Quarantine entry #60 - May 20

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. On top of whatever other issues I may have, I seem to have developed computer/Internet problems… hopefully, they will be resolved quickly enough. What else? Aside from the fact that the DA has switched and that is the end of that? What next?

So, yesterday, I have watched one of the ‘Monsters Resurrected’ episodes – the ‘Great American Predator’. It dealt with one of the more obscure North American dinosaurs – the Acrocanthosaurus. It existed during the early Cretaceous, millions of years before the T-Rex, and it was not really related to the Rex – rather, it was one of the carnosaurs, a cousin to both the Allosaurus of the Jurassic and the giants of the Cretaceous, such as the Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus, for example. Compared to them, the Acrocanthosaurus was smaller, more like the Allosaurus in size, but unlike Big Al and the rest of the carnosaurs in general, the Acrocanthosaurus had a ridge on its back. It was relatively short, nowhere as impressive as the sail of the Spinosaurus, for example, and when compared, the Acrocanthosaurus was the much more conventional theropod dinosaur out of the two, but it is still worth mentioning, because it is overlooked in favor of the T-Rex and the other latecomers.

…Speaking of T-Rex and the other latecomers, I found the ‘Great American Predator’ to be heavily influenced by Robert Bakker and his ‘Raptor Red’ novel, which depicted the life and times of an Utahraptor and her family in the early Cretaceous North America, with the Acrocanthosaurs’ being regular rivals to the Utahraptors in the first two thirds of the novel. Ergo-?

Ergo, my point is that the Utahraptor is the closest thing that real life had to the JP/JW franchise’s raptor, period, (which was initially based on the Deinonychus, also featured in ‘Raptor Red’). Proportionally, Deinonychus was smaller than the Utahraptor, (and the most obscure Dakotaraptor), but it was still the third largest raptor dinosaur in Earth’s history, and it appeared in the ‘Great American Predator’, while the Utahraptor did not. In particular, Deinonychus was shown harassing younger Acrocanthosaurs and eventually forcing this species into extinction, (though by middle to late Cretaceous, not just Acrocanthosaurus, but also Deinonychus and Utahraptor were extinct on the planet, it should be noted).

Other contributing factors to the Acrocanthosaurus’s extinction included the eventual extinction of large North American sauropods, such as Sauroposeidon/Paluxysaurus, and them being replaced by smaller, tougher prey, such as Sauropelta, a distant cousin to the better-known Ankylosaurus, for example. Whereas the jaws and teeth of the T-Rex and its cousins such as Tarbosaurus bataar and Daspletosaurus evolved precisely to crash through bony armor and skeletal bones of the other dinosaurs, the carnosaurs hadn’t evolved this sort of feature – their teeth were thin but sharp, designed to slice through flesh instead, and their jaws were longer and shallower than those of the tyrannosaurs, and so not as powerful as the latter. …The latter were the more derived theropods, I suppose, but now they are all gone, and how the kriff I am going to manage the new DA site, I have no idea. I am half-tempted to just destroy my pages there and all, and be done with them – I do not really have much of value on that site, so who knows?..

Getting back to theropods, let us talk about swans instead. No, not the extinct giants of the Mediterranean islands that used to harass the pygmy elephants that’d also lived there, but rather the modern species. The best-known species are the four northern ones, which belong to the genera Olor (aka the mute swan) and Cygnus, (the rest of the white swans of the Northern hemisphere), as they’d been immortalized in the various works of art and literature as symbols of purity, chastity, and the like, because appearance matters.

The other two swans, however, are quite different birds: the black swan of Australia, (Chenopis atratus), is all black, of course, but the oldest ‘true’ swan of them all, (Sthenelides melancoryphus), is the black-necked swan of South America, and it is white, with a black head and neck, giving it a rather odd appearance, and making one wonder, as to how the swan evolution has gone, color-wise at least.

…The continent of South America is also home to the so-called coscoroba swan, (Coscoroba coscoroba), which is solid white in color instead, but is considered to be more closely related to geese and shelducks, (especially to the Cape Barren goose of southern Australia), rather than to the true swans, appearances be damned…but we’ve talked about geese (and ducks) before, and right now I don’t want to get back to them.

