Saturday, March 28, 2015

Pleistocene Park

 

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

The worst of things is that Jurassic Park was less interesting than the reality of the Americas which was discovered by Dr. Francisco Moreno of Argentina in an expedition to Patagonia at the beginning of the 20th century.
I quote President Theodore Roosevelt on the discovery which has now been lost to fiction.


At one period, in connection with his duties as a boundary commissioner on the survey between Chile and the Argentine, he worked for years in Patagonia. It was he who made the extraordinary discovery in a Patagonian cave of the still fresh fragments of skin and other remains of the mylodon, the aberrant horse known as the onohipidium, the huge South American tiger, and the macrauchenia (a sort of llama that looked like an Asian Saiga. Charles Darwin discovered the first evidence of the species.), all of them extinct animals. This discovery showed that some of the strange representatives of the giant South American Pleistocene fauna had lasted down to within a comparatively few thousand years, down to the time when man,

Theodore Roosevelt. Through the Brazilian Wilderness

Think of a world in America, which had not just Saber Toothed Tigers, but llamas with tapir type snouts, the giant ground sloth, wooly mammoths, mastodons, and the Onohipidium which was nothing like the conventional norm of what a horse was or is.


Hunters of the Recent Past - Page 357 - Google Books Result

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1317598350
Leslie B. Davis, ‎Brian O.K. Reeves - 2014 - ‎Social Science
Extinguished species Megatherium americanum (giant sloth) 2* Equus cf. E. (Amerhippus) (Am. horse) 3% Hippidion-Onohipidium (American horse) 2 ..
 The world was so very diverse from what it is now in just a few years of Noah's boat gracing Turkish mountains. What a world of adventure it would have been, and Dr. Moreno literally is recorded to have found preserved, as in fresh skin and remnants of these animals. Oh to have the opportunity to exercise that DNA for a 9 foot sloth.

There were records of wooly mammoths still alive as specimens were found in the Arctic, in much smaller version, in the European exploration there. It makes one wonder, just where in the tundra or permafrost, or even some mountain a cavern houses some preserved DNA which could resurrect several species.

I am certain dinosaurs tasted like chicken, but I much prefer  furry things. For the few known extinct species, I wonder what was washed away as there certainly were more than one big cat, a hairy elephant, a big woodchuck, a long necked llama and a long nosed horse in the Americas.
There certainly had to be other nutritious things like some giant deer things along with those now gone camels.


Just a visit from the past and how I would still like to mount an expedition to the recesses not yet touched by humans.

Of course, where in this world are Dr. Moreno's DNA samples and who has them.


agtG