Plate Tectonics and an Evolutionary Precipice

1.

We've been experiencing a sampling of Netflix's offerings about dinosaurs recently. Some of the topics aren't necessarily about dinosaurs exactly; an entire mini-series highlights the half-billion years from the dawning of life itself to the emergence of what we today call the Era of Dinosaurs; another revolves around different American cities and how these cities were situated throughout the entire history of the planet.

The city series starts with New York (of course), a place that today feels like the center of the world when you're living there. Well, at one point, it was the center of Pangaea, and was on the edge when Africa started to separate and pull away. The Palisades are a remnant of the volcanic shifting. New York was also, much later, the site of the final extant of the last major glaciation. Because of glaciers, there are no dinosaur fossils in Chicago, or, for that matter, all of Illinois. They point to an example of the problem in an Chicago-land creek: the rock that makes up the creek-bed is 450 million years old, while the dirt and sediment that comprise the surrounding land is less than 20 thousand. There's just nothing in between.

2.

The episodes about the cities had a neat little animation cycle: they'd zoom through hundreds of millions of years worth of plate tectonics on a digital rendering of Earth. Watch New York be fully submerged back when we didn't have any ice caps. Watch a different time when it was a landlocked muddy lake front in the hot, hot super-continent's center.

The idea, though, got me thinking about plate tectonics, and about how I'd been trying to find a sufficient title for this blog since getting back to California in April of 2011. Those two ideas don't seem like an obvious match, but plenty of things bounce around my head before getting together. Back in New York the idea was seeing the City as a Caliboy. In Texas it was the same concept. Once we got back to California, I had a notion like "getting home" in the title, and settled, for the majority of 2012, on titling the blog about the southern ten counties of California. I even used the Spanish term los Diez Sur, to emphasize the heritage. 

I wanted something that showed both the location and the central premise: A California Child Back East (3/09-12/09); A California Child Deep in the Heart of Texas (1/10-3/11); A California Child Makes it Home (4/11-12/11); Living in los Diez Sur (1/12-12/12). The los Diez Sur idea was supposed to signify that even as a Californian, I'm an outsider here since I'm from the North.

I think I like the "Pacific Plate" idea, since with just a slip and a jiggle shit could get real bad around here. It still needs modifications, though.

3.

Getting back on track, there were some things that these shows have focused on that help everyone's overall understanding of how the world developed. 

Before I get to that, there are two basic categories of production teams for these separate series. The first are from the BBC and range from '99-'06, and the second are generally from the Discovery Channel, and range from '06-'09. 

I've noticed that the BBC productions use animatronic heads for closeups, showcase no humans, and tell the story of the dinosaurs (or the other, non-dino, critters) like a nature show. The CGI is quite good, and the level of shot recycling is mostly minimized.

The Discovery Channel shows use quick editing, repetition, humans of all kinds, generally poorly rendered animations, repeat those animations often, and have animated some of the most violent scenes imaginable to tell their story (usually how one dino ripped another's body apart).

Somehow they're both wildly informative.

4.

How the biosphere developed...

There was a time in history when the oceans teemed with life, with small creatures and great big predators, nearly yard long arthropods, and yet there was no life in land at all. The dryland was just a bunch of desolate rock quarries and lakes maybe. No dirt, no non-rock dust, no photosynthesis happening on land anywhere.

Those big bad arthropods swam around the seas fighting their only threats: themselves. Arthropods are around today: they're the ones with exoskeletons; insects, arachnids, crustaceans... Back in that day, these were the apex predators, and when they fought each other, they'd suffer damage like cracks in that exoskeleton. This particular episode showed tiny thumbnail sized flits pestering the three-foot long bleeding loser of a territorial battle, swimming in and nibbling on the blood from the wound and darting away, mostly safe from the terrible gob on this giant archaic swimming scorpion.

The tiny thumbnail sized flits had their own advantage: organs on the inside, sure, but they had a tiny flexible centralized structure that supported a rudimentary vascular system. These were the first chordates; the first animals with backbones.

So that was the frame for the next few hundred million years: the alternating battle between the arthropods and the chordates. 

All humans today are descended from those tiny flits.

5.

Fast forward a few hundred million years and we get tiny mosses beginning to grow on the desolate landscape, the flits are more developed with better senses, and the arthropods look just like actual scorpions from today, except they're three feet long and live in shallow water.

It was how they breathed, the arthropods, that made them the first of the animals to climb out of the sea. They absorb oxygen through their skin. The large size of their body couldn't have lasted long on land, since the oxygen levels were pretty small, as oxygen is a poisonous gas that is a waste material from photosynthesis.

A few hundred million more years and amphibians and reptiles are the dominant land creatures, and again we have apex predators that only have each other to fear. The fin-back reptiles are the apex in their zone, and while they're not dinosaurs, they're pretty fierce. The fins let the reptiles regulate their body temperature, which makes them a precursor to mammals.

6.

The dinosaurs were tiny little turkey sized critters during the end of the fin-back lizard era, but they were ready to adapt. For over a hundred and fifty million years, the dinosaurs were the dominant animal design, filling all niches on land and in the air, and nary a non-dino larger than a turkey. Tables had turned.

Part of me wants to discuss the T-Rex conundrum...as in (1) T-Rex vs Gigantisaurus and Charcarondontisaurus; (2) T-Rex vs. Spinosaurus; and (3) was T-Rex primarily a scavenger?

That discussion will have to wait.

But here, before the mass-extinction-event at the end of the Mesozoic Era (the comet or asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 MYA) we can see the apex predators being pestered by fuzzy mammals. The Age of Dinosaurs had ended, and the Age of Mammals was beginning.

7.

What were common themes from the rambling history lessons above? Apex predators finding themselves being pestered, if not outrightly hunted, by better adapted smaller creatures. Meek inheriting the Earth and all that. Also, the apex hunters had only themselves to fear (except for T-Rex--their food was pretty damn dangerous), and they were pretty good at killing each other.

In the age of the mammals, who are the apex predators on land? Bears have claws and teeth; wolves hunt in packs, as do lions; boars are pretty vicious; tigers are pretty badass; but none of them are the true apex predator in this Age of Mammals.

That's us, folks. We may not have crazy claws or razor sharp teeth, but we do have big brains that have been making tools for millennia. Machine guns and dynamite beats claws and teeth.

Also, we're pretty damn good at killing ourselves. At least we're using our big brains to see ourselves killing each other and having discussions on whether or not it's such a good idea. Is it me or does war all of a sudden seem like a natural aspect of life?

Who pesters us, as apex predators? I remember the joke being that after the nuclear holocaust the roaches would be the only animals left, which is a bit of a mis-characterization, but it's just another chapter in the ongoing cycle of meekness, adaptability, and arthropods vs chordates.

8.

Namesake photo: 

(Details coming later on this.)