feral minks' brains are regrowing & paleontologists are feral too
plus short story recs & my new 2nd favorite skeleton
when wild animals are domesticated, their brains shrink (obviously I mean this in an evolutionary sense, and not, like, my husband convinced me to be slightly less of a feral garbage critter and actually change the sheets occasionally and goshdarnit now my brains are leaking out my ears)
this typically does not revert, even if the species becomes feral again later on.
…except for minks, apparently! When minks become feral, their domestication-induced brain shrinkage is reverted!
possibly this is because, like shrews, minks undergo seasonal brain shrinkage? (it feels intuitive that already having some capacity for malleable brain size might come in handy for regrowing your brain when you re-wild, anyways)
(ps one of the last things Eliot Spitzer did before the whole prostitution scandal thing was to make NY the first state to ban anal electrocution of critters like minks, back in 2008 (truly no sarcasm intended - what a mensch!))
meanwhile, urban raccoons are starting to look more cartoonish domesticated (shorter snouts, not necessarily the whole floppy ears &c thing)
there are some bunnies growing horns in Colorado. but don’t worry, it’s basically just a tick-borne virus causing bunny warts.
it’s cool. I’d rather have a magnificent set of antlers than lyme disease too, even in this economy
van Gogh painted ‘Starry Night’ the same year (1889) that Nintendo was founded (via)
this is what Sir Richard Owen, the guy who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, looked like
“In addition to being a knight, he was also a bitch” - Alie Ward, Ornithorhynchology
yup. some reactions to his bitchery:
Owen was “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism.” - some biography
“He lied for God and for malice.” - some Oxford professor
what is it with paleontologists and weird nastiness?
I mean, just think of the [classic] Bone Wars between famed paleontologist assholes-in-and-to-science Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope (chronicled in David Rains Wallace’s wild The Bonehunters’ Revenge)
They discredited each other, sent spies to obstruct each other’s expeditions, were secretive to the point of occluding progress…
“In their haste to outdo each other, Cope and Marsh haphazardly assembled the bones of their own discoveries. Their descriptions of new species, based on their reconstructions, led to confusion and misconceptions that lasted for decades after their deaths.”
…made tons of errors in the rush to publish, literally smashed fossils they couldn’t collect so none of the other kids could use ‘em, &c1
Cope died on April 12, 1897 in “his cot-bed, on all sides of which fossil bones were piled.”
and then
“Cope… had his skull donated to science so his brain could be measured, hoping his brain would be larger than that of his adversary; at the time, brain size was thought to be the true measure of intelligence. Marsh never accepted the challenge.”
(Many years later, Robert T. Bakker (paleontologist with an impressive lack of bitchiness known to wikipedia) “pour[ed] pasta into the skull to measure Cope’s brain size.”)
Professor Loren Eiseley excavated Cope’s skeleton from UPenn’s archives, admired it laid out on his desk, then returned it to its box - “believing that the former paleontologist, who had himself stored many a bone in a carton, would feel more at home in the box.”2
Eiseley seemed very fond of Cope’s bones, and hoped they “might ultimately be interred with him.” In 1977, his nephew “took the bones from Eiseley’s office to the funeral home where his uncle was laid out… [but] wilted upon realizing that the mortician soon would discover the stowaway and thwart the plot, leaving him with no choice but to smuggle Cope’s skeleton back to the museum.”
so hey, here’s to my new second favorite skeleton! (Bentham will always be my true fav3 though)
Cope and Marsh were kinda egged on by James Gordon Bennett Jr. (nepo baby publisher of the New York Herald), who supposedly inspired the old-timey British exclamation of ‘Gordon Bennett!’ (used to express “surprise, incredulity, or exasperation”)
Bennett is the guy who sponsored Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” expedition!
He also
nearly killed Winston Churchill’s mother when she was thrown from his carriage during one of his wild races (which often took place in the middle of the night, with him driving naked but for a white silk top hat)
kept a cow on his yacht so that he could always have fresh cream on tap
got out of his engagement by urinating in his prospective in-laws’ fireplace (or possibly piano?)
(“He may have deliberately committed parlor urination to escape his engagement without incurring a costly breach-of-promise suit.”)
…which led to his being horsewhipped until “blood stained the snow from sidewalk to gutter”, fighting the last duel in the United States after demanding satisfaction for the whipping, being mistaken for a pickpocket while drinking with his opponent afterwards, then fleeing to Paris for the ~rest of his life.
Introduced polo to the US, then lost his Reading Room membership after he dared a Polo team member named Colonel Candy to ride his pony up the stairs of the club
had a major owl fetish, to the point where he had owls tattooed on his mistress’s knees
(thus also the glowing-green-eyed owls at Herald Square)
(“He had conceived his owl fetish when a sylvan hooting saved him from running aground in a fog” when he commanded his yacht for the Union during the war.)
“Bennett’s plans for a giant owl mausoleum in New York had collapsed after another crazy millionaire, named Harry Thaw, murdered his architect, Stanford White, for having a love affair with Thaw’s wife, the chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit. Considering this a bad omen, Bennett contented himself with having owls carved on an otherwise unremarked gravestone… near Paris.”
someone please make a movie about this guy! (if I had infinite time I’d do it. but then it’d probably be claymation. and anyways, I don’t. sorry.)
short stories I recently read and enjoyed
The Belle of the Ball by Stephen Graham Jones (except I didn’t like the very last little bit at the end)
Hyman Kapla*n, Samaritan by Leo Rosten
and a few by Donald Barthelme
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby (reminds me nostalgically of a pre-wedding abduction I once orchestrated, but written in a Wodehousian style)
on August 9, 1978, a team of workers from British Waterways pulled the plug out of the Chesterfield Canal, and all the water emptied out
perfect sentences (and snippets)
“He treated his talent as a bad rider does a fine horse - riding it mercilessly and showing it neither love nor care.” - Gorky on Andreyev
“The Ford Probe, for those unfamiliar, was a car designed by someone who had heard of cars but had never actually seen one. It was the automotive equivalent of a transitional fossil. I loved it the way you love something that confirms your worst suspicions about yourself.” - Matt Duggan
Bentham's Bulldog remains a consistently magnificent source of perfect sentences. For example, from Addressing My Critics:
“I read Machiavelli, and concluded that I should either be loved or feared, but I’m not a very scary guy, and fear lowers utils, so I settled for being loved.”
“I don’t see why destroying nature is irreversible. We can add back nature. I’m not in favor of obliterating all nature—just of reducing it at the margins.”
I had in my notes that I’d love to read a historical romance series set amidst the Bone Wars, and then I discovered that a YA version already exists! haven’t read it yet, probably should, still want adult literature on this theme anyways (yes I know about the Crichton book too)
My therapist always wants me to visualize putting away the memories we’ve discussed in some specific container at the end of each session. I always shrug and tell her, fine, I don’t care, a cardboard box, whatevs. But now I know which cardboard box! It’s the one with Cope’s bones in it!
and happily, we’ve met twice so far! once on my first visit to London, and again when he was visiting NYC years later