Well, this is it for now. Real life sucks, and the new DA site is worse, but it doesn’t matter; see you all soon instead!

Quarantine entry #47 - May 7

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. In the world of imagination, things are not all right either – first the ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’ cartoon series have ended, and secondly, so did the DC animated videos, which had begun way back when the ‘Flashpoint Paradox’, when the Barry Allen Flash – or some other Flash, I tend to get them all confused – broke time and created an alternate universe, much worse than the DC mainline… Now what?

Honestly, I have no idea – as we have discussed previously, the Disney/SW universe is still having issues, and the SW9 film had only made them worse. The SW: CW series were a good thing, mind you, but now they are finished, and that chapter of the SW saga has also ended.

As for the DC animated universe… I do not know. I’m not a big fan of DC, but I tried to follow it generally, and so I’m aware that the animated movies of that comic world have appeared relatively regularly throughout the ages, an heir to the (original) ‘Teen Titans’ and ‘Justice League’ cartoon series of the 90s and the early 2000s. They might be the reason why the ‘Young Justice’ TV cartoons never got off the ground properly – competition between similar species and all that – who knows? Now they are gone, and DC is left mainly with live action movies, (which are a mess), as well as live action TV series, (which are doing great). We will just have to wait and see what will come out of this conclusion yet.

…The ‘JLD: Apocalips’ film (or whatever it is truly called) itself will be discussed at a different time, so let’s talk about something else. How about geese?

They are waterfowl, birds from the Anatidae family, and relatives of ducks and swans. They differ from swans by being smaller, with shorter, straighter necks. They differ from ducks by being larger than they are, by having less sexual dimorphism than ducks have, (in geese, the female geese and the male ganders are colored much more similarly than the female ducks and the male drakes are in duck species), and by being more terrestrial.

I.e., out of the three groups of waterfowl – ducks, geese and swans, the ducks spend the most time in the water, and they find most of their food in the water as well. Contrary to some popular old beliefs, both swans and geese are omnivorous at most, with a strong herbivorous element – geese in particular are quite happy to survive on plant-based food, with only some animal-based supplements, (possibly caught in a nearby pond). The swans are similar, and both they and geese spend quite a large period of time on land, foraging there. They need water primarily for their young, to keep them safe from such predators as red foxes, coyotes, and – probably – large hawks and similar birds of prey, whereas ducks…

…Whereas ducks prefer to spend their time either in the water or at the water’s edge. They are quite smaller than the geese, let alone the swans, have notably shorter necks, and their legs are located further down towards the tail end of their bodies than in case of their swan and geese cousins, making them better swimmers, (though the grebes and the loons – neither of which are anatid birds – are better swimmers and worse land-walkers yet).  

Moreover, there are two main groups of ducks, (by layperson bird watchers’ standards) – the dabbling ducks and the diving ducks. The dabbling ducks are ducks like mallards (and especially the domestic ducks): they feed in shallower water, mostly on plant food, and they dabble – turn downside up in the water to pick up aquatic plant material, (primarily). The diving ducks dive outright, and they are the more carnivorous species of ducks – birds like the mergansers. They look different from the dabbling ducks and are not really domesticated, as their flesh is strongly fishy. So, where do the geese come into this?

…Aside from the three genera of ‘true’ geese, (Anser, Branta & Chen, or the grey, the black, and the white geese), there are also quite a few species of birds that are also called ‘geese’, but are not considered to be geese at all. Some of them, like the northern gannet/’Solan goose’, (a bird more closely related to the anhinga and the cormorant, FYI), don’t even look like geese at all, but most of them are anatid birds that look more like geese than ducks – only they are ducks instead, shelducks! More precisely, they are waterfowl of the Tadorna genus, and they are large, semi-terrestrial birds, somewhat in the middle between the ducks and the geese, an intermediate link of sorts. They behave more as how the geese do, but they have sexual dimorphism as the ducks do instead.

On the other end of the spectrum, we got the Coscoroba swan, a waterfowl endemic of the South America, which looks and acts like a ‘true’ swan, but is genetically more closely related to the so-called Cape Barren goose of south-east Australia and Tasmania instead. The mapping of the genetic relationships of various birds can get pretty weird, sometimes…

…Well, this is it for now, though. See you all soon!