I read The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World on the plane. A pretty quick read, and recommended. Two major things that stood out to me:
- The importance of the fact that dinosaurs likely were more efficient at getting oxygen from the air, like modern birds, than mammals (explains their size?).
- The description of the cataclasm at the K-T boundary is pretty good. Though the author was mildly critical of the story in The New Yorker on this, it’s a good complement to that.
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, An early dispersal of modern humans from Africa to Greece. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the dating. So don’t take this home, but the plot keeps getting thicker and more muddled.
Tarring Steve Pinker and others with Jeffrey Epstein.
Ross Perot, Brash Texas Billionaire Who Ran for President, Dies at 89.
Buddhists Go to Battle: When Nationalism Overrides Pacifism. The idea that Buddhism leads to pacifism is falsified by almost all of history. Kind of annoying that Western conceptualizations of Buddhism are foregrounded to such an extent that history is rewritten.
Couple Forced to Give Up Babies After Embryo Mixup, Lawsuit Says.
That’s the explanation I’ve heard for dinosaurs being bigger. Bones full of air sacs that both made it easier for them to breath, and also made said bones weighed less than mammal bones. What’s interesting is that aside from the sauropods, the biggest land mammals actually weighed about as much as the biggest land dinosaurs – it’s just that the dinosaurs were bigger for that weight.
I’ll have to give that a shot. It’s been a long time since I read a treatment of dinosaurs.
Razib,
I remember about 4 to 5 years ago you mentioned you were interested reading some primary histories for pre-modern Chnia, but had to make due with English language summaries instead because much of those materials were still untranslated. I recently came across a blog that lists direct English translations of some of those histories, which maybe of interest to you:
http://earlychinasinology.blogspot.com/2018/01/chinese-dynastic-histories-translations.html
Razib — the recent podcast (Insight) episodes seem to have become very “quiet” again (low sound level).
Will Spencer ever re-appear?
joeq, i’ll work on the gain. or tell the editor
this replaced stumbleupon: https://mix.com/for-you
“The importance of the fact that dinosaurs likely were more efficient at getting oxygen from the air, like modern birds, than mammals (explains their size?).”
There is a strong correlation between the size of animals at the time and the amount of oxygen in a given volume of air at the time. And, this correlation extends beyond dinosaurs. For example, it also extends to insects. The amount of oxygen available was almost surely more important than the efficiency of particular clades of animals in processing it.
See, e.g., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-mammals-evolved-thank/
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110808-ancient-insects-bugs-giants-oxygen-animals-science/
https://www.livescience.com/1083-oxygen-giant-bugs.html
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/3907
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
http://www.washington.edu/news/2006/10/26/oxygen-levels-the-key-to-land-animals/
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/10/31/4118108.htm