It Makes Me Sad How No One Ever Seems To Mention How Wild The Crocodilian-line Archosaurs Were. Dinosaurs

Postcard by Charles R. Knight

These Are The Oldest Footprints On Earth

Found on a prehistoric sea floor, the oldest footprints ever found were left between 551 million and 541 million years ago during the Ediacaran period. That is hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs.

The trackways tell scientists it was left by a bilaterian animal — that is, a creature with bilateral symmetry that has a head at one end, a back end at the other, and a symmetrical right and left side. Its paired appendages, scientists did not call them legs, were used to raise the animal off the sea floor as it moved.

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Ctenophore

NGC 4590 (M68) Globular Cluster

33,000 light years from the Earth, this globular cluster has an odd orbit around our galaxy, orbiting like a comet does around a star, and moving away as far as 100,000 light years from the centre. 

It’s theorised that it’s likely a captured cluster, and appears to be undergoing core collapse, where the gravitational influence of the entire cluster bares down at the centre and causes black holes and dense stars to slowly migrate towards the centre, much as our own galaxy has the same mechanism creating the central black hole. 

Scene from an ancient sea floor, as if it happened yesterday, however, these are from Permian period (~299–251 million years ago). Some of these fossilized bivalve shells are still articulated, meaning, left and right shells are still closed together. This tells you that particular animal specimen was undisturbed since its death, until now. The hard rock that envelops these shells was once a soft sediment in which these molluscs lived.

South coast NSW, Australia

The Horsehead Nebula : Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex. About five light-years “tall”, the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left of the full image. The featured gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using several different telescopes. via NASA

Hubble Anniversary Image Captures Roiling Heart of Vast Stellar Nursery by NASA Hubble

50 Foot Long Congo Snake

In 1959 Remy Van Lierden was flying over the Katanga region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was flying a helicopter and returning to the base that he commanded in Kamina. As he passed over a clearing in the jungle he noticed a large animal laying out in the sun. What he saw was a 50 foot long snake, with green and brown scales. He couldn’t believe his eyes and neither could his passengers. He circled around and made several passes off the monstrous snake, however he flew away when it got into the striking position and thought it was too dangerous to contour to fly over the animal. During one of the passes he made a passenger on his aircraft snapped this picture to prove what they saw. The snake in question is clearly large and it’s easy to see how it could have been a threat to a low flying helicopter. It’s believed that the snake is a Titanoboa which is thought to be extinct, and has been for millions of years. But it’s possible that the species may have survived. The natives claim that the snake pictured here is a small one and that they can get up to twice and three times the size.

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