Shala K. Howell's Blog, page 17

“Is that truck exhausted?”

Once upon a time, I used to use Saturday mornings to post funny things my then four-year-old daughter said. She still says a lot of funny things, but as a twelve-year-old, her jokes have longer build-ups and don’t lend themselves to a quick burst of humor. But when going through my files this week, I stumbled on one that I hadn’t posted yet.

The Four-Year-Old, on seeing a garbage truck spew an incredible amount of exhaust into the air: “Mommyo, is that truck exhausted?”

Four was an excellent year for puns.

Related Links: 

More Funny Stuff My Daughter Says on Caterpickles

Wordless Wednesday: Hi!

A little birdie told me today that it’s been entirely too long since I updated Caterpickles. I’m sorry about that. I’ve been doing some writing work lately for a select crop of clients and I’ve been having a mild spot of trouble finding time to blog as well.

But don’t worry. This guy has been checking on me every day since May. He and the Mrs. raised a batch of kids in our eaves this spring, and he got in the habit of stopping outside my front window at around 1 o’clock to give me a progress report.

[image error]It’s about time you featured me, lady. I’ve only been visiting you every day for most of my life. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Related Links:

More Wordless Wednesdays on CaterpicklesThe 10-year-old finds the world’s smallest lizard (Caterpickles)

“Is that weird beastie in my yard a mole, vole, or gopher?”

My mother-in-law refers to our backyard as the National Wildlife Refuge of Northern California, and I have to say, I can see her point. So far this summer, I’ve spotted at least one opossum, multiple smaller as-yet-unidentified ground rodents, a great blue heron, Mr. & Mrs. Mallard, at least two types of hummingbirds, violet-green swallows, black phoebes, waxwings, doves, spotted towhees, and juncos.

While swinging on the swing set one blissful afternoon, The Twelve-Year-Old noticed a furry beast with a rather fine set of long yellow teeth staring at her from his burrow. She immediately began taking pictures, and when he decided he was done posing for the paparazzi, she came inside and asked me what he was.

“Is that dude a mole, vole, or gopher?”

Honestly I thought it looked too big to be a vole.

“I zoomed in a lot, Mommyo, because I didn’t want to scare him away.”

So much for the easy answer. Time for a trip to the backyard to survey the damage.

[image error]Well, that doesn’t look good. (Photo: Shala Howell)

That looked like a lot of damage from one little guy. But it also didn’t look like the work of a vole.

Voles like to dig runs — relatively open holes with a network of tunnels running between them. (Shawn Woods has posted a wonderful video on the difference between moles, voles, and gophers and the types of damage they do to your yard on YouTube.)

Our guy was digging up crescent shaped dirt mounds. Here’s a close-up.

[image error]Close-up of the outside of the dude’s burrow. (Photo: Shala Howell)

I knew from watching Shawn Woods’ video that moles typically dig dome-shaped mounds composed of finely sifted dirt, while gophers tend to make crescent-shaped ones with lots of big dirt clumps in them. All of the mounds more or less looked like this, so it was tempting to call it a gopher and be done. But my daughter had taken some pretty great (if a little low-resolution) photos of the beastie’s front attributes, so we decided to double-check our answer.

Mole or gopher: Examining the teeth



[image error]My what big teeth you have. (Photo: The 12-Year-Old Howell)

As you can see, our guy has some pretty big teeth. They are flat and enormous, great for gnawing on things. Moles are carnivores, so they have smaller, sharper teeth.

Those teeth belong to a rodent. So our guy is most likely a gopher.

Mole or gopher: Examining the face

But what if you didn’t have a lovely portrait of his smile? What if all you had was a side view, like this one? How could you tell then?

[image error]

This guy has large digging paws. Someone out there might be able to look at those paws and say, oh that’s a gopher. But not me. Moles and gophers both have large digging paws, so I’m going to need something else to help me make a quick and dirty field identification.

