Dear Readers:
This is to let you know of some upcoming changes.
Some of you might know I also write over at Substack, and over there have focused mainly on writing, fiction, storytelling, and how stories and mythology have woven their way through history. I've noticed that in the last year or two, this site (and Blogger in general) has been swamped with bots and AI scrapers, and I think it's time to switch platforms, and only write through Substack.
I welcome you all to subscribe to my site at the link above (for free!). The plan is on Mondays and Thursdays, I'll focus on stories, storytelling, and language, and on Tuesdays and Fridays I'll write the science news and critical thinking posts you've found here at Skeptophilia. Wednesdays and Saturdays will be anyone's guess! Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes wherever my chaotic brain takes me.
At some point I'll be offering in addition some paid-subscriber-only content, like audio chapters from one of my books, some quick video mini-lessons on a topic in critical thinking, or something else fun and extra. But for now, everything's free for everyone.
If you've been accessing Skeptophilia through social media (Facebook or Bluesky), no worries -- I'll still be posting links there, so you don't have to do anything different. The links will look a bit different, but that's the only change.
This week, I'll have Tuesday's and Friday's posts in both places, but Friday will be the last post here at Skeptophilia. Starting next week, I'll only be posting to Substack. However, my old Skeptophilia posts will still be available here to browse through!
I hope you'll join me over there, subscribe, and continue to comment and interact!
I've been at this for sixteen years -- thanks for the encouragement that keeps me going.
Best,
Gordon
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It's an interesting question to consider how long a human life expectancy would be if we had a time machine (or, as my friend Andrew Butters would correct me, a space-time machine).There are all the possibilities during recorded history, some of which would be dramatically worse than others (depending, of course, on exactly where you decided to go). Southeastern Europe in the mid-fifth century would be a poor choice, given the fact that Attila the Hun was kind of trampling the place, causing chaos amongst the Goths (who were already there) and the Romans (who wished the whole lot of them would just go away). Just about anywhere and any time, of course, would have been worse if you were poor; the "nasty, poor, brutish, and short" quip about people's lives in the past is all too accurate, and worse still if you didn't have privilege (a condition that sadly hasn't changed much).
But if you could add in prehistoric times, there are choices that would be a great deal worse than any time in recorded history. And that's even assuming you're eliminating periods prior to the Great Oxidation Event, when the Earth's atmosphere would have killed you rapidly if you didn't think to bring along an oxygen supply. Likewise, let's put out of the running the Late Ordovician (Hirnantian) Glaciation Event, when damn near the entire Earth was covered in glacial ice, and events like the Chicxulub Meteorite Collision. Hard to imagine how we could survive either one of those.
One time period that often comes up in these discussions is the Carboniferous. This was the era of the enormous arthropods -- dragonflies like Meganeura with its 75-centimeter wingspan, and the two-meter-long millipede Arthropleura -- which are thought to have evolved because of the favorable conditions of warmth, moisture, and an oxygen concentration in the atmosphere that may have exceeded thirty percent. But honestly, there's no certainty these things would have been all that dangerous to something the size of a human; so other than the "ooh, icky, creepy-crawlies with lots of legs" issue, the Carboniferous would probably not have been all that bad.
For my money, the odds-on winner is the mid- to late-Cretaceous. Not, perhaps, for the reason you're thinking; that period of Earth's (pre)history always brings to mind the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor, which were certainly scary beasts. But they are far from the only thing you'd have to worry about, should your space-time machine drop you off there.
I wrote just last month about the Kem Kem Formation in Morocco, a shale and limestone deposit formed when that part of the world was a shallow ocean, and what is now the Sahara was a tropical rain forest. This place was, to put not too fine a point on it, a fucking nightmare. It was home to the schoolbus-sized theropod Carcharadontosaurus, which had twenty-centimeter teeth serrated like steak knives; twenty-meter long crocodilians like Aegisuchus; and the pterodactyloid Apatorhamphus, with a five-meter wingspan and dozens of needle-sharp teeth.
Carcharodontosaurus skull [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matthew Deery, Ultimate Dinosaurs Carcharodontosaurus, CC BY 2.0]
Oh, so don't head to Morocco, then! We'd be fine! Right?
Not really. The region bordering the Western Interior Seaway, which bisected North America from north to south during the same time period (and is why Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas are such great places to find fossils), was no better. There was a horrific fish called Xiphactinus that was five meters long. The Seaway was also home to mosasaurs, carnivorous reptiles that could get to be over twice that length. The plesiosaurs, whose shape will be familiar to aficionados of the Loch Ness Monster, were longer still.
If you were to visit the Cretaceous, going for a nice skinnydip would not be recommended.
Xiphactinus skeleton [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jonathan Chen, Xiphactinus AMNH, CC BY-SA 4.0]
The reason this stuff all comes up is a rather ghastly set of fossils from that time period that was the subject of a paper in Nature this week. A group of paleontologists, let by Jongyoon Jung of the University of Texas - Austin, discovered sets of tracks at a Cretaceous-age site in South Korea. One of the sets has been analyzed and found to come from an azhdarchid pterosaur that is new to science. The team named it Jinjuichnus procerus, and from its tracks they've concluded that (1) it seems to have come down to the ground to hunt, (2) walked on its knuckles while it was doing so, and (3) had an eight-meter wingspan. If that's not bad enough, there's a second set of tracks, from an unidentified small terrestrial vertebrate. The two sets of tracks intersect, and there's a confused mess of marks at their intersection.
Guess what that means.
If our imaginations weren't bad enough, the scientists have kindly provided us with the following artist's rendition of the event:
[Image credit: artist Jun Seung Yi, Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License]
Just in case you needed some more fuel for your dreams tonight.
So. Yeah. Dinosaur enthusiast though I am, I would not jump at the chance for a trip back to the Cretaceous. In fact, considering what I know about most of Earth's geological time periods, I think I'll stay put right here where there are not many creatures with Big Nasty Pointy Teeth, and there are nice features like modern medicine, water purification systems, and indoor plumbing.
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