#t rex and the crater of doom

[mindfulwrath]

Books of 2023

"You Look Like a Thing and I Love You" by Janelle Shane - AI is even weirder when you know how it works. Interesting read. Recommended.

"The Spare Man" by Mary Robinette Kowal - Cozy mystery, IN SPACE! Good mystery, fun characters, ACAB. Recommended.

"Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Vol. 4" by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu - Oh they FUCKIN. Recommended.

"Meddling Kids" by Edgar Cantero - Scooby-Doo meets Lovecraft. Scarier than I expected. Recommended.

"Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days" vols. 1-5 by Shiro Amano - Break my heart all over again why don't you. Surprisingly humorous. Recommended.

"Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire - Boarding school/group therapy for young adults who have just returned from portal fantasies. "Piranesi" vibes. Recommended.

"Down Among the Sticks and Bones" by Seanan McGuire - Prequel "A" to 'Every Heart a Doorway.' Vampires, mad scientists, and the greatest horror: suburbia. Recommended.

"Beneath the Sugar Sky" by Seanan McGuire - Sequel "A" to 'Every Heart a Doorway.' A group of portal-fantasy survivors quest to resurrect a friend. Recommended.

"In an Absent Dream" by Seanan McGuire - Prequel "B" to 'Every Heart a Doorway.' Fae bargains and the consequences of brinksmanship. Recommended.

"Peter Pan" by James Barry - Charmingly written, alarming subtext. At times appallingly racist. An interesting read.

"Come Tumbling Down" by Seanan McGuire - Sequel "B" to 'Every Heart a Doorway.' A portal-fantasy survivor seeks aid to unswap her body. Recommended.

"The Roman Empire" by Don Nardo - Nice overview of the time period, accessible, with good references. At times gratingly Christianity-positive.

"Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village" by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper - What it says on the tin. Amusing.

"Across the Green Grass Fields" by Seanan McGuire - Prequel "C" to 'Every Heart a Doorway.' Horse girl goes to horse world. Frankly, missable.

"Everyday Life in Ancient Rome" by Lionel Casson - Fascinating, and has my favorite quality in a historian: petty snark. Recommended.

"Where the Drowned Girls Go" by Seanan McGuire - Sequel "C" to 'Every Heart a Doorway.' Portal Fantasy survivor escapes institutionalization. Recommended.

"T. Rex and the Crater of Doom" by Walter Alvarez - How we figured out what killed the dinosaurs. Recommended.

"Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" by Ben Barres - Life, science, and activism from a trans neuroscientist. Recommended if you like neuro jargon.

"The Eternal Darkness" by Robert Ballard - A brief history of deep-sea exploration told by someone who's been there. Recommended.

"Lost in the Moment and Found" by Seanan McGuire - Prequel "D" to 'Every Heart a Doorway.' Abused child escapes to a cosmic Lost & Found. Recommended.

"The Writing in the Stone" by Irving Finkel - A mysterious stone drives a Babylonian exorcist to a killing spree. Cool concept, unpleasant execution.

"The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett - Docu-drama about the building of a cathedral. Like if Game of Thrones loved its characters. Recommended.

"The Secret History of Moscow" by Ekaterina Sedia - People are turning into birds and folktale creatures live underground. Not my cup of tea, but Gaiman fans will like it.

"Wild" by Cheryl Strayed - A woman hikes the Pacific Crest Trail alone to grieve her mother's death. An interesting read.

"House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski - An imaginary film ruins a guy's life. Disturbing. Recommended.

"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson - The true story of the 1893 World's Fair and the serial killer who hunted there. Fair bits way more interesting than killer bits. Recommended.

"Piranesi" by Susanna Clark (reread) - The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. Recommended.

[howieduet]

The book T Rex and the Crater of Doom is a nice summary of the scientific investigation into the extinction of dinosaurs and the discovery of the impact site.

Where did the whopping huge meteor come down? I assume if there are core samples, we know where it was, and maybe there are remnants of it?

Chicxulub Puerto, Yucatan, Mexico, fucking exactly

[yellowjavkets]

anyway. T Rex and the crater of doom is some fantastic paleontological nonfiction. it's like a day and a half read and openlibrary has it

[starswallowingsea]

conjure up everything you have cause I want to know if you have any book recommendations (any genre will do)

BOY DO I. I ended up going off on all of these but know that I love all of these books deeply.