This guy has visible ears, beady eyes, a small black nose, and the hint of pockets in his cheeks.

Moles have ears and eyes so small that they are nearly invisible, and a large pink nose for sniffing out prey.

Conclusion: Probable gopher.

And that explains all the hawks I’ve been seeing circling our yard and landing in our trees lately. Happy hunting, dudes. I want my yard back.

Related Links:

Helpful video on the difference between gophers, voles, and moles (MousetrapMonday on YouTube) “There’s a mouse in my pool. Is it time to freak out?” (Caterpickles)

Wordless Wednesday: Obligatory lizard post

It wouldn’t be summer without at least one lizard picture.

[image error]My daughter spotted this little guy on a recent trip to Texas. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Related Links:

More Wordless Wednesdays on CaterpicklesThe 10-year-old finds the world’s smallest lizard (Caterpickles)

Wordless Wednesday: Scenes from Aspen

This summer, I got the chance to visit Aspen for the first time. So of course I took some pictures. Here are a few of my favorites.

[image error]Some random field, because Aspen has gloriousness to spare. (Photo: Michael Howell)



[image error]Aspen at night. Wish my phone could take photos like these. (Photo: Michael Howell)

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More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

The book that has my 12-year-old bubbling over with joy this week

Yesterday, with one week to go before school resumes in earnest, The Twelve-Year-Old and I finally made our annual School’s Out for the Summer trip to the local bookstore.

(Yes, I am aware. However, the librarians at my daughter’s middle school cleaned out their inventory last spring and let the kids take the discarded books home for free. So of course, my daughter came home on the last day of school with two enormous bags full of books. I just didn’t see the need to buy more until she’d read those. It took her a while.)

Reading broke out on our way home from the store, so instead of tuning in to NPR’s dreary summation of the day’s events, I listened to bubbles of laughter coming from the back seat. It’s been a while since I’ve had the pleasure to hear so much infectious joy, so I thought I’d tell you about the book that triggered it.

Klawde: Evil Alien Warlord Cat #1 by Johnny Marciano and Emily Chenoweth

[image error]What the book’s about: With his sharp claws and maniacal pursuit of power, Klawde has proven too ruthless a leader, even for the warlord cats on his home planet, Lyttyrboks. Klawde’s fellow cats strip him of his power and impose the cruelest punishment they know — exile to Earth.

Raj had an amazing life in Brooklyn — friends, pizza, all the comics he could read — all within easy walking distance of his apartment. But when his family moves to Elba, Oregon, Raj is forced to say goodbye to his friends, shelve his comic books, and go to nature camp. This is not a happy moment for Raj.

But it does make Raj a perfect foil for the tyrannical Klawde.

Why The Twelve-Year-Old Likes It: “The drawings are funny, the storylines are hilarious, and I liked the concept of Earth cats being descendants of ruthless exiles from another planet. Oh, and all of the cat place names are puns. For example, the capital planet is named Lyttyrboks. Lit-TER-box, get it, Mommyo?”

There is apparently a second book in the series, so I have agreed to acquire it for The Twelve-Year-Old on the condition that she doesn’t read it aloud to Canelo. That cat is feral enough already.

Related Links:

More Book Reviews on Caterpickles

Wordless Wednesday: Trouble in two ears

Yesterday, Canelo and I got into a little spat over who got to sit in my chair at breakfast. As you can see, he won.

[image error]Photo: Shala Howell

Bitter experience has taught me not to argue with Canelo when his ears do that.

Related Links:

More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

Wordless Wednesday: You are getting sleepy…

[image error]so very sleepy… (photo: shala howell)

How are you still awake right now?

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More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles

So they named a new dinosaur species last week…

Wonder how long this one will last?

News broke last week that paleontologists have determined that a set of bones found in Big Bend back in the 1980s is actually a hitherto unknown type of duck-billed dinosaur.

From the article:

“Experts say fossil remains discovered in the 1980s at the Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas have been identified as a new genus and species of duckbilled dinosaur.

