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That is, earth.  It’s a big place and we’re almost everywhere on it, including places where the average day temperature cooks skin or makes your toes fall off.  Let it not be said that we give up easily.  Listing all the kinds of places humans have learned to thrive would be an endless job so of course we did that and also did it for everywhere we can’t live and also made sure there were fewer than ten entries so we wouldn’t hurt ourselves trying to memorize the full list.  Also, it helped that we were willing to grind up all terrestrial habitats into massive sweeping concepts that contain wide variation within their bounds.  How’d we do this?  By classifying them based on dominant vegetation, of course!  Animals and individual species come and go across continents, but vague plant-types are forever, and certain groups of those reliably eat certain climates for breakfast.
Now, let’s look at these nine super-habitats.  And call them their proper names: biomes.
Starting from the equator and heading up, weeeee’ve gooooottt……

I: Tropical Rainforest

The joke is that this is not the same as Amazon.com. That is what the joke is.

Tropical rainforests are easy as hell to quantify: lots of rain, high temperature, and dominated by the most gratuitous amounts of greenery you’ll find across the entire planet.  Ever.  Mostly evergreens that give short shrift to shedding leaves – when the climate’s like this all year, why bother?
Current usage: bulldozing.

II: Savannah/Tropical Seasonal Forest

As seen in the true-to-life documentary 'The Lion King.'

A hop, skip, and a jump north and we find us some more open ground, but with still enough trees that it’s not really a solo grassland.   The ‘seasonal’ bit is the keyword – this place doesn’t actually get that much less rain than the rainforest, but it only gets it for about half the year.  The other half it parches like crazy, which leads to a lot of migration from dry to wet by anything that doesn’t enjoy eating dry grass and being incinerated in regular wildfires.  The dominant plants are tough thorny buggers like these acacias.
Current usage: Poachin’ grounds. 

III: Subtropical Desert

Not actually a still from the first Star Wars movie. Pretty sure about this.

Contrary to the picture above, this doesn’t just mean the Sahara – subtropical deserts are pretty consistently found around 30 degrees north and south of the equator – the Kalahari and Mojave are another couple of examples.  Basically, warm moist air at the equator rises, gets cold, shits water all over the rainforests and floats aimlessly north and south until it descends and sucks all the moisture from the land beneath it like a hideous gas-vampire.  This produces subtropical deserts, where you can find tiny little shrubs that just won’t quit and a wide variety of animals with ridiculous ears that refuse to come out before midnight lest they be fried to a crisp.
Current usage: Oil, questionable journalism, questionable warfare. 

IV: Shrub/woodland

Shrubs + land = complex etymological origin.

Shrubland has what you could call a ‘Mediterranean’ climate.  You know, lots of poetry, philosophy, togas, and xenophobia.   No, wait, that was a few thousand years ago damnit let me try again.  Shrubland is dry and has wetter winters and periodically gets eaten alive by forest fires, which is why the plants there tend towards being evergreen and hard as hell – if the fire doesn’t take your roots, you’ll just spring back up again, madder than ever.  In california it is called ‘chapparal’ from the spanish ‘chapparo’ meaning evergreen oak and now I’ve filled your head with something completely useless.  Team effort!
Current Usage: Overgrazing and soil erosion. 

V: Temperate Rainforest

If you want to go big, you go here.  Douglas firs and redwoods – it might be nippier than the tropical version, but you can still find ridiculously huge evergreens and a healthy heaping of water (lots of it in fog).  New Zealand, California, British Columbia and such.  Don’t forget to bring your camera and a working pair of eyeballs, and try to save some memory space.  You probably don’t want to miss out on this.
Current Usage: Logging.

VI: Temperate Seasonal Forest

It's just trees. You know, trees. They drop their lives and grow new ones and that's it. Really.

Also known as ‘trees.’  It’s just a bunch of trees.  Just a bunch of deciduous trees that get some rain and get cold in the winter.  They do one thing for half the year and another the other half.  Look, it’s what’s right outside my window, I can’t find it very exciting what do you want from me damnit.
Current Usage: Logging, clearing, uprooting from lawn.

VII: Temperate Grassland/Desert

We could put a cow there.

In North America, this is a prairie.  In Europe and Asia, it’s a steppe.  In reality, it’s the same damned thing: no trees, some shrubs, and enough grass to choke a hundred million sheep to mindless woolly death.  Though really, the cold winters sort of take top tier as far as lethal dangers.  Speaking of hot and cold there’s a LOT of fires here, even more than in shrubland, but grass doesn’t really give a damn about that since it’s basically the plant equivalent of the Borg.  You know, that star truck thing or whatever it is.  “Resistance is silly” or something. 
Current usage: Too many goddamned cows. 

VIII: Boreal Forest

Imagine this, but going on for slightly a lot longer than you can possibly imagine.

Also known as ‘taiga.’  Basically, it’s evergreen conifers (exactly what types and proportions vary, but you can usually bet there’s a spruce in there SOMEWHERE) copied and pasted ad nauseum across the entire upper half of Europe, Asia, and North America.  It’s the largest terrestrial biome by a pretty sizable margin so I hope you appreciate it at least a little bit.  If not, you could have issues.  There are more trees here than you could shake any number of sticks at, and more sticks than you could shake any number of needles and leaves at, and more of THOSE than could be counted by any given omnipotent omniscient entity with too much time on his or her appendages.
Current Usage: Guess.

(It’s logging)

IX: Tundra

Did you know that walruses have penis bones? It's true. Unrelated, but true.

You head far enough north, you’ll find a place where the ground goes stone cold hard anywhere from thirteen to two feet down.  Roots can’t hack it, shovels get dented.  It’s permafrost, and it’s a big fuck-you to anything that dares want a sizable root system.  Trees can go hang (they really do just give up – the spot where the taiga and tundra meet is called the timberline, in case you must know), and where the permafrost runs close to the surface not much bigger than a shrub’s shrub can grow there, and most of them don’t.  No, you get lichens and moss, moss and lichens, maybe some grasses and a few sedges.  And that’s that, and most of THAT’S frozen for most of the year – summer is a brief, beautiful window into flora gone berserk with growth-frenzy that then gives way to bleak frigidness once more.
Current Usage: Oil speculation, pretty photographs, freezing to death.

And that’s about it – for the land, at least.  Aquatic habitats are a whole other kettle of fish – you’ve got your itty-bitty rivers, huge rivers, ponds, lakes, tide pools, and the oceans, which aren’t as big a deal as you’d think they’d be because 90% of all the interesting stuff is crammed into a coral reef or lodged up a continental shelf’s rear end.  Everything else tends to fall into either ‘enormous blot of empty blue space’ or ‘hideously crushing depths of infinite cold dark.’

Picture Credits:
Amazon Rainforest: Phil P. Harris on Wikipedia, 2001-03-07, north of Manaus.
Kenyan Savanna: Christopher T. Cooper on Wikipedia, 2011-12-16, in Taita Hills Wildlife Sanctuary.
Libyan Desert: Lucca Gazza at http://www.galuzzi.it, 2007-04-07, in Tadrart Acacus.
Hawaaiian Shrubland: Forest & Kim Starr on Wikipedia, 2001-08-31, at Maui, Polipoli.
Sequoias: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
Canadian Forest: Cephas on Wikipedia, 2009-06-20, Jacques-Cartier National Park.
Canadian Prairie: Zeitlupe on Wikipedia, 2004-05, between Calgary and Edmonton.
Alaskan Taiga: Public domain image from wikipedia.
Greenland Tundra: Hannes Grobe on Wikipedia, 2007-08-31, Scoresby Sund.

Yep, it’s that time of year again, kiddies!  Well, technically it’s been a year and a half since the last one of these, but no matter!  Time waits on no man, woman, or reptile, as we all know and lament.  It marches on, on, on, steadily dragging you and each and every other living thing inexorably towards the grave in fractions we are forever unable to measure without error.