So first off I have to mention Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. I read this book for the first time when I was 16 and it changed who I am as a person. Also I picked two of my names from this book. It starts off as a kind of journal/diary/confession of our main character (Queenie) about her time in a Nazi prison in France after being caught while trying to infiltrate the country. They tell her to tell them everything she knows about the Allied war effort, specifically looking at aerial assaults, which gives Queenie an excuse to talk about how she met her best friend. The buys her time for a while, as she does sprinkle in what looks like useful information into her narrative but eventually her time runs out. Make no mistake, this book is a tragedy and will tear your heart out in more ways than one. It's very slow going but I promise it'll be worth it if you can get into it.

In the same vein, I also recently finished the Paris Orphan by Natasha Lester. This book follows a model turned journalist named Jessica May (based on the actual photographer Lee Miller) as she deals with sexism and misogyny during the war effort in trying to do what she wants to do, which is reporting on the war front. Jess meets a soldier named Dan who she instantly connects with while trying not to die in a trench because the field hospital she was supposed to be stationed at turned out to be under fire, and he introduces her to a child he has been looking after since his brother was killed (it's not his brother's child, she's the child of two French citizens who were trying to flee the country and couldn't take a child with them, but she takes to Jess and Dan as her parental figures very quickly). This one is also a bit heavier and includes suicide and rape, but it is still very very good.

Next I'll jump briefly to non-fiction and recommend the book T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez. It's written by one of the lead scientists trying to figure out what killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. While it is about geology and physics, it's not too dense and written in a way most people will understand what's going on, and explanations are provided for anything that wouldn't be comprehensible to the average lay person. Absolutely fascinating read.

Then we have an Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. I found this one on youtube and it sounded interesting and boy was it. It's a fantasy novel set in the Middle East/Western Asia and incorporates the culture into the story very well. It follows two main characters, the son of the overbearing military leader who just wants to run away and live a quiet life and the daughter of two scholars who wants to see her people free to live their lives without fear of being enslaved. Laia, the scholar girl, watches her only remaining family killed and imprisoned before her very eyes, barely managing to escape herself and looks for help in the resistance. Elias, the military leader's son, is planning on running away to the South before he is nominated to take part in a series of trials to become the next Emperor and decides to stay. While I wasn't the biggest fan of the romance in this book, it's not overbearing. Content warnings for violence, death, rape, and slavery for this one.

And finally, Cain by Jose Saramago. This one was recommended to me by one of my professors last semester and it's a relatively quick read at like 160 pages. It's a bible retelling focusing on Cain, where he is cursed by God to wander the world for the rest of his days. He finds himself traveling through time (or in the words of the book, different presents) and interrupting different bible stories to spite God. The writing style takes a little bit to get used to as it's just very long sentences with dialogue only indicated by the usage of capital letters starting new dialogue tags, but it doesn't take very long to get used to it. As for content warnings, if you'd find it in the bible you'll find it here (death, rape, incest mentions).

[itmightrain]

My Favorite Books I Read This Year

[tolkien-feels]

Rules: Tag 9 people you would like to know/catch up with.

Tagged by: @erynalasse

Last song: 海底 by 一支榴莲 (Haidi by Yizhi Liulian) which I've randomly found out about just this week and I can't seem to stop listening to it, please send help

Last TV show: I literally can't remember, it's been a while since I've had the attention span to watch anything serialized. The last anything I watched was the stream of Finrod-zong and the Lay of Leithian that happened a while ago

Currently watching: Nothing, see above

Currently reading: The Silmarillion and the Return of the King by JRR Tolkien, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, 詩經 (The Classic of Poetry, but it's known by other names), T. rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez, and I'm just wrapping up Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (I highly recommend it!), at which point I'll probably begin the Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

Tagging: anyone who feels like doing it and, if they want to, @ma3dhros @valar-did-me-wrong @cuarthol @outofangband @coopsgirl @carlandrea @leandrafalconwing @warrioreowynofrohan @theleakypen

[pareidoliaonthemove]

It's not just the artists in on this imagery. This is the last paragraph of the book written by one of the guys who proved the asteroid strike as the cause of the dinosaurs' mass extinction event:

The bursts of heat from the impact sites on Jupiter were intellectually satisfying, but they were also sobering and deeply moving. For as we watched the violence being inflicted on another planet, we were seeing a re-enactment of the last spectacle ever witnessed by Tyrannosaurus rex - the deadly flash from the Crater of Doom on the day the Mesozoic world ended.