The Journal of Systematic Paleontology announced the classification of the Aquilarhinus palimentus last week. It was named for its aquiline nose and shovel-shaped jaw.”


Source: “Fossil found in 1980s in Texas declared new genus, species” (Associated Press, July 17, 2019)

This caught my attention for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that whenever I hear of a new species, I can’t help but wonder how scientists can be sure they’ve got it right this time, and how long that new species identification will last.

[image error] Aquilarhinus palimentus. Illustration by ICRA Art via SciTechDaily.



There’s a reason the dinosaur family tree keeps changing

The 40-year delay implies that paleontologists are much more careful about these things now than they were in the past. In this case, at least part of the delay was due to the fact that the bones were stuck together in a way that kept scientists from properly examining them.

Nevertheless, scientists were able to determine that Aquilarhinus’s lower jaw is a very different shape from most duck-billed dinosaurs. Apparently, the lower jaws of most duck-billed dinosaurs create a U-shape, but Aquilarhinus’s lower jaws create an odd sort of W. That lower jaw was part of the reason paleontologists decided Aquilarhinus was a unique species.

Still, there’s a reason that paleontologists like Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana devote at least part of their time to streamlining the dinosaur family tree.

Horner believes that at least some of the specimens declared in the past to be unique species are in fact juvenile versions of other, already defined dinosaurs. Not everyone agrees, but as even a rudimentary look at the history of paleontology can tell you, the dinosaur family tree is probably a royal mess.

The Bone Wars of the mid-1800s resulted in a lot of dubious species

In the mid-1800s, fossil hunters had a nasty habit of getting into feuds with one another. Richard Owen and Gideon Mantell shared a lifelong antipathy, as did Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. These rivalries played out not only in the scientific journals, but also took tangible form in overt comparisons of the fossil hunters’ respective bone collections. Those comparisons weren’t just about how many bones you had, but how many of those bones came from new and never-before-seen species of dinosaurs. That was wonderful incentive for early paleontologists to declare that they’d discovered an entirely new species based on nothing more than a few teeth or a couple of stray bones. And really, who could blame them? So few dinosaurs were known at that point that odds were their dinosaur really was a new species.

That free-wheeling environment is no doubt the reason Joseph Leidy felt free to declare Trachodon mirabilis to be a unique species based on no more than a few teeth in 1856, and why Edward Drinker Cope rushed to publish his Elasmosaurus platyurus findings in 1868 without taking the time to figure out which end was the tail and which end the neck.

Although Cope’s Elasmosaurus platyurus has managed to hang on to its place in the dinosaur family tree despite Cope’s initial blunder, Leidy’s Trachodon hasn’t been as lucky. Elasmosaurus boasts a relatively complete skeleton all things considered, but the original fossil evidence for Trachodon was limited to seven teeth, one of which had a double-root. While Leidy always claimed to be certain that the double-rooted tooth came from a Trachodon, he eventually admitted that the other teeth could have come from a different animal entirely. Hardly confidence-inspiring.

[image error]Left: Sketch of the teeth that Leidy used to name Trachodon. (Sketch via DinoHunters.com) Right: Artist interpretation of Trachodon. (Trachodon image via CoolDinoFacts.com/fandom.com)

Years later, on examining the double-rooted tooth that Trachodon was originally based on, Jack Horner decided that it probably belonged to some sort of duck-billed dinosaur, but whether that dinosaur was a crested lambeosaurid like Corythosaurus or a flat-headed hadrosaur from the genus Prosaurolophus, he couldn’t say.

The dinosaur family tree is littered with dubious species like these.

In fact, the older the species identification the more likely it is that the dinosaur has been stricken from the official fossil record. The glorious thing about the widespread human fascination with dinosaurs is that dinosaurs started appearing in pop culture almost from the moment they were first discovered. Old books, sculpture gardens, movies, and TV shows featuring dinosaurs are everywhere. Each little bit of pop culture records which dinosaurs were popular when it was created, and to some degree, what people thought they knew about them at the time.