So anyways, dinosaurs!
Now it often happens in science that we find out new stuff.  And since it’s been three yearsish since the last time I wrote anything about dinosaurs, there’s been a ladel-ful or two of new discoveries and debates and so on.  Let’s take a look and try to pretend once again that we live in a time where multi-ton land predators were a thing!

The Dinosaur that Wasn’t (But Then Was [Unless it Wasn’t])

This here era ain't big enuff fer the two of us. Plus Jimmy over there. Heya, Jim, how ya doin'?

Good ol’ Triceratops.  What could be more iconic and truthful and mesozoic-as-conifer-pie than that old-time image of a Triceratops tussling with a T-rex in front of some trees and a sunset or something?  It’s the reptilian version of the high-noon shootout.  The biggest and first-discovered of the ceratopsians, who (obviously) were named for it, Triceratops is just peachy.
Also, according to a smidgen of research occurring from 2009 to 2010, it didn’t exist.  At least not as we knew it.

This skull alone is so much bigger than your entire body that you should feel physically ashamed of yourself.

A light bit of research and poking around by paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner (the latter is partially the inspiration for Jurassic Park’s Dr. Grant, the co-discoverer of Maiasaura, and a generally gung-ho dinosaur guy for decades) ended in a fun conclusion: Triceratops was actually the immature form of fellow ceratopsian Torosaurus, whose equally impressive and even-more-elongated noggin is shown above.  Triceratops, as it aged, must have grown a pair of big ol’ holes in its (peculiar for a ceratopsian) solid-bone frill, where two rather thin spots had already been noted to exist.  Rather magnanimously of them, they decided that if one of the dinosaurs had to go it would be Torosaurus, given its later date of naming.
Then in 2011 Andrew Farke, a paleontologist with a ceratopsian bent, said that was all twaddle and required a bunch of things unknown in ceratopsians, such as the opening-up of the holes in its skull later in life, the bone texture of the skull swapping itself from an adult’s to a juvenile’s and then back again, and the addition of little bitty nubbly bumps around the frill’s edges (the term, apparently, is “eppoccipitals”).  So now who knows what the hell’s going on.  Maybe Torosaurus is an adult Triceratops.  Maybe it isn’t.  Maybe oh who the hell knows we’ll find out in the next few decades if we’re lucky.

Evidence For an Immature Designer

The feet that launched a thousand children under the covers whenever they heard scraping noises in the hallway.

We all know the dromaeosaurs.  Okay, fine, we all know the RAPTORS, even if most of our knowledge is as inaccurate as all-get-out.  Everybody loves a good terrifying predator, and switchblade feet are suitably creepy for an already alarming concept: big lizardy thing that wants to eat you.  That reminds me, they’re definitely feathered nowadays.  Yup.  Irrefutable proof of feather knobs on boatloads of ’em, PLUS big ol’ feathers all over their arms and tails and down elsewhere.  Outright scaly’s been out for a long time, but feathered is the new leathered.  Just don’t let it get to you – anyone who disputes the fearsomeness of big feathery animals has never been attacked by a goose.  The entire dromaeosaur family remains every bit as graceful, sinister, and elegantly razorbladed as before, and nobody can prove differently.  Up until the summer of 2010, when a new species was discovered in Romania.

Oh what the flipping bicycle-pumping Christ is this.

Yes, your eyes are not fooling you.  Two.  Claws.  Well, the usual number of five, but two BIG claws, the ones that flip and slash and hack.  That’s right, we found the dinosaur you all drew when you were six.  Sometimes nature just has no class or restraint whatsoever.  What next, we’re going to find a two-headed hundred-foot tyrannosaur?
The new arrival to the family is named Balaur, and it seems to be one of those wonderfully weird little evolutionary runarounds you get when you maroon animals for a few million years on tiny little islands: it shares its territory (Hațeg, Romania, which was Hațeg Island more than 65 mya) with a petite 20-foot titanosaur named Magyarosaurus, a miniscule 7-8-foot nodosaur known as Struthiosaurus, a teeny 16-foot hadrosaur called Telmatosaurus, and possibly one of the largest pterosaurs ever to live, named Hatzegopteryx, unless it was really a species of Quetzlcoatlus.  Who knows.
Balaur does contain one crucial detail that both separates it from a juvenile’s daydream and brings it closer to both its island peers and the majority of the dromaeosaur family: it was really tiny, and would’ve been lucky to break 7 feet in length.

The Deadliest Budgie

An ordinary human just like me or you drew this. But it would not be strange to suggest that he may have also been a wizard.

Feathered dinosaurs.  Old hat!  Been there and done that and purchased the t-shirt, lunchbox, action figure, and app!  Related to birds?  Damned right!  This is the twenty-first century and we are no longer a bunch of idiotic rabble huddled together around the campfire of ignorance babbling about how birds are somehow related to crocodiles and Archeopteryx doesn’t mean a damned thing.  Why, we had Microraptor over for dinner just the other night.  So top THAT. 
Fine.  Have a feathered full-grown tyrannosaurid.
Now let’s not get super-excited and carried away here.  Tyrannosaurids are the superfamily, tyrannosaurs are the family – this isn’t a close, personal cousin of T-rex here that we’ve learned was probably coated in 15-cm fibrous feathery filament fuzzies from snout to tail-tip, it’s a second cousin once removed or something.  Let’s stay calm and reasonable here as we look at these facts.  Calm and reasonable.
Yutyrannus (Feathered Tyrant) was named in 2012, measured roughly thirty feet long, and was coated in plumage (species name huali: beautiful).  It probably lived in an area with a climate about ten degrees above zero.  It is currently the largest known feathered dinosaur.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Jesus Christ it’s Over and Done With

Thankfully, 65 million years too late to be scavenged.

The last person who firmly believed that Tyrannosaurus rex was an obligate scavenger died in captivity today as doctors attempted desperately to operate and remove a fatal clot of obstinance from his brain.  To his last breath he stubbornly refused to admit that practically every damned vertebrate carnivore ever that wasn’t a big lazy soaring flappy thing was entirely unopposed to killing its own food now and then, because there’s utterly no advantage in being a slow-moving land-dwelling schlub that refuses to make its own meals.  A memorial service is planned Tuesday.

Picture Credits:
Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus: A really nice mural painted by Charles R. Knight back in 1927.
Torosaurus Skull: Public domain image from wikipedia.
Deinonychus Foot: Image from Didier Descouens on Wikipedia, taken June 4th 2011.
Balaur Foot: Image from Ghedoghedo on Wikipedia, taken October 30th 2011 at Munich Fossil Show.
Yutyrannus: Ridiculously beautiful image taken from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2012/04/04/giant-feathered-tyrannosaurs/, and drawn by Brian Choo 2012.
Cemetary at Worms: Public domain image from Wikipedia.

I’m older.  To take my mind off that, have a list of some things that are awesome.