Walter Alvarez, "T. Rex and the Crater of Doom"

First edition: 1997, Prince to University Press.

Lol lol :)

[billy-bumblr]

When I was a kid I had this little tiny dinosaur play set that was contained inside of a T. rex head. The jaw was hinged and the mouth could be snapped securely closed and when you pried open the jaws and laid the head out flat there was a tiny perfect little world. One side, the top part of the head, was lush with tiny sculpted dinosaur nests. There were little trees made out of rubber so that they were pliable, there were rock overhangs and little cliffs and a textured water feature. The play set came with some dinosaurs, of course. There were a few hadrosaurs, and some ornithomimids, two raptors, and a few extra eggs.

The other side of the head, the bottom jaw, was a blighted wasteland, with tiny sculpted craters and little boulders. There was also a tar pit, it was textured and pliable and was scored all the way through so you could push tiny dinosaurs through the tar to their death, and they would fall out the bottom of the jaw.

It wasn’t very big, I was only four but I could carry it pretty comfortably. It was like Polly pocket for dinosaurs and I LOVED that thing. A lot of toys from when I was little left behind mostly just memories of how they made me feel, but that one? That one I remember so well, I remember how it felt in my hand and what the trees looked like.

There’s also something very funny about a toy dinosaur head that you expect small children to pry apart the jaws of like King Kong so that they can shove tiny dinosaurs into a tar pit to their eternal doom.

Isn’t it weird the stuff that you never stop missing?

[animorphologycast]

Episode 18.5: No Comet, No Comment

Megamorphs 2: In the Time of Dinosaurs

In this episode:

Dinosaurs!

Gray has been confidently mispronouncing “deinonychus” for years

Is this the best Rachel book?

Revisiting the Band of Five roles

More time travel philosophy

Outer space provided broccoli and ants

K.A. Applegate keeps up with scientific theories

A song about Deinonychus

Other references:

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez

The Deinonychus song

[sophia-sol]

T. rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez

I AM SO IN LOVE WITH THIS BOOK.

Walter Alvarez, the author, was one of the central people in the development of the theory that a cataclysmic impact caused the major extinction event at the KT boundary - which included everything from foraminifera to dinosaurs. And this book is about how they figured this out. It is clearly aimed at a general audience and it is immensely readable and delightful.

My inner preteen self is so happy right now. I was an enormous dinosaur nerd as a kid and wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. And actually one of the most surprising things about reading this book was how much of the content I knew already - not the more detailed scientific processes, but the overarching story and arguments, all of that I knew very well indeed. And indeed some parts of the story (eg the stuff about the Deccan Traps) I actually know in more detail than is covered in the book. I have no idea what I was reading as a kid but I clearly wasn't just screwing around. But then I've always been the sort of person to get very intense about areas of interest!

It was disconcerting to realize the timeline of the KT extinction discoveries, though; it was only in the early 90's that the Chicxulub crater was finally discovered. As in, WITHIN MY LIFETIME, and only shortly before my burgeoning interest in dinosaurs really flowered. What I remember from my readings as a kid was that there was no agreement at all about the death of the dinosaurs - whether it'd been a slow extinction or a sudden event, and what the cause was. Because all of this was BREAKING SCIENCE and there'd not yet been any scholarly consensus trickling down to kiddie dinosaur books! So I'd read about the Chicxulub crater, of course, but I hadn't realized before reading this book just how clear the evidence is that the Chicxulub impact had caused a major extinction event, whether it was definitively what caused the end of the dinosaurs in particular or not.

Also I was fascinated by the way a lot of the story was framed as a push-pull between uniformitarianism and catastrophism as frameworks of looking at Earth's history, and the eventual realization that there's actually some of BOTH. Because this isn't something I've ever heard talked about before! The comparison between the discovery of plate tectonics and the realization that catastrophic impacts are a thing that happen was really interesting.

