Dale Sabo’s Reviews > Dinosaur in a Haystack > Status Update

The last three essays included an ancient and enormous Michigan mycorrhizal fungus, Caribbean snails and Creole languages, and the evolution of whales. Each excellent.

Do you share a birthday with someone famous or infamous? Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born February 12,1809. Try for a moment to imagine the alternative history if either man was never born.

Wide ranging, scholarly and accessible. Entirely to my taste.

The last two essays were about Jurassic Park (and an evolutionist’s kudos and complaints), and museums historical and modern. The biases, theories, and ultimate presentations. Both superb.

If you hold a seashell 🐚 point up as in the emoji, it’s right handed if the opening is right if the axis (as in the emoji), but left handed if on the other side. The great majority of seashells are right handed, though many species come in both types. Most parrots are left handed.

Edgar Allan Poe had one book printed in a second edition in his lifetime. The Conchologist's First Book, for students of Malacology (the study of mollusks). Poe made significant changes to Wyatt's original text. Poe translated the French text by Cuvier into English, worked on accounts of the animals, and constructed a new classification scheme. Poe drew on his association with Dr. Ravenel, an "eminent conchologist"

The most recently read essay deals with punctuated equilibrium, evolution, and to a degree the beginning of a separate homo sapiens and our very small group of direct ancestors. Best evidence is we’re all directly descended from a clade of fewer individuals than now live in your home town. How frightening, marvelous, and wild our world was then.