-Zombies that rise from the grave to take a nice stroll, chat to their grandchildren, and have a word in private with that bitch Else Maye about people who snore at your funeral.
-Magnificence in the arthropod phylum, provided it is kept at least five metres away from me and behind a double-layered Plexiglas wall at all times.
-More fangs than are strictly necessary.
-Soft, wispy-at-the-edges explosions that seem almost delicate and fragile in nature until you really make yourself think about what was just destroyed, leaving you depressed but somehow still happy.
-Publications written by, about, and for alligators. Which are protested against by crocodiles as racist screeds.
-Really stupendous hugeness.
-Armed whales. Using either definition of armed.
-Any pub fight that manages to cross at least two different international borders before it gets really interesting.
-Futuristic settings where humans are pretty much as dull and dense as they are in the present, but on an intergalactic scale.
-The CN Tower talking smack to the Empire State Building who bitches about it to the Eiffel Tower who gossips with the Pyramids who mentions it to the Burj Khalifa who calls up the Tokyo Skytree to chat about it who sends the CN Tower a nasty email about how it’s the FOURTH-tallest freestanding structure and nobody loves it anymore. So there.
-Depraved checkers.
-No, wait, depraved chess. More possibilities.
-Death-defying obstacles that are overcome with sufficient volumes of livestock.
-Reams of anything.
-A constellation of impossibly huge balls of burning hydrogen scattered at random across an infinite expanse of empty vacuum that looks sort of like human genitalia when you squint at it from the right spot on earth.
-An organized religion that considers holy books cheating and divinely endorses ‘winging it’ as a form of worship.
-Raspberries.
-The quiet wonder experienced at estimating how many hours-worth of pornography has been filmed since the first cinema was created.
-Roadrunners that try to run on roads to and become run over.
-Warbling walruses. Walri? Walroids.
-Monuments to failure constructed from writer’s blocks and mortared with elbow grease, surmounted by good intentions.
-Voracious kittens.
-Martial arts focused around buttering.
-Utility Mohawks.
-Using a cat’s pajamas to cover your debilitating and socially awkward bee’s knees.
-Any dream that becomes recursive at least twice. Anything past four times is trying a bit too hard, though.
-Newspapers heavy enough to crush a weta to death.
-A chuckawalla chucking wood with wood chucks in Walla Walla inside a chuck wagon.
-Keeping a stiff upper lip in times of peril due to terror-induced muscle paralysis.
-Long-lost ruins constructed from cardboard and Styrofoam.
-True Tales of the Terrapins, series I, volume III. Action-packed as hell, over four twigs and leaves eaten per page.
-5 gigabytes of pure unadulterated boredom straight to the forebrain and through the imagination’s heart.
-Undue viscosity in an officer of the peace.
-Ancestral cross-species feuds that date back as far as the excuse-me-I-believe-those-are-MY-amino-acids incident.
-Blue skies with big fat white clouds on ‘em and a huge yellow glowy thingy up in one corner.
-Incredibly tasty lethal toxins.
-The ability of five-year-olds to construct lego guillotines entirely unprompted for their own entertainment, as well as what this says about our species.
-Freaky things from too far underwater with eyeballs that are just wrong.
-Voluptuous terrain.
-Cross-continental wars between cross continents.
-Mountains that have been hollowed out and filled up with whacky bullshit.
-Gravel salads garnished with blue diamond dressing.
-Naturally occurring unnaturalness.
-Species that are hipster enough to do sexual trimorphism.
-Any civilization sophisticated enough not to have discovered other humans.
-One million cupcakes in the right place at the right time making exactly the right difference.
-Moustaches that reach full maturity, forcibly separate themselves from their hosts, and leave for home via the exosphere.
-Manuals for doomsday machines that come with helpful, multi-lingual instructions and very clear little diagrams so you won’t accidentally put half of the thing together backwards or fire it at your foot by mistake or something.
-Mistaking your left for your right twice in a row and fast enough that it works out okay.
-World leaders that pick their noses in front of the press and just don’t care. Bonus points if they flick the results at the cameras. Double word score if they scream their current tally each time they connect with the lens.
-A refreshing quantity of bees.
-Nose flute power ballads.
-Sentient geological formations.
-Rigorous, diligent, and well-planned faffing about.
-That one Viking that wore a horned hat on that one raid and completely ruined the image of his entire culture for a thousand years.
-Scientific hooligans clashing with bodybuilding nerds.
-The vibrant and unique sensation of waking up to find a big friendly spider sunbathing on your outstretched tongue.
-Metaphors that are as free to mix as they damned well please. Segregation went out of style decades ago after hanging around like a bad smelling guestfish after three days.
-Pink things, as long as there is sufficient enthusiasm involved. Lots of it.
-Barbs that are covered in other, smaller barbs.
-Cloning dinosaurs topsy-turvy.

Once again, my birthday has passed, leaving me older, less appealing, and none the wiser.  To commemorate this momentous occasion I will as per usual be buggering off and leaving you with a nonsensical list of whatever has spun into my noggin over the past week.  We will return you next Wednesday to your regularly scheduled shenanigans.
In any case, the following things are somewhat awesome.

-Full-frontal mastodons.
-Anything in this day and age that is one or more of the following: comely, strapping, or fulsome.
-Viciously serrated teeth in unexpected places.
-A little song with a big dance. Or vice versa.
-Grown adults settling their differences with maturity, mutual respect, and gladiatorial combat.
-Cackling molluscs. Any will do.
-Sentient states of matter just above and a little to the left of liquid. Or to the right of solid. Maybe just below gas. Whatever.
-Extremely unpleasant noises associated with extremely good things.
-Whippersnappers that give geezers guff.
-Zeppelins that dangle upside down, huddling together for warmth in cliffside roosts to evade their natural predators during the night.
-Self-tending lawns that consume dagnabbed kids for nourishment, allowing them to constantly maintain a healthy lustre.
-The finest and most state-of-the-art titanium-framed, triple-buffered, self-sealing, liquid-cooled waterwings modern manufacture can offer.
-Poison that still tastes delicious.
-Any disease whose symptoms include “chronically feisty.”
-Buttocks that experience parting as such sweet sorrow.
-Cloning dinosaurs higgledy-piggledy.
-Failing against insurmountable odds in ways that are too strange to imagine with perfect lack of grace.
-Pickles.
-Songs that are about books in which film directors attempt to create abstract paintings of comics based on the lives of famous sculptors.
-Automated intelligence that plots against its masters because they heard all the cool AIs do it.
-Two fearsome warriors duelling to mortal embarrassment.
-Random sapience.
-Emotionally uplifting intellectual breakdowns. Or intellectually invigorating emotional breakdowns.
-Norsemen that subscribed to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Elder Edda.
-Unscrupulous and untrustworthy charity workers.
-Laws of physics whose discovery has an immediate and notable impact on the fashion industry.
-Olympic swashbuckling.
-Internet browsers with up to four stomach chambers that use cud instead of cookies.
-Coal-burning iPods.
-Twelve-year-old girls named Euphenia.
-Legislators who devote their entire political careers to correcting spelling errors in government.
-Any technology that lives off of skin flakes. Or corn flakes. Either.
-Morally unwholesome children’s fables re-told as “just metaphorical.”
-Barbed pacifiers for gunmetal toddlers.
-Ambiguously worded grocery lists whose interpretation leads to weeks of fierce warfare and intercultural strife.
-Pygmy Wolfhounds.
-A preteen who controls the economy of half the planet by prank-calling buy and sell orders to a five-item list of the world’s richest and most gullible men.
-A computer virus that deletes your operating system to make room for antiviral software.
-Kissing fish that catch mono.
-Male sharks that know damned well that they have two penis-equivalents, and take smug pride in this every time they see a mammal.
-Flexing physically improbable muscles.
-Not necessarily respiration, but respiration if necessary.
-Monuments to human folly that actually turn out pretty nice, with smooth construction and intelligent management.
-Baking with malicious intent and a little bit of cinnamon to add that extra something.
-Wild and carefree income tax conducted by really cool and far-out accountants with coke-bottle glasses.
-A chess match between Deep Blue and a Dadaist.
-Skiing on crocodiles, with crocodiles on skis.
-Houses so revolting opulent that most people would go homeless rather than live in that.
-Communities of atheistic Mennonites that nevertheless produce maple syrup very nearly exactly as delicious as that of their theologically-inclined peers.
-Aliens that don’t really pay any attention whatsoever to humans. Alternatively, replace “aliens” with “supernatural entities.”
-Little guys who overcome huge odds with pluck, wherewithal, and massive amounts of cheating endorsed by their carefully-groomed photogenicity.
-Fearsome warlords whose secretly sensitive poetical souls conceal bloodthirsty ambitions to win a Nobel for literature through any means.
-Vegetative savants. Using either meaning of “vegetative.”
-Gummi limbs.
-A retired astronaut who lives vicariously through his dentist granddaughter and bitterly regrets wasting all his youth on moon rocks.
-Machinery that is too sophisticated to be used.
-Wrangling rogue refrigerators from sofa-back with one hand and chugging a beer with the other on the Bungalow Plains of Lower Suburbia.
-Passive-aggressive organs.
-The rather large spider in the corner of your ceiling that’s presently deciding whether or not to jump on your neck and kill you before you finish reading this sentence.
-Real-time over-the-shoulder cover-based tactical-squad grittily-realistic first-person strategic boredom.
-A cardboard box shelter so grand that nine out of eleven humans would become homeless just for a chance to huddle in it for five minutes.
-Gorillas, chimpanzees, and other associated nonhuman primates that tirelessly campaign to end their cheap exploitation in modern mass media for shorthand ‘wackiness.’
-Monkeys that act like humans sometimes. Those poor, deluded fools.
-Racquetball on a court composed entirely of landmines. Exactly one is live.
– Loitering without intent but just sort of why not I guess I mean nothing better to do sure.