One of the things that makes me happiest about this book, though, is its commitment to and joy in the scientific process. The author is just so genuinely and clearly delighted to have been able to collaborate with so many awesome people and to have so much interdisciplinary work going on; and he always talks in terms of the greatest respect even for the people who disagree(d) with him utterly. He talks about how the vociferous debates and disagreements fostered additional efforts to figure things out and get things right. And about how science is of course full of wrong turns and mistakes but if you just keep working away you will figure more and more things out!

It gave me a lot of science feels, is the conclusion of the preceding paragraph. SCIENTISTS DOING SCIENCE! SCIENTISTS BEING FRIENDS! SCIENTISTS WORKING TOGETHER! SCIENCE!!!!

I very nearly chose to study geology and/or geography in university and reading this book reminds me why: it's really cool. I was genuinely fascinated by the various geological details that were discussed, and kept wishing that the photographs of rock outcroppings were larger and higher quality. And I would have been happy if the author had gotten even more technical about various details!

For the last...idk, YEARS, probably, I've been ending up too much on the arts side of the arts-science divide and have started to think of myself as more of an artsy sort of person. But reading this book reminded me how much I love science too. SCIENCE IS GREAT.

[elalmadelmar]

If you're interested in learning more about how they found this, T-Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez is (despite what the title may lead you to think) a very detailed and approachable discussion of the process of determining that it was an impact event that killed the dinosaurs, and then discovering where the impact occurred and the actual extent of the now-buried crater. Alvarez was one of the lead researchers on the project, and he's also a great writer.

I know this image is just an artistic rendering, but was Chicxulub even close to being that big?

YES, ABSOLUTELY. if anything, that paleoart UNDERSTATES it!

the Chicxulub Impactor was about six miles wide, meaning that when its bottom edge slammed into the atlantic ocean at roughly 20 km/s, its top edge was still in the upper atmosphere.

(infographic cadged from Kurzgesagt)

[tolkien-feels]

@ma3dhros tagged me to share 6 books I want to read this year. I'm making no promises that any of them will get actually read, and I'm not counting re-reads or books I'm currently reading.

The Nature of Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien (courtesy of the awesome warrioreowynofrohan sharing interesting thoughts about it and making me curious about a book I'd decided not to buy already 😅)

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Persuasion by Jane Austen (it's the one book by her I haven't read yet and it's long overdue!)

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, specifically the unabridged translation by Moss Roberts. I've read the abridged version and been dying to read the unabridged but the translation I wanted was Expensive™️.... but luckily I've been able to find a set at a used bookstore! Does this count as re-reading?

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult by Joseph Bédier

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez

I'm tagging anyone who wants to do this and needs an excuse, and also the first 6 people I see on my notes both for this blog and for @cqlfeels but no pressure if you don't feel like doing it

@frodo-with-glasses @outofangband @theleakypen @is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer @cuarthol @warrioreowynofrohan

@natandacat @courtesyname @layzeal @madtomedgar @liesweliveby @esmeraldablazingsky

[pareidoliaonthemove]

If you want to find out how the Chicxulub Crater was identified as the site of the "end of the world", and responsible for the death of the dinosaurs, I highly recommend T-Rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez, who is one half of the father-son team who did the research.

Where did the whopping huge meteor come down? I assume if there are core samples, we know where it was, and maybe there are remnants of it?

Chicxulub Puerto, Yucatan, Mexico, fucking exactly

[boreal-sea]

T-Rex and the Crater of Doom is a great book, I highly recommend it!

I know this image is just an artistic rendering, but was Chicxulub even close to being that big?

YES, ABSOLUTELY. if anything, that paleoart UNDERSTATES it!

the Chicxulub Impactor was about six miles wide, meaning that when its bottom edge slammed into the atlantic ocean at roughly 20 km/s, its top edge was still in the upper atmosphere.

(infographic cadged from Kurzgesagt)

[emilreloaded]

for an accessible and in depth explanation of how we determined the details, i heartily recommend T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez

Where did the whopping huge meteor come down? I assume if there are core samples, we know where it was, and maybe there are remnants of it?

Chicxulub Puerto, Yucatan, Mexico, fucking exactly