Welcome back! It’s this time of year again where I go down
the annual Paleofest Symposium, held every March at the Burpee Museum in
Rockford Illinois. There’s always new discoveries, new experiences, and a lot
of great talks about paleontology research. For further details, I once again
recommend our MC Scott Williams, for tweets check out Dr. Thomas Holtz’s
twitter, and for images ask Todd Johnson. Once again there’s no particular
theme, but once again younger researchers and women researchers take the
foreground on a wide variety of topics.
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Thursday, February 7, 2019
New Year Special: Year of the Pig
Happy New Year! In China, it’s the Year of the Pig. Pigs
have long been a mainstay of Eurasian societies since they were domesticated,
proving critical protein for relatively low cost, and allowed for the
Polynesians to conquer the Pacific and the Europeans to thrive in the New
World. The Egyptians considered them
evil and diseased, and the Jewish and Muslim examples followed their example. But it says something the Romans loved them
so much they refused to adopt that dietary law.
Pigs have been a success story
in history. It’s time to talk about
their evolutionary story.
Pigs are basal artiodactyls-their closest relatives are the
similarly Suine Peccaries, more basal camels, and more derived ungulates such
as hippos, whales and extinct entelodonts, followed by camels, then by
ruminants.
So where do Suines come from?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)