skeletons among us

Cats domesticated earlier than thought fossils show

2010-11-22T18:57:00.001-06:00

Dogs have still been around our fires longer, but cats weren't as far behind was once thought, according to French archeologists who found skeletons in ancient Cyprus graves in 2004.

The skeleton find suggests that cats have lived with people about 9,000 years – about 5,000 years longer that thought.

The archeologists found the complete skeleton of an 8-month-old cat buried next to a wealthy 30-year-old man. The cat and the man were posed in the same position less than a fott away from each other, indicating a close personal relationship.

The discovery narrowed the gap between taming cats and dogs to a mere 3,000 years.

This discovery was puzzling since it put cats in Cyprus before the rise of Egyptian civilizations thought to have domesticated cats. The puzzle was solved when separate research on mitochondrial DNA in five species and determined that domestic cats actually are descended from a Near Eastern wild cat, native to the deserts of the Middle East.

Skeleton, bone imagery is a rich thread in literature

2010-10-25T13:25:00.000-05:00

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

– Henry Miller, writer and painter

There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.

– Wilson Mizner, earl 20th Century playwright

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

– Audre Lorde, "Poetry is not a Luxury," in

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984.

All copyrights belong to Audre Lorde and associated parties

Duck-billed weed-whacker dinosaur knocked down trees

2010-04-27T22:54:00.001-05:00

Fossils discovered by a volunteer in Utah near the Arizona line in 2002 provided amazing physical details of what has been called the “Arnold Schwarzenegger of dinosaurs” and a “Cretaceous version of a weed-whacker.”

With more than 800 teeth and a compact skull, the duck-billed dinosaur, Gryposaurus monumentensis, was 30 feet long and 10 feet wide. It could eat any plant and its heavy body could knock down trees.

When it lived 75 million years ago, Utah had a climate more like that of modern-day New Orleans. The bones were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Researchers from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah worked on the bones for several years and published their findings in the Oct. 3, 2007 Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

You may not have room for a Gryposaurus monumentensis, but a nice skeleton drying her hair fits most anywhere.

Did you know that you need bones to be able to hear?

2010-04-25T20:30:00.011-05:00

The stirrup, deep inside the ear, is the smallest bone in the body. It is one of three tiny bones that transfer vibrations from our ear drum to the hairs in our inner ear and eventually through nerves to our brain. The stirrup, hammer and anvil bones enable us to hear.

The stirrup is less than an eighth of an inch long, about the size of the word "ha" in this sentence.

Bones are more marvelous than most of us know and having skeletons around the house or office can be lots of fun!