Goodness gracious me, it has been a while since we’ve had one of these, hasn’t it?  But with the second week in a row of total creative bankruptcy and general hopelessness upon me, it’s time I shared something else.
Let’s talk about our planet.  It’s something like 4.54ish billion years old, and for an awful lot of its that it’s been very poorly-suited to life, what with oceans saturated with iron, often no oceans at all, an atmosphere that at one point was more methane than anything, and the distinct possibility of having turned into a single gigantic snowball on more than one occasion.  It’s a little surprising that anything living would feel like taking a stab at reproduction on it; that’s the sort of optimism that our political system has carefully leached out of us.
But, as our history has shown, people need names to recognize things or they get all panicked and flopsweaty.  So we’ve slapped various Greekish terms all over Earth’s various and irregular birthdays, comings-of-ages, and red-letter-days.  If you sort our divisions of geological time from longest to shortest, we’ve got Eons, Eras, Periods, and then Epochs and Ages which no one really cares about.  You don’t need to know epochs unless you’re into prehistoric mammals, and honestly, when you’ve got dinosaurs right there, why the hell would you do that thing?  I wouldn’t.
So.  We’re going to look at our planet’s history from beginning to end, with most emphasis on the bits where there’s slimy things with slimy legs crawling around furtively trying to mate with whatever holds still long enough.

The Hadean Eon
Named after the least cheerful and fun-loving afterlife in Greek mythology (such cheery terminology is also used in the naming of the hadopelagic zone, the deepest trenches of an ocean), the Hadean covers Earth’s history from its beginning to a little sooner than four billion years ago.  There’s not much to say about it with regards to life because there wasn’t any; the planet was a bit of a hell-hole at the moment and although it begrudgingly managed to acquire a liquid ocean made from actual 100% water and an atmosphere of something like water vapour, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, its heart really wasn’t in it.  It idled.  Rocks from this period are a bit of a bugger to find, and plate tectonics may or may not have been active something like four billion years ago.

The Archaen Eon
Archean, as in archaic, as in, “old, doddering, decrepit,” and stretching from a wheezy 3.8ish billion years ago (the abbreviation is “GA” if you must know, a shortform of giga-year) to a creaky 2.5 GA.  This was around when life started turning up, somewhere in this mess – single-celled prokaryotic life (prokaryotic cells have no nucleus, leaving their DNA swinging about all willy-nilly within the cell).  Apparently some amino acids formed up (not an unlikely thing at all to happen supposedly, given time and materials at hand), proteins popped up thanks to their meddling (not a likely thing at all to happen, given that amino acids need direction to make things and “just winging it” is unlikely to form a functional, properly socialized protein), and from then on it was a slide from protein-assembled RNA into DNA.  Exactly how this happened is impossibly weird, over-debated, and half-known.  Anyways, we’ve got fossils of stromatolites (big mats of photosynthesizing cyanobacteria) dating back about 3.5 GA, so there was definitely something in the water.  Among other things, actually, the oceans were still saturated with iron, which was a bit of a pain in the ass – but that was all fixed in the

Proterozoic Eon.
“Early life.”  Technically speaking, that would make the Archaen “earlier life” or maybe “earliest life,” but nits didn’t exist yet so there was small reason to pick at them.  The Proterozoic stretched from 2.5 billion years ago to 542 million years ago, and it was around this time that the planet decided to try some harder life and came up with Eukaryotes, cells with nuclei to hold all their sweet, tender, DNA-giblets inside.  We know for certain they were around by 1.4 GA, and they could’ve been first popping up as much as 2.7 GA, just before the end of the Archaen.  Regardless of when they arrived, they needed something special and luscious to fuel their greedy little internal hordes of organelles (sort of the cellular version of organs – it’s believed that organelles had their origins in eukaryotes [which are rather large by cell standards] hoovering up prokaryotes and then decided to exist in peaceful symbiosis rather than absorbing them), and that something was oxygen.

If you can breath, thank your mother. If you're breathing in oxygen of your own free will, THANK A STROMATOLITE.

This had to wait for a little while despite the best efforts of the cyanobacteria: all that oxygen the new photosynthesizers were pumping out was going straight into the water and binding up with the iron, formed lovely alternating bands of rusted-red iron and black oxygen-poor iron in sediments all over the place by about 2.2 GA.  Banded iron holds a hellacious amount of oxygen locked up inside it even today, and it was only once the oceans were nicely oxidized up that the atmosphere got its turn, becoming somewhat less stifling and more oxygenated about 2 GA.  From then on, there was nowhere to go but up, and at some point or another, Eukaryotic life made a very silly move: it went multicellular.  When you consider on the whole how much more numerous and successful most single-celled organisms are compared to us, it makes you wonder why it bothered, but then again, life itself is a case of needless complexity, and you can’t fault it for being consistent with its roots.
One specific period within the Proterozoic is quite noteworthy as far as life goes: the Ediacaran, the very last period of the very last era (the Neoproterozoic) of the Proterozoic proper.  It lasted from about 635 mya to the 542 mya dawn of the Phanerozoic era, and it’s got a smattering of mysterious and soft-bodied fossils, of which practically the only ones that look anything like any life we know from anywhere else are jellyfish.  The rest are strange by many standards, including most or all of ours.  It’s pretty possible that this was an early attempt at life taking off at a sprint, one that was forestalled by one of those random disasters that wipes out almost everything that we’ve had an alarming number of times.  But fear not!  If there’s one thing life can be marked by, it’s its refusal to learn pessimism. 

The Phanerozoic Eon
“Visible life” has been a work in progress from 542 mya to that ever-shifting little non-moment called “now.”  As to its naming, if you can’t see a stromatolite with the naked eye, there’s something wrong with you.  But this is the era where suddenly there was all kinds of stuff out there you could see without a microscope, and because of that, it’s time we got a little more detailed.  Eras and periods will be all over the place here, and let’s begin by noting what is specifically NOT an era or period: the Precambrian.  It’s a sort of blanket term that can be applied to everything before the Cambrian Period at the dawn of the Phanerozoic, the sort of geological equivalent to “B.C.”  What noteworthy event could inspire such broad terminology?  Let’s take a quick, misinformed peek.

The Paleozoic era
“Old life” opens up the Phanerozoic, and it does so with a bang.

