Earth History: The Paleogene Period

The Paleogene was the period in Earth's history that occurred just after the dinosaurs went extinct. Come explore some of the interesting geological and biological events of the time by playing my quiz. Interesting facts from the quiz can be found below:

1. After the extinction of the dinosaurs, many ecological niches were left vacant. This allowed small mammals to evolve into larger beings during the Paleogene. The Paleogene roughly covers 65-24 million years ago. It is technically a sub-period of the Tertiary Period, which covers a large portion of the Cenozoic Era. The beginning of the Cenozoic marked both the ending of the Mesozoic Era and the Cretaceous Period, about 65 million years ago. The Tertiary is split up into the Paleogene (65-24 mya) and the Neogene (24-1.8 mya), which are in turn divided into Epochs. Epochs of the Paleogene are the Paleocene, Eocene, and Oligocene.

2. Cetaceans are large aquatic mammals like whales, dolphins, and porpoises. They are thought to share a common ancestry with ungulates, the family of mammals that evolved into horses, pigs, rhinos, cattle, giraffes, and hippos. Cetaceans are thought to have evolved from an early prototype of this group. The closest land-dwelling mammal they are related to are hippos. They were likely spawned by an isolated community that continually had to swim through water in order to survive.

3. Grass had been around since the late Paleozoic, but it took as long as the Oligocene for it to grow outside of woodland areas. The grazing of mammals caused grass seeds to expand from the forests and grow on the prairies of the Earth. Due to intensive grazing, grass could only survive by altering its method of reproduction. It needed a much more efficient way to multiply, so it evolved to be pollinated by wind instead of insects. The wind would carry it as far as it could, scattering its seeds over all the prairies of the world, which in turn allowed even more development for grazing mammals.

4. The Mediterranean Sea is much smaller than its predecessor, the Tethys Sea. The African continental plate pushing up against Europe caused the Tethys to shrink throughout the Paleogene. As the Mediterranean formed, many mountain chains in the region were caused by the African plate colliding with Europe. These include the Alps, Pyrenees, Pennines, Carpathians, and Caucasus ranges. Similarly, the collision of the Indian plate with Asia is thought to have created the Himalayan Mountains in roughly the same time period.

5.  Australia and Antarctica were the last two continents to break apart from each other. They were part of a landmass that separated from Gondwana during the Jurassic Period. Together they drifted toward the South Pole before starting to break apart, anywhere from 80-130 million years ago. It was a very slow process; it wasn't until the Paleogene (30-50 million years ago) that they separated completely.

6. With a name meaning "near the hornless beast", Paraceratherium was one of the largest land-dwelling mammals that ever existed. Thought to have evolved with the rhinoceros, the name is a reference to Aceratherium, a genus of hornless rhinos that it co-existed with. Paraceratherium was much larger than its sister species; it looked like a cross between a rhino and a giraffe. Being a herbivore, it had a long neck that enabled it to reach leaves high up in the trees. Fossils of the species have been found all across Eurasia, but by 2015 nobody had found a complete set of bones. The cause for its extinction is unknown.

7.  The Paleogene was inhabited by many species that looked like hybrids of modern day mammals. Yet there are some mammals, such as rodents and bats, that bear a solid resemblance to those of the period, such as Icaronycteris. Icaronycteris is Greek for "Icarus night flyer", which doesn't make much sense to me, seeing as bats are nocturnal and Icarus flew too close to the sun. The first known bats lived in the early Eocene, some 50-55 million years ago. They were about the same size as modern bats, and even used echolocation to capture prey. 

8. During the Oligocene, the formation of the southern circumpolar current may have affected the global climate all the way to our present age. Before Australia broke away from Antarctica, the circumpolar current surrounding it was able to reach latitudes where warm water kept temperatures higher than they are today. After the split, the current could no longer reach these latitudes, enabling Antarctica to grow its huge ice sheet and keep the Southern Ocean cooler than it used to be. This may have had an effect on surface temperatures everywhere, as oceanic currents strengthened and distributed heat away from the tropics. In addition to being the only current that goes around the whole world, it is notorious for causing havoc among sailors.

9.  Cats and dogs can trace their lineage back to a group of species that existed during the Paleogene. Among the first of the order Carnivora, they had a name that means "mother animal", called miacins. About 40 million years ago, these small mammals branched off into caniforms and feliforms. Caniforms would eventually evolve into dogs, bears, pinnipeds (sea lions, otter, walrus), foxes, and weasels. Feliforms would become felines, hyenas, civets, and the now extinct Saber-toothed Tiger. After 40 million years of separation, no wonder they can't get along!

This quiz was inspired by a picture book called "The Atlas of Life on Earth", printed by Barnes & Noble Books. The Paleogene makes up only a fraction of the material.

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Dreams, Ants, Robins: Finding Meaning In “Blue Velvet”

 Director David Lynch has an uncanny way of blending the ultra-mundane with a subtle surrealism that only gets stranger as his movies progress.  His masterpiece Blue Velvet is as stripped of glamour and creepy with morbid realism as a movie can get.  Underneath the surface of Blue Velvet's superficial murder-mystery plot, symbolic details reveal an important message that Lynch wanted to say: that love can only conquer evil after the outward appearances of things yield to an inner turmoil within. 

