What scientists have dubbed a “fucking shit load” of volcanic eruptions are now thought to be responsible for mass extinctions prior to the dinosaurs. Not only that, but this “fucking shit load” (their words, not mine) of eruptions also opened the door for the dinosaurs to run amok. Oh, you fucking volcanoes, you. You just didn’t want to let the mollusks have their due, did you?
Hell yeah! While it isn’t exactly the embodiment of the Evil like his character in LOTR, a dinosaur is a pretty menacing thing to hang the name Sauron on.
Let me tell you a story that my superiors at the Time Guild wouldn’t want you to know.
A couple of days ago, I decided that I wanted to travel to the year 195,000 BCE. Since it was the weekend, I had to use my personal time-machine, which I actually prefer to the stodgy contraption they allot me at the office. However, without the Guild’s temporal disinhibitor-ray, it was up to me to craft a suitable concoction. So after filling my gut with three liters of Pepsi Max, taking a shot of bourbon, and huffing paint thinner for the better part of an hour, I stumbled into my broom closet and passed out.
There you have it – my secret recipe for spacetime fabric softener.
Anyways, when I came to I was in the dense jungles of prehistory. Looking skyward, I saw a pterodactyl soaring majestically. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked to the ocean just in time to catch a glance of a megalodon snapping a leviathan in half before submerging once again. And on the path before me, two cavemen bros riding their steeds, a saber-toothed tiger and a mastodon, respectively.
The caveman on the saber-toothed tiger was the first to see me, and he quickly pointed me out to his buddy. “Daniel, check it out! It’s another one of those dudes from Beyond the Wheel.” He waved to me invitingly, “C’mon over, man!”
I was nervous, but I obliged.
The other caveman hopped off his mastodon and shook my hand. “Hey there! My name’s Daniel and this is my friend Hollis. Who might you be, Beyonder?”
“Pleasure to meet you, Daniel and Hollis. My name is Rendar Frankenstein and I’m from the year 2012. Well, actually, I’m originally from 1986 but I’ve caught up to 2012, and I guess that’s when I’m not shifting all over. I’ve been to a lot of points in the 20th century, and hell, I’ve even gone back Plato’s cave and the Garden of Eden and beyond that. You guys ever see 2001?”
Blank stares.
I laughed. “My bad! Anyways, what’re ya’ll up to?”
With a pat on my back, Hollis clued me in. “We’re actually about to meet back up with the tribe and raid a T-Rex nest. With those things on your feet,” he pointed to my hi-tops, “you could really help us out. You want in?”
Long story short – dinosaurs were murdered, the caveman tribe was victorious, and I got to start off today by having a prehistoric omelet.
Just don’t tell my superiors at the Time Guild. I need this job, and they’re lookin’ for a reason to can me.
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Welcome to the Monday Morning Commute! I’m going to list off the various ways I’ll be salvaging my (dwindling) sanity during the workweek. It’s then your duty to hit up the comments section and share your own recipe for mental-refuge. C’mon, ain’t this the whole point of an Internet community?
Let’s stab this dino in the heart with a fuckin’ bone-shard dagger!
If you’re not careful, you may wind up a regular, boring person. You’ll sip only from bottles of regular, boring mind-juice. Your blood will never boil, whether in contempt or jubilation, at the sight of any unscheduled programming. You will never swing your Existential Monster Truck over the double-lines, crushing regular, boring soul-vessels in the process. In fact, you’ll just become mired in the homogeneous muck of mediocrity.
Forever.
Because that’s what THEY want.
Welcome to the Monday Morning Commute! This weekly post is my excuse to ramble and then show you how I’ll be keeping my (in)sanity via entertainment. After I puff, I’m going to pass – hit up the comments section and share what you’ll be doing in the upcoming days.
Let’s rawk.
Dinosaur talk always strikes me the same as space talk. That is, in the sense that there’s a ton of interesting conjecture, but I’m always a smidge skeptical. But sometimes when the news is interesting enough, it’s worth repeating. Studies have dropped in the past couple of days suggesting that the King of All Dinosaurs, Mr. Tyrannosaurus Rex was a cannibal. Say it ain’t so! According to a crack team of crackpot scientists – that isn’t fair, they’re in all likelihood more brilliant than I could imagine – the gashes on one T. rex suggests that it could have only been made by another of the same species.
Like I said, we’re taking leaps of impressive speculation here.
“They’re the kind of marks that any big carnivore could have made, but T. rex was the only big carnivore in western North America 65 million years ago,” Nicholas R. Longrich of Yale University said in a statement.
Longrich and colleagues report their findings in Friday’s edition of the journal PLoS ONE.
They found 17 fossils with deep V-shaped gouges of a type identified as being made by T. rex. Of those, four were remains of T. rex themselves.
It seems likely the marks were made during scavenging from a dead dinosaur, the researchers said.
“It does seem improbable that Tyrannosaurus routinely hunted full-grown members of its own species,” the researchers wrote.However, they added, it is possible that combat led to casualties, with the dead becoming convenient sources of food for the victors. “Still, compelling evidence for predation in Tyrannosaurus remains elusive.
So well then! I mean, yeah, what the hell is the story worth? Some interesting guesswork and a handful of possibly this and possibly that. But I mean, yeah! There you go. I think more interesting than the fact that the there were T. rexes walking around in North America. For sure, millions and zillions of years ago. But still, it’s interesting to imagine that the very land we’re smashing about on, at one point in time, houses cannibalistic insane-o creatures of unfathomable fright and might.
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