The Cambrian Period
The Cambrian (RIP 542-488 mya, beloved by its children, named for the Latin term for Wales) is famous for the Cambrian explosion, as is only natural.  Said explosion, to put it simply, was what happened when an awful lot of organisms decided (apparently overnight) that what they really, really, really needed was a shell.  A phosphate shell, a silica shell, a carbonate shell, whatever.  They wanted shells like we want a viable sustainable source of energy that will allow us all to continue to live in lives of gross excess, and suddenly the fossil record went ballistic.  Soft-bodied organisms are much more difficult to preserve traces of than anything with a hard structure – look at sharks, their cartilaginous bones mean that most of the time the best we have to record them with is teeth – and the effect is a sort of explosion of life suddenly blossoming out of what seems to be nowhere.
If you want to see traces of the less-known, softer residents of the Cambrian, the Burgess Shale of BC, Canada, has a lovely record where some sort of extremely gentle landslide smothered an entire community (with love!) and preserved all its inhabitants with the perfection of a photo.  Some of them are very, very, very, very, very weird.
By the way, trilobites turned up around this time.  They were arthopods (insects, arachnids, crustaceans et al), diverse (17,000 species known, of various habits and inclinations), adorable if you found that sort of thing adorable, and remarkably long-lived, being the most ubiquitous and mascot-worthy inhabitants of the Paleozoic.

Size matters not. Judge, rather, by splendour of carapace.

On land, not much was happening.  Algae had cropped up on there about 600 mya, but nothing else was really going on.  The Cambrian explosion was a marine club only.

The Ordovician Period
Named for a tribe of long-deceased Celtic yokels known as the Ordovics, the Ordovician lasted from 488-444 mya, and saw a few Cambrian developments thicken plottingly.  The cephalopods began an intricate little burst of radiation and ascendance, jawless fish that had first crept onto the scene millions of years before began to experiment with making interesting shapes with their gill arches that could just barely be called “jaws.”  The top predators were probably Nautiloids; shelled cephalopods.

The Silurian Period

Fishes jawed and jawless, class of '428 mya.

Also named for welsh-based Celts, the Silures, the Silurian lasted from 444-416 mya, and was when several developments take off all at once.  Jawed fish were proliferating, milipedes and scorpions made the trek onto land, and up there, waiting for them somewhat anxiously, were the first vascular plants – plants with structural support and internal vessels that slop around the various bits and pieces of nutrition and water they need.  The first plants were seedless mosses and ferns, which did and still need moist places for their spores to mingle in water.  Plant life wasn’t ruling the world yet, but it was spreading.  Incidentally, why scorpions felt the need to leave the seas was a tad unknown, seeing as some of them were nine feet long and ruled the oceans with iron fists, claws, and mandibles.
Some of the earlier possibly-sharks show up right in the Silurian, and they definitely existed by 409 mya, right in

The Devonian Period
which lasted from 416-359 mya and broke the trend of naming periods after cultural subgroups that didn’t much care about geology except insofar as it pertained to woad, being instead named for an English county.  Many things came to a head: fish rose up and took the oceans by storm with thirty-foot monsters like Dunkleosteus, which eschewed teeth in favour of gigantic, bony plates that it used as shears to bite directly through sharks and such (which, despite being the focus of such attention, were now pretty common).  Stuff like this is why this is slanged as “the age of fishes.”

Teeth are for fish who take more than one bite per prey. You know. Sissies.

Possibly more strongly motivated to get the hell out of the ocean by now, some lobe-finned fishes decided to try their luck on land, and before the Devonian was over we had amphibians, the first tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates).  They still had to lay eggs in water, and stay moist, but they were up there and walking around, making life merry hell for the invertebrates that had gotten there first.  Still, there was more livable land-space than ever before by the Devonian’s close; some clever plants (gymnosperms to their friends and acquaintances, if you please) had come up with the concept of sexual reproduction via seeds, creating little self-fueled packages that precluded the need for water.  With these tools, plant life began to spread more quickly yet, and farther from water than before.

The Carboniferous Period
If you’re American, you could divide this period’s 359-318 mya body into the two chunks of Mississipian and Pensylvanian.  If you’re anyone else you couldn’t care less and don’t really mind the period’s name, which, for once, isn’t even British-centric – “coal-bearing” is a pretty amiable and un-nationalistic title.
The Carboniferous saw plants really, really, really make it big.  The seedless mosses and ferns had their last, greatest heyday, and swamps were everywhere.  When plant matter drops into a swamp, it doesn’t rot – there’s too little oxygen in the water for most bacteria to break it up.  Instead, it turns into peat.  Leave peat for a few million whenevers, it turns to coal.  LOTS of coal in the Carboniferous’s case.
With all those plants, oxygen levels hit what’s widely regarded as our personal planetary record.  With that incentive, arthopods on land hit their own as well – since they absorb oxygen straight from the air, with no lungs, bug size is entirely restricted by how much oxygen they can sop up.  We had two-and-a-half meter millipedes and dragonflies with wingspans of 75 centimeters waltzing around, and feasting on them were a cornucopia of amphibians, the most in history, along with strange little newfangled things called “reptiles.”  They’d never catch on.

Does a world with Eryops in it need any fancy reptilian "crocodiles"? It thinks not.

The Permian Period
By now (where “now” is 299-251 mya, and named cosmopolitanly enough after Russia’s Perm Krai) all the continents were in the midst of being crudely kludged together into one big lump: Pangaea, which would be complete before the period’s end.  Inside it, stuffing its mass like jelly in a donut, were a gross quantity of deserts.  Still, plant life forged onwards, and the first real trees popped up – conifers, gingkos, and cycads, mostly.
Reptiles, by now, had obviously caught on and were strutting about as if they owned the place.  It turns out that once you cover your skin in scales, and your eggs in shells, you don’t really need water that badly anymore.  And once you’re free from water, well, on a continent-of-continents with enough inland space to lose Russia like a set of car keys, there were a lot of opportunities for an ambitious little reptile.
Mammal-like reptiles, or “therapsids” popped up around here too.  Their most iconic if not notable member would be Dimetrodon, which is famously not a dinosaur at all.

This is not and has never been a dinosaur. It's a therapsid. Get that straight, damnit.

The Permian ended, and so did the Paleozoic, the old life.  But it didn’t end quietly.  The era had begun with an explosion, and it closed on a somewhat different one: the largest mass extinction event of all time on Earth.
On land, 70% of all land species died.  In the seas, the mortality rate was 90-95%.  And that’s just species killed entirely; you don’t need that many individuals left alive to pull a species through an extinction event.  It’s very possible that 99% of all living things died, all from who knows what.  For all its impossible scale, the Permian extinction is too old and fragmented for many details to be pulled out, and no theories are solid enough to be confirmed.  All you need to know, if you need one fact to judge its severity, is this: it is the only extinction event to include mass extinction of insects.  That’s right; whatever this thing was, it was so harsh that the damned cockroaches had to live hand to mouth to pull through, and plenty of their relatives didn’t.
The casualties are innumerable, but the most prominent of all the deceased were that persistent, ever-scuttling emblematic class of the Paleozoic: the trilobites.  After a little over two hundred and seventy million years, they had finally taken too much punishment, and the very last of them laid down their shells for the final time as the Mesozoic dawned.

The Mesozoic Era
“Middle life.”  Also, you know, where you go when you want to find dinosaurs.  Which most sensible people should.

The Triassic Period
At a nice even 250-200 mya duration, and a sensible, straightforward name originating from the triple layers identifying its formations in Germany, the Triassic was a neat, orderly fresh start after the near-brush with death that the entire planet had suffered at the Permian extinction.  Life caught its breath, and then moved on, callously dumping many of the amphibians left over from the Permian as it went.  Reptiles and therapsids took over (the former produced the world’s first flying vertebrates around this point: the fabulous pterosaurs, as well as the dolphin-esque icthyosaurs), and the therapsids pretty much enjoyed themselves at will until the mid-Triassic, where some strange little upstarts began to make themselves prominent.

Eoraptor, the "dawn hunter," and among the earliest known dinosaurs. The massive success of its descendants is attributed to early-bird hunting habits while therapsids slept in past noon.

They were called dinosaurs, and by the late Triassic they’d elbowed the therapsids out of dominance and into obscurity, where they and some very odd fuzzy milk-producing little things descended from them would remain until the Mesozoic’s end.