Since I’m not officially in the business of studying dinosaurs, I get to have fun with the intersection of dinosaurs and pop culture, and play a little game I like to call Dinosaur Species Go Poof?

Dinosaur Species Go Poof?

The rules are simple:

Watch an old movie or TV show featuring dinosaurs or read an old dinosaur book.Identify the dinosaur species in it. (Books often tell you this outright, movies and TV shows may or may not. If not, you’ll need to look it up. I’ve had good luck with IMDb when it comes to figuring out which dinosaurs directors thought they were using in their movies and TV shows.)Pick a dinosaur that looks wonky to you, and figure out whether paleontologists still believe that dinosaur once existed. If your dinosaur species has been erased from the fossil record outright, you win. Your dinosaur species has gone poof. In the more likely event that that your dinosaur species has simply had a name change, an appearance makeover (like that fancy new T. Rex stance), or been declared a juvenile version of some other species, I strongly recommend that you take a few minutes to figure out your dinosaur’s backstory. Who first discovered this dinosaur and why didn’t their work on it hold up?



Every time I’ve played this game I’ve been rewarded with some glorious nugget.

Like the fact that the complicated, fully imagined, and animated Trachodon in the 1925 movie The Lost World was based on a single double-rooted tooth that probably belonged to some other animal entirely.

Or the fact that the rivalry between Cope and Marsh started when the same Joseph Leidy who gifted us with the now-dubious Trachodon pointed out that Cope’s paper showed the Elasmosaur’s head perched on the tip of the very short tail instead of at the end of its very long neck, and Marsh decided to never let Cope forget this very embarrassing public mistake.

Or the fact that Boss Tweed (the guy who ran the Democratic party machine that controlled New York City in the 1860s and 1870s) is the reason Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins wasn’t able to build an American version of his Crystal Palace Dinosaurs in Central Park.

I simply adore this game.

Have you ever played it?

I’d love to hear some of the weird facts about dinosaurs you’ve learned by exploring the intersection of dinosaurs and pop culture.

Want to know more about the rivalries between the early dinosaur hunters?

I have some book recommendations for you.

Nonfiction:

Deborah Cadbury’s book Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science surveys several of the first dinosaur hunters. She focuses mostly on British hunters, like Mary Anning, William Buckley, Richard Owen, and Gideon Mantell.

Barbara Kerley and Brian Selznick teamed up to create a kid-friendly (although fact-laden) nonfiction book The Dinosaurs of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, that describes how Richard Owen and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins worked together to create some of the first visual images of dinosaurs for the general public.

My Beloved Brontosaurus by Brian Switek is a lively and entertaining look at the way our understanding of dinosaurs has evolved over time.

And of course, there’s always Bones for Barnum Brown, Roland T. Bird’s memoir of fossil hunting during the Great Depression, which I reviewed here on Caterpickles recently.

Fiction:

Tracy Chevalier’s historical fiction novel Remarkable Creatures provides a fictionalized account of Mary Anning and the cultural forces arrayed against her.

Michael Crichton’s novel, Dragon Teeth, is set in the American West in 1876 at the height of the battle between Cope and Marsh. I’ll be honest, I didn’t like this book as much as Chevalier’s, but I did enjoy seeing how the nasty tricks and general paranoia of the time affected those around Cope and Marsh.

What about you?

Do you have any dinosaur book recommendations for me?

Related Links:

Movie Review: The Lost World (1925) (Caterpickles)10 Facts about Elasmosaurus, Ancient Marine Reptile (ThoughtCo)Professor Cope vs. Professor Marsh (American Heritage)Gideon Mantell: Forgotten man who discovered the dinosaurs (Guardian)One dinosaur too many? (Science Line)

Wordless Wednesday: Oleander

Still more flowering plants to admire and learn. Google tells me this one is oleander.

[image error]Photo: Shala Howell

Related Links:

More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles