Posts by JohnWDailey
We all know the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk--a farmboy sells his cow for some "magic beans", which in turn grow into a mountainously tall stalk that led him to the land of a giant. Now, scienti...
In exploring likely candidates for an alternate Earth without rodents, someone suggested multituberculates to me. Here's a little summary as to who the multituberculates were for anyone not in the ...
The muroids are a superfamily of rodents consisting today of mice, rats, voles, hamsters, lemmings and gerbils. There are at least 1750 different species of them, proof apparent of their environme...
Anyone who has studied ice ages would know that during the last two-and-a-half million years of Earth's history, there have been periods where there was enough ice to suck up a lot of water. As a ...
A cleaner, narrower-focused improvement of How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle, so not a duplicate. For further clarification, eccentricity is the shape of a planet's...
66 million years ago, something brought an end to the long-established dinosaur empire. The pendulum just kept shifting between an asteroid and a comet, astronomical bolides that actually have dif...
"The Dark Knight" is a nickname given by astronomers to the exoplanet TrES-2b, a gas giant with an albedo of one percent, blacker than paint, blacker than coal"”in fact, blacker than anything on Ea...
Many people are excited with the idea of super-Earths--rocky, habitable exoplanets greater in mass, density and diameter (because I'd prefer to go the whole way than stop at the halfway point) than...
Our estimates of our own habitable zone--a piece of space in which liquid water is possible--have varied over the years, but the current estimate is by Ramirez and Kaltenegger in 2017. Based on an ...
Conventionally, there are two ways to build mountains--direct collision (as is the case with the Himalayas) and one side sinking beneath the other (which explains why the Pacific Ring of Fire is vo...
There is a concern that's been brought up only recently--steel and concrete buildings are environmentally wasteful. In further clarification, they waste away too much greenhouse gases. And consid...
In the waters of Iceland, the natives have their own word for a particular brand of cetaceans--"Illhveli", literally "evil whales". And the bloodthirstiest of them all is Raudkembingur, Icelandic ...
Perissodactyla is an order of mammals consisting currently of the seventeen species of horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs. Usually, any clade is connected by a coupling of genetics and physical morph...
As landlubbers, we often let ourselves think that if salty seawater is undrinkable for us, it could be even worse for plants. However, certain types of angiosperms have found ways to not only thri...
Back home, Amphicyonidae (bear-dogs) predated Ursidae by only four million years. While the latter still lives in the form of eight species, the former had been extinct for two-and-a-half million ...
By "bryophitic", I mean "non-vascular land plants", being the liverworts and the mosses. (Hornworts are comparative latecomers, so we won't be talking about them.) Without vascular tissues, these...
Many mythological creatures have a popularity secondary only to the dragon (the one true global force.) Among them is the griffin, a half-bird-half-cat cut-and-paste. Now, in an alternate Earth, ...
From 2.4 to either 2.1 or two billion years ago, Earth underwent a surge in a waste product that we know as "oxygen". Before that, life thrived in an ocean rich with iron under an atmosphere loade...
In recent years, we have found evidence in the Negev Desert of the Middle East of a striped hyena, a solitary carnivoran, tagging along with a pack of wolves. This sort of alliance is found nowher...
Here is all you need to know about the creodonts: They were a group of carnivorous mammals that, despite having carnassials, had no relation to Carnivora. They were a global force, occupying terr...
In an alternate Earth, there are no bats. Instead, there are "flying monkeys" (which are actually lemuriform primates, rather like bushbabies or lorises.) And even though they have batlike ears, ...
In an alternate Earth, a mass extinction wiped out a percentage of the most successful phylum ever--Arthropoda. All that survived of the class Arachnida were the really small varieties--the ticks,...
The mad scientist community is...mad, to put it kiddie-appropriately. Their logic has the tendency to make 0% sense 100% of the time (provided, of course, that they ever bring it up.) So you can ...
Within our society is a mad scientist obsessed with hybridization. His specialty is canids, and he could not get enough of the canid hybrids that had happened in the past--wolfdogs, coywolves, coy...
Here is Carolina Lang's interpretation of one of Britain's heraldic beasts, the enfield: For anyone not familiar with the creature, here's A Book of Creatures' basic description of it: It ha...
