Premier Automne, a short film by French studio Je Regarde, is beautiful and emotional journey that explores nature’s balance: life, death, and the seasons.
Abel and his skeleton puppies live in an eternal winter. Apolline and her summer puppies frolic in the green. Keepers of their own seasons, they first encounter each other with curiosity before they both realize how different their worlds are, and how their worlds respond to each other.
This story sparked a lot of discussion in our house, and the simple last scene has become an instant favorite. If you want to see how the animation was made, there is also a Premier Automne: Making Of video that shows some beautiful detail.
From Untamed Science, a tour with Dr. Lindsay Zanno, Director of the Paleontology & Geology Research Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
The key things she emphasized were that a) it’s a lot of work b) it’s not glamorous c) rarely to they find complete skeletons d) they don’t excavate it with little brushes out in the field and e) they spend close to 50 times the effort on a skeleton, in the lab, once it’s been pulled out of the earth.
We are living through the most exciting period in the history of dinosaur paleontology. More than half of all known dinosaur species were discovered within the past 25 years, including nearly all of the remarkable feathered dinosaur specimens. One of the hottest areas for dinosaur discovery in North America is the Cedar Mountain Formation of eastern Utah, where new dinosaurs are being discovered and described at a phenomenal rate. These fossil beds span the last 25-30 million years of the Early Cretaceous, a time when North America was undergoing a period of climate change that resulted in localized extinction events and invasive dinosaur species.
Our team returns to Utah every year to hunt for new dinosaurs. This year we began excavations at an unprecedented dinosaur burial ground in the Cedar Mountain Formation known as the Crystal Geyser Quarry (CGQ). The CGQ is a mass mortality site entombing a rare and remarkable dinosaur dubbed Falcarius utahensis. One hundred and twenty-five million years ago an estimated 300 Falcarius individuals ranging in age from hatchlings to 4-meter long adults died and were buried here under mysterious conditions.
An almost-complete skeleton of a Mammoth has been found in an ancient Roman excavation site about 19 miles outside of Paris. It’s thought to be between 100,000 to 200,000 years old.
“Evidence this clear has never been found before, at least in France,” said Gregory Bayle, chief archaeologist at the site.
“We’re working on the theory that Neanderthal men came across the carcass and cut off bits of meat.”
Above, a clip of what Woolly Mammoth life might have been like, from the BBC natural history show Wild New World. Below, scientists dive further into what traits the Mammoth had to adapt to the freezing cold temperatures of the Ice Age:
The circulatory system consisting of the heart, arteries, capillaries, and veins, is the pumping mechanism that transports blood throughout the body. In the heart, the left ventricle contracts, pushing red blood cells into the aorta, the body’s largest artery. From here, blood moves through a series of increasingly smaller arteries, until it reaches a capillary, the junction between arteries and veins. Here oxygen molecules detach from the red blood cells and slip across the capillary wall into body tissue.
Now de-oxygenated, blood begins its return to the heart. It passes through increasingly larger veins to eventually reach the right atrium. It enters the right ventricle, which pumps it through the pulmonary arteries into the lungs, to pick up more oxygen. Oxygenated, blood reenters the left atrium, moves into the left ventricle, and the blood’s journey begins again.
Nothing like riding through the body to get the point across!