Early in the film we are shown a tranquil suburban setting, where all is perfect, happy and bright.  This is interrupted by a man having a stroke on his lawn while watering it.  Then the camera zooms in to the underbrush of some grass, where ants are fighting each other for food in a grotesque manner, forecasting a darker atmosphere than we might have been expecting.  After a young man named Jeffrey finds an ear (also crawling with ants) in the grass, he is sucked into a mystery that only gets more intriguing to him after each dark twist piques his curiosity.  We are meant to think that this shiny youth has been living in a perfect suburban world (as has his girlfriend, Sandy), and that he's never faced any real conflict in his life.  That is, until he finds the ear, which leads him to the lady in velvet: Dorothy Vallens. 

Clues about the ear's owner cause him to stake out her apartment, where his thirst for the truth becomes so strong that he actually breaks into the place looking for evidence of murder.  While he's snooping about, in comes the lady in velvet, who fixates on the youth even though he is trespassing.  Her seduction lures him by some force that can only be described by a Jungian association called the Shadow, a mythological archetype that only shows itself when viewed behind closed doors and in dreams.  In the movie, the Shadow is best represented by her mystique and the raging Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper: a man who is apparently holding her ex-lover and child hostage in order to make her do whatever he wants.  The first of these glimpses of the Shadow come when Jeffrey was hiding in Dorothy's closet, watching her strip off the velvet.  She catches him and nearly seduces him, until Frank knocks on the door and she forces him to go back in hiding.  Then, once again from the closet, he watches Frank engage in an Oedipal fetish with the lady (though Frank doesn't know he can see them).  She doesn't resist what Frank is doing, but we can tell she isn't enjoying herself.  (During the film's climax, it was from this same place in the closet that Jeffrey put his life on the line and shot the shadowy madman who threatened to destroy all that he loved.  The closet to me symbolizes the interface from which an unscathed youth first views the harshness of the real world, and conquers it by stepping through the door and confronting it.) 

Things are never the same once he gets involved with Dorothy.  Once Frank finds out they are seeing each other, his primitive, Freudian eccentricities go overboard and he loses his mind.  He takes Jeffrey on a "joyride" meant to teach him a lesson, but it only ends up making Jeffrey stronger.  During this joyride, other dark mysteries are revealed, particularly in suave Ben's apartment.  Ben's a flamboyant drug dealer who sings In Dreams using a lamp as a microphone in one of the strangest and oddly captivating scenes ever made.  It was here that Jeffrey learned just how sick and cruel humans could be, as the raw evilness of Frank seemed to infect everyone he interacted with.  Not to mention the fact that Ben was hiding the lady's son and ex-lover behind a door in his complex.  Like the song, the scene itself was like a dream- an adventure into a part of the mind that few of us have the courage to take.  It was like a surreal journey into hell, too bizarre to be real yet too real to be imagined.  The contrast between Ben and Frank, despite both of them being shady characters, is that Ben is dreamy and graceful: something Frank wants to be, but knows he is not.  At the end of the song Frank does something peculiar.  He turns off the music after becoming frustrated by Ben's karaoke dance, which indicates to me that he reminds Frank of something he can never become, something that his reptilian incapabilities and impulsive violence has been condemned by. 

All this is confirmed at the end of the joyride, when Frank references hell by saying that he'll send Jeffrey there for cheating on him with Dorothy.  If anyone could resemble Satan in the film, it is surely Frank.  He appears at the very least to be a demonic figure attempting to ruin Jeffrey's purified soul.  Before beating up Jeffrey, he asks his cronies to once again cue up In Dreams on the radio, while a stripper-junkie dances on top of the car.  [Why is there a junkie dancing while Frank beats the crap out of Jeffrey?  Only David Lynch knows.  The dancing likely indicates another parallel between hell and the real world; that someone could be so ignorant and base as to dance while someone else is getting beaten right in front of them enhances that idea the movie is illustrating a phantasm of hell on Earth.]  Then Frank tells him, "In dreams, I walk with you. In dreams, I talk to you.  In dreams, you're mine, all the time.  Forever."  His obsession with dreams means that he knows there's a fine line between fantasy and reality, and that the line he walks is right on the edge of it.  His deep curiosity in them could prove that he's a demonic figure living on the edge of reality, and longs to return to the dream-world he came from. 

In between the lengthy scenes of darkness there are snippets of light, as Jeffrey's relationship with Sandy grows.  Sandy represents the inner child and the flowering of love after the darkness yields to light.  At one point she and Jeffery pull up beside a church and Jeffrey says, "It's a strange world; why are there people like Frank?"  Instead of giving him a direct answer she tells him about a dream she had where hundreds of robins, which represented love, were released into the world to deprive it of its darkness.  Here Jeffrey's disillusionment with comfortable living is sedated by Sandy's wisdom.  Despite appearing to be the most naive person in the film, she turns out to be its wisest.  Toward the end, after Jeffrey confronts the darkness and reconciles it with the light, we see an image of a robin eating the ants that had been fighting in the grass at the beginning of the film.  In the ants we can see the consumption of Frank, Dorothy's seduction, and all the horrific things that happened, by the thing that represented love in Sandy's dream- a colorful bird.  Seen in a different light, the ants can symbolize the primitiveness of creatures that haven't evolved much.  Frank's strange fetish and all the violence and swearing paints him in the same light.  Birds and (most) humans are highly refined creatures, just like our heroes and Ben's proverbial suaveness- all things that drove Frank mad and conquered him in the end. 

