#mastodons

[geopsych]

From last October. The pods were still hanging on the honey locust tree because the large Ice Age mammals that used to eat them and spread the seeds just never come around anymore. I read but haven’t tested it that the stuff inside the pods around the seeds is sweeter than honey (not recommended b/c I don’t know if it’s toxic). Somebody back in the Pleistocene had a sweet tooth and it seems to be mastodons. Remnants of these pods have been found in their manure. And the huge thorns and spines at a certain height on the trees? They were to discourage mastodons from pushing the whole tree over to get the pods just out of reach! Now you know.

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 61: Middle Ages and Much Earlier

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct grouping.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.

[antiqueanimals]

Mastodon Americanus by Charles R. Knight. 1907. From Terra: The Member's Magazine of The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Volume 25, No. 2. November/December 1986.

Internet Archive

[uwlmvac]

Mammoths and mastodons are both extinct ice-age megafauna, distantly related to today's elephants. The mammoth eats grass, and its teeth are flat to allow crushing the vegetation. The mastodon has a series of high bumps on the teeth to allow it to eat browse such as twigs. Mammoth remains are found predominantly on the plains, and mastodon predominantly in the eastern woodlands. However, the La Crosse area has remains of both species, suggesting that the vegetation here at the end of the ice age was a mosaic of both grassland and woodland that could support both species. 

Photo: Single tooth from: Left-mammoth, right-mastodon. The mammoth tooth is fragile and some of the tooth is broken, exposing the deep tooth enamel. Mammoth lose their teeth as they are worn down, and new ones emerge to replace them.

For more information about mammoths and mastodons visit MVAC’s video at: https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/educators/archaeology-terms/?letter=m&term=164813

[sunbentshadows]

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

[mitchipedia]

[deafeningcreationearthquake]

[cyberpunkboytoy]

So there's the idea of "kitchen table poly," AKA "everyone in the polycule needs to be able to sit at a kitchen table together and get along like friends."

One of my roommates just came up with a counter idea, which is "poker table poly." Everyone in the polycule must be enemies. No one is allowed to get too chummy or they're kicked out. They all also likely owe eachother money.

[abbiistabbii]

[thoughtportal]

[cmerrill2]

Speculative Creative Nonfiction

Nonfiction is not made up, right? But I wanted to wander off into my imagination while writing this essay and this is the result, just published in Sentience Literary Journal: “Mastodons, Mammoths, and Morula” by Cheryl Merrill

[f-identity]

[Image description: A series of posts from Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@octodon.social dated Dec 08, 2022, 04:33, reading:

It's good that our finest minds have focused on automating writing and making art, two things human beings do simply because it brings them joy. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people risk their lives every day breaking down ships, a task that nobody is in a particular hurry to automate because those lives are considered cheap https://www.dw.com/en/shipbreaking-recycling-a-ship-is-always-dangerous/a-18155491 (Headline: 'Recycling a ship is always dangerous.' on Deutsche Welle) A world where computers write and make art while human beings break their backs cleaning up toxic messes is the exact opposite of the world I thought I was signing up for when I got into programming

/end image description]

[weepingwidar]

Yui Sakamoto (Japanese, 1981-2024) - Untitled (2022)

[netscapenavigator-official]

If Staff ever implements the editing method from Mastodon, we'd be fucked.

Currently, on Tumblr, if you edit a post, all the former reblogs stay exactly the same.

On Mastodon, editing a post changes all the boosts and simply notifies the people who interacted with the post prior to the edit.

Now, can you imagine that on Tumblr?

Surely giving the OP the ability to edit their post after hundreds of thousands of people have reblogged it would be a perfectly balanced feature that I'm sure the Tumblr' userbase has never abused before.

[covidnovelaesthetic]

How do you do? As well as you know, the usual being plagued by antlered worms and attacking earth-eaters. Hopefully wizards and bats and lizards and rats can compete with that, with Carnival Jack. Though the Architect seems friendly, which is probably just swell. Beyond the Architect are the cave spiders, crawling around one another within a great cylindrical star-cavern and paying no heed to the small crab between their feet holding one Dreamsphere (ours). Upon the outside surface of the cylinder trods a great elk, and between the icy-white and ivy-draped peaks of its antlers lies a great network of cobwebs, of silken strings, upon which dances a great Remipede, playing out the Song of Reality on the strings of the great harp, which hums in the ear of the narwhal-squids which pull the chariot of the Hand of Time around the circumference of the great celestial Clown Clock, which crawls with ogres and goblins and spiders and trolls and dragons and squid and emerald crabs and hermit crabs and octopus-belugas, all hanging about in the tide-pools between its infinitely-stretching axial spars. All of this is in turn imagined by the velociraptor-monkey with a spear which lives in a tree and hides from snapping packs of weevil-aardvark-aardwolf-wolves, cougar crabs and angry lobster-tigers snapping for a denied dinner. In a hidden compartment in its tree, the velociraptor-monkey protects a hidden tankful of Architects on a reef which hold Memories in time via Dreamspheres. Butterflies and moths made of jewels flit lazily above it all, more heedless than the vultures and bustards and buzzards which are starting to crowd in the sky and blot out the sun and descend on the land to relieve its remaining carnage that following day. “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, Yesterday Holds Memories In Time,” screams Carnival Jack’s enabler with a great cruel sneer and pulls out your heart and demands that you yield. His mouth makes impossible sounds that seem almost like words. You cannot decrypt it, no matter how you scream. We all emerge as particles of unfiltered light from the eyes at the tips of an anemone’s waving fronds.

The Clockmakers are coming.

[amnhnyc]

This Fossil Friday, meet the Warren mastodon: the first complete American mastodon (Mammut americanum) skeleton found in the United States! This fossilized proboscidean was discovered in a bog in Newburgh, New York in 1845. It was remarkable for being preserved in the position in which it had died some 11,000 years ago—standing upright with its legs thrust forward and its head tilted upward, likely gasping for air under mud in which it had become mired. Shortly after its excavation, the Warren mastodon’s tusks began to decay. But thanks to Museum preparators, the tusk fragments were reassembled and restored to their proper length of 8 ft 6 in (2.6 m).

See the Warren mastodon up close in the Hall of Advanced Mammals! The Museum is open daily from 10 am–5:30 pm. Plan your visit.

Photo: D. Finnin / © AMNH