DailyDirt: The Old, The Big & The Ugly
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Even after centuries of study, the incredible diversity of life on this planet never ceases to amaze. Tracing the history of plants and animals reminds us just how small a slice of that history we represent — apart from the fact that life has been kicking around for some 3.5-billion years, there are living specimens on the earth today that individually date back to the early stages of human civilization. Here are a few articles about lifeforms past and present that will make you feel young, insignificant or both:
- These giant lime-green blobs in the Andes look pretty alien — but they are actually among earth's oldest organisms. "Llareta" plants are related to parsley, they grow about a centimeter a year, and some specimens are estimated to be over 3,000 years old. [url]
- The ugly, solitary welwitschia mirabilis plant is the last of its genus, family and order, and has a history going back 200-million years. Individuals can live thousands of years, and it's probably the most 'unique' organism on earth, with all its genetic relatives having died off long ago. [url]
- A recently-discovered dinosaur has taken the title of largest dinosaur ever, weighing up to four times as much as an apatosaurus. It lived 95-million years ago, meaning even its time on earth is dwarfed by that of the aforementioned ugly plant. [url]
If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
It is not defamation if it is true!
I do, sort of, resent your very accurate description of me. How did you know?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: It is not defamation if it is true!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]