Protein Interaction World: An Explanation for the Origin of Life

The origin of life is every bit as mysterious as the origin of the universe.  Before the Industrial Age, both were ascribed to supernatural forces in various mythologies and religions.  It wasn't until the 19th century that a scientific proposal for the origins of the universe became widely accepted- The Big Bang Theory.  However, a generally recognized theory for the origin of life remains obscure, even in 2015. Some scientists think that strong rain, lightning, and a muddy environment- just as the ground was becoming submerged by the sea- created the ideal conditions for life to evolve.  Others think that volcanic vents in the ocean were where it first happened.  Either way, it hardly matters where it happened; how it happened is most vital to our understanding.  DNA couldn't have just come out of nowhere, nor could the proteins that constructed it (which are conversely created by DNA in protein synthesis).  Proteins and DNA depend on each other for survival, so the question becomes: which came first? 

A cell can't be a cell without a membrane holding it together.  It's generally agreed that the first cell membrane was created by a coacervate- a thin layer of molecular aggregates with hydrophobic properties, similar to a bubble.  These enclosed themselves around special molecules called amino acids, which were just drifting about randomly in the water.  Amino acids are the building blocks of life.  There are 20 of them and there isn't a creature in the world that doesn't use them all.  They'd eventually assist in the creation of DNA, a superbly complex molecule that serves as a blueprint, or command center, from which a cell can operate.  What I propose is that the first coacervate able to replicate itself had the fortunate circumstance of enclosing all 20 amino acids at once.  This happened by pure chance (I'm open to claims of divine intervention, but only in a metaphysical sense).  Many other coacervates could have enclosed different combinations of these amino acids, but they couldn't have evolved into cells without the full 20. 

Proteins are long chains of amino acids.  When amino acids bond to each other they are capable of forming every single protein that makes our bodies operate.  In a sense, proteins are like our own bodies; their amino acids are like the organs we use to balance anatomical systems.  Once proteins developed, they had to create an information system that would remember their design, because there wasn't any other way for them to keep the chain of life going.  In order for the proteins to replicate themselves and survive, they had to encode a blueprint for their formation into a strand with optimal spacing.  We call this the DNA molecule.  DNA molecules are replicated themselves, by means of something called RNA.  RNA is then taken to the ribosome of a cell by carrier proteins, where the translation of their code generates amino acids, which in turn give birth to new proteins.  Thus, the cycle suggests that proteins are indeed capable of reproduction- something that the very definition of life needs- but not in the same way that traditional life forms reproduce.  Proteins were the first thing on Earth that created something they could use to reproduce themselves- something unheard of in the biological world. 

Eventually coacervates got stronger and developed into cells, which evolutionary biologists would call a breakthrough.  This was when cells began to form nuclei which held the genetic material they needed to operate.  Cells evolved from proteins, but they don't reproduce in the same way.  They have their own special way of doing it: by splitting themselves in half through mitosis or meiosis.  Every rung on the ladder of life can be described by a leap forward in the means of procreation, from the formation of DNA to the splitting of a cell, and from the pollination of plants to the fornication of animals. 

In a sense, proteins were the first life-forms. Since they found a way to self-replicate they deserve to be called such, because reproduction is the most essential quality of life.  Protein doesn't quite do all of the defined qualities of life, but you could make an argument that they do most of them.  They certainly aren't typical molecules, and neither is DNA for that matter.  Eventually there was no further need for them to "evolve", since they'd created a way to sustain themselves inside the environment of a cell.  The same thing happened to cells.  They stopped evolving once they turned into protozoa.  In turn, the same could be said of bacteria- protozoa's lesser evolved cousins- because the same species have survived for eons inside beings larger than they are.  It's only outside of the microscopic realm that we begin to see species that aren't sustainable inside a controlling body. 

There's already an hypothesis which describes this theory, called the Protein Interaction World.  It describes an environment in which amino acids naturally found each other and bonded to create the first proteins, long before the creation of DNA.  The proteins then found a way to reproduce themselves by building DNA, so that they wouldn't ever have to be born again by chance.  It is a theory that isn't well known, and nowhere in it does it say that proteins were the first life forms.  But perhaps in the beginning there were long chains of protein that competed against each other inside the first coacervate.  Perhaps they were participating in natural selection before the existence of cells and bacteria.  The ones that won the battle got a permanent stake in the chain of life, oblivious to the fact that they'd eventually serve the bodies of larger organisms. 

Could the same thing happen to a network of plants and animals?  I wouldn't be surprised.  It could be that we humans, safe and smug at the top of the food chain, will become part of a network inside the body of a greater being, whose existence we won't have any awareness; maybe we already are.