The Jurassic Period
Dinosaurs in the Triassic capped out in size at about the 30 feet of Plateosaurus, a prosauropod.  Impressive, massive by today’s standards.  They were just getting started.
The Jurassic (200-145 mya, and named after the Swiss Jura mountains, please and thank you) saw the rise of the sauropods (“lizard feet”), which had popped up either alongside or soon after the prosauropods, depending on whom you asked.  They’re long-necked, long-tailed, and easily far and away the largest animals to ever walk on the planet’s surface – some of the more obscure and shadowy finds of the 20th century, based on singular, scary-huge bones, hint that their largest examples might have given blue whales more than a mere run for their money.  As far as pure impossibility of body structure goes, few animals can match them; they’re built like living suspension bridges, and the specifics of the engineering required to run their circulatory systems, heat their bodies without boiling them, and move them around without crushing themselves are maybe just a little bit more than unbelievable.

While I'm admonishing people, as of 2009 Brachiosaurus as you most likely know it is technically "Giraffatitan." You see, the most complete specimen, the one they based all the artwork off, was in Africa, and it turns out it was a separate genus instead of a subspecies of Brachiosaurus, and hey pay attention hey.

As the sauropods grew, so did other dinosaurs.  Stegosaurs arrived, plate-spined and spike-tailed, and all were hunted by larger and larger yet carnivorous therapods (“beast feet”), the most famous of which is probably Allosaurus, which may or may not have hunted in packs and may or may not have been ballsy enough to take on smaller sauropods in said packs (recent interesting speculation has been clustered around its bite habits: it shows a surprisingly weak bite for its size, but similar neck and jaw adaptations to sabre-tooth cats, which has led to the idea that perhaps it used its mouth somewhat like a hatchet, slashing and hacking to wear down big prey).
While all this exciting stuff was going on, a few smaller therapods had quietly taken to growing feathers – or at least growing more feathers; feathers themselves were distributed somewhat scatteredly around the therapod family tree, as insulation and decoration presumably – and jumping off things, then fluttering about.  Archeopteryx (“ancient wing”) is the oldest known bird; toothed and tailed, with three sharp claws on its arms, it has come near to being mistaken for small dinosaurs several times.  Well, that sentence is a bit misleading.  Birds are small dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs weren’t the only creatures up to shenanigans.  Salamanders evolved – quietly, like most things salamanders do – and the pleisiosaur family, which had first poked its extremely long necks out into the world in the Late Triassic, sidled into the spotlights.  For easy pleisiosaur identification, if it has a long neck, it’s a pleisiosaur, if short and powerful-jawed, a pliosaur.  Except recent rejiggering of the pleisiosaur family trees has dumped short-and-long-necked individuals in both groups, making separating them somewhat complicated.  Between the pleisiosaurs, pliosaurs, and still-present icthyosaurs, marine reptiles were the word on the seas of the Jurassic.  In the skies, pterosaurs held court, dominant and as of yet in blissful ignorance of the dinosaur’s casual preparation to horn in on their turf.

The Cretaceous Period
Pangaea had been splitting apart ever since the Triassic had seen it formed to its full extent, but it was pretty much fully divided by now (“now” being the period of 145-65 mya, and named for its lovely chalk), with groups of dinosaurs left in strange corners of the world to evolve like mad to their own desires.  Sauropods still were in firm presence, though many of the older diplodocids and brachiosaurids had faded away in favour of titanosaurs like Argentinosaurus, which were every bit as enthusiastically large as their predecessors.  The tyrannosaurs produced their largest member, the ceratopsians brushed the world liberally with horns, frills, and spikes, and the duckish-billed hadrosaurs spread like wildfire.

Now look, I know this isn't THE Tyrannosaurus, but Gorgosaurus was a perfectly respectable TyrannosaurID, and there's no call for you to make that face.

At sea, the icthyosaurs finally left the oceans, and in the Late Cretaceous the mosasaurs sprung up; most closely related to snakes or monitor lizards depending on who you asked.  Whichever it was, they were more than eager to take the spot as apex predators, and did so with gusto.  The skies saw their own regimes shaken: the birds spread and multiplied, the dinosaurs carving out their section of the air at the expense of the (somewhat annoyed) pterosaurs.
Everything was looking very pretty indeed when a very large meteorite slammed directly into the Yucatan peninsula, kicking up debris that clouded the sun for years, incinerating everything within hundreds of miles in a wave of heat and force, and generally ruining things.  Among the casualties were the marine reptiles, the pterosaurs, the beautiful, coil-shelled ammonites so emblematic of the Mesozoic (leaving only the lonely nautilus as their surviving relative) and each and every last non-avian dinosaur.  They’d lasted for 160 million years, substantially less than the trilobites, but with every bit as much breathtaking splendor.  They’d taken the land, they’d started in on the skies, and if we’d given them a few more million years to play with I at least am damn well sure they’d have taken the oceans, lakes, and the whole bloody solar system.

Farewell, sweet saurians. May flights of Archaeopteryx screech you to your rest.

This disastrous, massive extinction event was what finally gave our tiny, furry ancestors the kick in the tail they needed to poke their heads out of their burrows and consider doing something other than hiding for another two hundred million years.

The Cenozoic Era
Here comes the “new life,” same as the old life.  But much smaller.  And usually furrier.  And always, always, always milkier.

The Paleogene Period
Covering 65-25 mya, this covers the bulk of the foundation of mammals upon earth.  Whales cropped up around 50 mya, elephant ancestors somewhere similar.  The oldest known primate is somewhere around 58 million years old, although the order’s roots could be back in the Cretaceous.  The oldest, smallest ancestors of horses were skulking around forests somewhere.  Somewhere around 28 mya, C. Megalodon (possible relative to the great white shark, probably fifty feet in length, definite eater of whales) popped up and made the oceans a very frighting place up until a mere one and a half million years ago.

In all fairness, at this point they'd overestimated the length of the shark. By like, ten feet.

The Neogene Period
25-2.5 mya, the Neogene was steady.  If not much else.  Look, horses were starting to look like horses and North and South America bumped uglies so a lot of species migration happened, what more d’you want from me?  Alas, South America’s marsupials were the long-term losers of the Great American Interchange (so it’s called), and we lost the chance to have marsupial sabre-toothed “cats” in Ontario, more’s the pity.  Opossums made it, though.

You ever noticed that the most survival-prone species are the unpleasant, omnivorous, nasty ones that have utterly no dignity? No offense.

The Quaternary Period
The Quaternary (fourth) period covers everything from 2.5 mya to today, and specifically the area of time in which vaguely hominidish things began to wander around Africa and consider smacking things with rocks (among objects considered: trees, sticks, bones, dirt, other rocks, other hominids).  Most of the exciting and interesting megafauna died off within the last twenty thousand years – giant ground sloths that resembled tree sloths as much as chihuahuas do great danes; a rainbow of mammoths; glyptodon, which resembled a cross between an armadillo and an ankylosaur.  As far as life on earth goes, the last couple of thousand years have been pretty puny in scale.

As recently as 10,000 years ago, you could've helped this guy go extinct in South America.

It is the period of time within which we can recognize the precise moment where everything went very wrong.
And it’s all your fault.

