Ok, but what about WDRA?

Well, if we get back to WDRA and its’ Late Jurassic segment, then it features more dinosaurs than just the two sauropods, including the already mentioned dinosaurs – Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus – and the much smaller Dryosaurus; Dryosaurus was a much smaller bird-hipped dinosaur, one that get eaten by a Ceratosaurus, which got killed by an Allosaurus later. Whether or not this happened in real life no one knows, but I suspect that this was the inspiration behind one of JFC’s episode, where an Allosaurus fought and killed a couple of Ceratosaurs. Another segment, one where an Allosaurus pack harasses an Apatosaurus herd and eventually finishes off a hurt sauropod, inspired – or influenced an episode in the ‘Dinosaur Planet’ mini-series, named ‘Alpha’s Egg’. It is all interactive, baby!..

That said, WDRA was a generally good movie, complete with ‘talking scientist heads’ interrupting the dino action, and semi-interactive CGI graphics, helping to get the point across. It was very impressive, truly, especially for the year 2001. It had certainly lifted my spirits up, however briefly as well, COVID-19 or not, and that is it.

…Well, this is it for now – see you all soon.