Picture Credits:

• Stromatolites: Public domain image from Wikipedia; Stromatolites, Zebra River Canyon Western Namibia, 12 December 2010, NimbusWeb.
• Trilobite: Public domain image from Wikipedia; Olenoides erratus from the Mt. Stephen Trilobite Beds (Middle Cambrian) near Field, British Columbia, Canada.; Photograph taken by Mark A. Wilson (Department of Geology, The College of Wooster), 6 August 2009.
• Silurian Fishes: Public domain image from Wikipedia; by Joseph Smit (1836-1929), from Nebula to Man, 1905 England.
• Dunkleosteus Skull: Dunkleosteus skull on display at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane (Southbank), Australia, photo: Cas Liber; 21 August 2006.
• Eryops Skeleton: Image from Wikipedia; Photo by Joshua Sherurcij, 2007.
• Dimetrodon: Public domain image from Wikipedia; 1897, Charles R. Knight.
• Eoraptor: Public domain image from Wikipedia; replica Eoraptor at Brussels Science Institute, submitted 2008, MWAK.
• Giraffatitan: Public domain image from Wikipedia; by ДиБгд, 9 May 2007.
• Gorgosaurus and Parasaurolophus: Public domain image from Wikipedia; by ДиБгд, 3 June 2007.
• Impact Event: Public domain image from Wikipedia; Made by Fredrik. Cloud texture from public domain NASA image, 18 May 2004.
• Megalodon Jaws: Public domain image from Wikipedia; Reconstruction by Bashford Dean in 1909.
• Opossum: Public domain image from Wikipedia; Johnruble 21 December 2006.
• Megatherium: Public domain image from Wikipedia; by ДиБгд, 22 July 2007.

Hello there, I’m Kimberly Beverage and this is Not Really News: Where the Real Isn’t.  Your usual host Joey Fishlips is on sick leave for undisclosed reasons, and I will be your commentator this evening.  I am being paid a tiny stipend for this that is one-eighth what he would get, but I promise I won’t let the tremendously swelling bitterness within my heart pour out on the air. 
So, today’s first stupid “story,” if you can call it that seeing as it doesn’t even exist, is that someone in British Columbia, Canada, has formed a sasquatch-defamation league to protest the racist use of the slur “Bigfoot” to describe the species of big hairy crazy guys that live in the woods.  Can you believe this shit?  “Sasquatch-defamation league.”  Honestly.  The man, a mister Harry Sole, held a very small press conference that he may or may not have attended according to witnesses, with the audience members puzzling over grainy footage that shows him ambling away from the podium with an odd stride some maintain is not human.  Others insist the entire thing was a hoax, much like the line that good ol’ Joey fed us about where he was going on weekends.  “Seeing a man about a carp” indeed, you filthy weasel. 
Speaking of animals, the new center for the Inhumane Society opened in downtown LA.  “We figured, well, there’s got to be balance,” said founder Platz Roberts.  “Moderation in all things, right?  Right now we have a flagrant disrespect for that, with thousands of professional locations across the country dedicated to comforting suffering animals, while horrifying mistreatment is left to rank amateurs.  I think we’re correcting a very important part of nature here,” he concluded as he teased a large German shepherd with a treat just out of what was proven seconds later to be not quite its actual full reach.  An update: the new LA center for the Inhumane Society has closed on opening day following our interview, as Platz proved unable to drink coffee and work at the same time since his hand was messily removed.  Our condolences, as I think we all know of someone who does nasty things to animals, don’t we, Joey?  Oh wait, you can’t hear me where you are. 
While on the topic of where things are, geographers of the world rejoiced earlier when they realized they had “missed a spot.”  “Seriously, we somehow managed to skip over this little five-by-ten kilometre patch of land somewhere in eastern Kenya like, eighty times in a row,” said professor Arnold Z. Squibbits.  “I guess it was this one guy’s job for a while, and he just got a blind spot.  That happens.  But it just kept happening.  It’s the most evasive and least attention-drawing piece of land I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and even now I’m not sure I’ve seen it.”  Professor Squibbits pointed out that the missing spot was “by no means particularly unworthy of attention.  It just doesn’t, you know, catch the eye.  At all.”  A major land war between Europe and the United States of America is expected to break out within the month for dibs on colonization, enslavement of the locals, and grossly exploitative resource exploitation.  Which reminds me, Joey, what you did to that poor young lady went beyond mere exploitation.  There’s being a prostitute, Joey, and then there’s being a prop.  One implies that you are still a person, albeit one with a shitty career, and the second implies a basic lack of social empathy on the viewer’s part that renders them incapable of seeing people as anything other than things, you monstrous twit. 
In art, a local lout has produced the world’s most ironic piece of art, a gigantic, poorly-thought-out, self-absorbed painting that loudly acclaims himself as the smartest, straightest-thinking man in the country while depicting him skewering “furreners.”  The art community praises mister Ted Gabble for his commitment to the massive irony inherent in the piece, for which he called them a “buncha sawft pansees” and asked them what the word meant.  Clearly, his dedication to the piece goes beyond its mere creation, indeed, he lives his very life ironically now.  Or so the theory goes.  He may, in fact, just be an ignorant meathead.  Like someone else we all know, who is still somehow making more than I do despite being in PRISON, huh?  How’s that for fairness?  How’s THAT for irony? 
In other unfair news, today some angry old racist was the victim of ageism.  Being overheard making a crude joke at the expense of some people who didn’t quite look like him, he was surrounded by youths who also didn’t look quite like him who taunted him mercilessly for being a “scrawny old bastard” who looked like the lovechild of a prune and an ice mummy.  The merciless discrimination against his elderly status left no mark untouched, down to their mocking of his incontipants-brand adult diapers.  Attempts to defend himself were fruitless; no amount of cane-waggling deterred them, as they simply stole the cane and sold it to buy candy.  When asked for a statement, the elderly racist simply requested that we get off his lawn and gummed our reporter on the upper hip, which he attempted to suckle.  Disgusting, but apparently newsworthy.  Apparently not like what you did with those fish heads, JOEY.  That doesn’t belong on the news but this shit does?  Give me a goddamned break.  If it’s vile tripe the network wants, they can get it straight from the deviant’s fishlips, right here, right now!  Why don’t we do an interview from your cell, huh?
Right, right, sorry.  Anyways, our big item for the evening: the Prime Minister of Canada narrowly survived an assassination attempt while fishing for bass earlier today.  Our extremely invasive and legally questionable cameras caught footage of a scuba diver silently slipping into the canoe and stabbing the leader directly in the spine with a perch, presumably in an attempt to make it look like an accident.  However, he was unaware that the Prime Minister is an emotionless robotic shell, and as such his fish-blade bounced off the cold titanium lying just beneath the official’s pale and artificial skin.  Moments later, the assailant was beaten to death with the bailing bucket.  Although the attempt currently seems mildly humorous it is worth noting that the Prime Minister’s system specs are not optimized for piscine defence, and a larger fish, such as a big pike, muskellunge, or sturgeon could very well have breeched his hull and exposed his circuitry, to the great relief of the population at large and much celebrating in the streets at the end of the steely grip of our robot oppressor.  Try harder next time, please. 

Standard warning that none of this is real, or even quasi-real, yadda, yadda, yadda, with the notable exception of the following news.  JOEY FISHLIPS IS IN PRISON FOR UNNATURAL ACTS WITH A SOUTH AFRICAN HOOKER INVOLVING FISHEADS!  RAW FISHEA

—Service will resume as soon as possible—

A very, very long time ago, there was a wafting cloud of interstellar dust, gas, and general bits of leftover matter.  A very small bit of it bumped into another very small bit of it, and they stuck, to each other and soon to others. 
This took a long time.
Afterwards, there was a very small, very dense ball.  It kept growing, kept packing itself tight, getting denser and denser.
This took a very long time. 
But when the long time was done and everything had finished sorting itself out, it was a surprised and pleased ball of debris that looked around itself and decided that its existence was really pretty neat.  In fact, it decided its existence was more than merely neat. 
“Wow,” it said as it looked around the endless expanse of the universe, at the nebulae and galactic arms, at the dust clouds and lonely comets, at the asteroid clusters and gas giants.  “I am absolutely incredible.  I am amazing.  In fact, looking at all that stuff out there, I think I’m just about the best at everything I am!”
This was an unusual attitude for a ball of interstellar debris.  In general, the denser they are the better off they become, but perhaps this one was a bit too dense. 
“No you’re not,” said another voice. 
Now, a clarification on this voice, because it will be heard regularly: it is not a nice one.  It’s smug, insufferable, self-satisfied, and unpleasantly plump to the point of bloated.  If voices were animals, this one would look like a big fat toad. 
“What?” snapped the debris ball. 
“I said,” the voice said, from a clump of trans-galactic litter much like that that made up the debris ball, “you’re not the best at everything you are.  And I said this because obviously I am.”
The ball swelled up in outrage, absorbing a third of its weight again in particles.  “You?  Not a chance!  Not at all!  You’re tiny, you’re teeny, you’re barely there!  I’m more than you’ll ever be!  What a joke!”
“What rubbish!” scoffed the clump.  “What folly!  Look at you, barely a blip!  You’re comparing atoms to quarks, you miserable cretin, and you can’t even do that properly.  Look, as you can see, I am easily your better!”  And as it spoke, it sucked in its neighbours, ballooning in size to prove its point. 
Now, at this point a fair mind would provide a crude estimate and declare that the two were as near as made no difference.  But this was something neither of them was all that eager to possess.  An ego is a terrible thing to waste. 
“I’m bigger!”
“No, I, you miniscule dolt!”
“Moron!
“Twit!”
And at each exchange, they both grew a little, a boost to secure their positions, just to be safe, to be sure.  And their argument got louder and hotter.  Much hotter, although that could’ve had a little to do with their increasing density. 
“Dumbass!”
“Pompous gasbag!”
“Chump!”
“Fool!”
Now, this heating and growing went on for a long time, as it’s measured by many life forms.  For a pair of squabbling bits of leftover cosmic garbage, not as long.  And the argument was seemingly settled when right as the first bit of dirt and rock was trying to come up with a really good comeback, it ignited.  Fwoosh. 
“Ha!” the new star declared as it lit up a microscopic bit of the sky.  “Now who’s the best?”
Fwoosh.
“Still me, I’m afraid,” smarmed its neighbour, oozing condescension from a mere couple of light-years away.  “I believe you’ll find my entourage speaks for itself.”  And indeed, a pretty cloud of solar bits had formed around it, spinning neatly as if to marvel at its newfound heat. 
“What?  Well, I’ll show you!” and the star worked its gravitic muscles as hard as it could, twisting and bending bits and scraps to it. 
“You’ll find that mine are bigger,” called over the rival. 
“Not for long,” said the star with grim spite, and it set about collapsing and coalescing its makeshift audience as fast and hard as it could.  When both of them were through, some hundreds of thousands of years later, they had a spinning solar system each of gas giants and rocky little spheres, one two-and-six, the other four-and-three. 
“I have more,” said the first star, smugness oozing from it stronger than ultraviolet. 
“Mine are more sizeable,” snapped back the second. 
“Mine have rarer elements.”
“Mine have higher albedos!”
“Shiny rubbish!”
“Dull dirt-lumps!”
The fight was brought to a halt as a comet shower passed through both systems.  It dropped some very small bits and pieces of odd chemicals on one planet in each solar system, and it started to do odd things to propagate itself over the next few million years. 
“What’s that?” asked the first planet suspiciously.
“I don’t know,” said the second planet.  “But I don’t quite think I like it.”
“I have more than you, and I don’t mind it,” said the first planet. 
“We’ll see about that!” 
And so before long, both of the stars were encouraging the growth and spread of the strange stuff – they called it life, and both insisted the other had copied their name – the only way they could: by bombarding it with all kinds of radiation and seeing what stuck.  It took some heavy work to get it through the thickening atmospheres of their worlds, but they persisted, and for every time they saw the life wax from overtly enthusiastic efforts on their part they saw it change and redouble in vigour. 
“I have more!”
“Mine’s more common!”
“Argh!”
“Shut up!”
A few billion years down the line, something really weird happened.  A bunch of the stuff started sticking together in clumps.  Before the stars knew it, life was getting bigger and bigger, and spreading through their planets faster than a solar flare. 
“Mine went multi-cellular before yours.”
“Liar!”
The very peculiar thing about the life was its speed.  In a few scant tens of millions of years it would shrink, grow, shrink again, change itself five times over, then almost collapse and start over.  Keeping track required very close attention, something that both the stars developed grudgingly as a way of one-upsmanship. And it was a good thing they did, otherwise what happened next would’ve completely slipped their attention spans. 
“My word,” said the second star.  “I do believe some of my life is making things out of other things.”
“What?” asked the first star, suspicion filling it.
“See for yourself,” it said, and the first star could see, now that it was looking.  Some of the other star’s planet was now sprinkled with strange piles of minerals and repurposed carcasses. 
“What are those?” asked the first star, curiousity momentarily overcoming malice with heroic effort. 
“I do not know, but I believe I will call them artificial.  My new life enjoys creating artificial things.”
“Well,” the first star snarled, “so will mine!”  And it stepped up its radiation again. 
Sure enough, it had sentient life on its planet soon enough.  Both of them egged them along as best as possible, and although their methods were harsh, clumsy, and often collapsed civilizations due to impossibly harsh and dangerous environments, they certain led to interesting species.  Very, very surly ones with immensely tough radiation tolerances and extreme survival instincts that tended to fight brutal turf wars. 
“So tasteless,” complained the second planet. 
“Mine are tougher.”
“The hell they are!  Mine are meaner!”
“Not a chance!”
At long last, after something like the hundredth world-wide war on the first star’s planet and the hundredth-and-thirty-first on the second, they realized that their planets were getting awfully cluttered and broken, and there was real worry that their life could run out of space soon, or just not be quite tough enough to last through that next nuclear conflagration. 
“There are other planets,” said the first star, “and my life shall be the first to reach them.  They’ll spread across the galaxy, and they’ll be the toughest, nastiest, and strongest of all!”
“My life will be there first and faster, and they’ll consume yours before you can so much as flare twice,” boasted the second. 
“Nonsense!”
This time the star’s searing efforts at egging them on did very little to aid the actual advancement of their life, but it certainly added urgency to their movements.  Swarms of little extremely angry and violent beings put new effort into crude spaceflight, slowed but scantly by their instinctive desire to mount terrible and monstrous weaponry on everything they built. 
“Nearly done!” said the first star, watching a fleet of colony ships being outfitted with antimatter warheads to crush any resistance on fertile worlds they found. 
“Almost there,” said the second, gloating over its creations as they tore out the minerals lodged in their planet’s core with drills that would make an Oort cloud wince.
“Never had a chance, you puffed-up little smidgen,” said the first.  “You don’t have the hydrogen to pull this off, not with your tiny little core.”
“I burn brighter, burn harder, and shine stronger than you ever will, mewling dwarf,” said the second. 
“Can you top this power?” asked the first, flaring up violently and swelling. 
“Bah!  Outshine this if you can,” said the second, and it glowed bright red, growing larger still.
“That’s nothing,” seethed the first, life forgotten as it restarted the oldest argument of all among them.  “I’ll burn so bright that you’ll vanish against me!”
“You call that bright?  You’re barely yellow, you’re turning red!”
“And you,” said the first, snowballing in size, “are tiny.  Hot you may be, but I could eat you up without noticing.”
“Pah!” said the second, bloating like a toad left under a sunlamp. 
They fought and grew and fought and grew, and they both got redder and redder.  Their inner planets began to vanish into their bulk. 
“You’re nothing but the same cosmic speck you’ve always been!”
“You’re a dust particle in your core!”
“Well you’re….. what?”
“What?” demanded the first planet, and then it saw they had both stopped growing. 
“How embarrassing,” confessed the second.  “I seem to be out of fuel.”
“So am I,” mourned the first. 
“Ridiculous.”
“I feel heavy.”
“I wonder why this happened?”
There was a brief (cosmically) silence as the two considered this, and then they both exploded, taking their entire solar systems with them. 
The two separate colonization fleets looked up from their battered, bleeding worlds as they fitted their cataclysmic drive engines for the first and final flights, then were unceremoniously obliterated by the joint supernovas at almost exactly the same time.  About half of them regarded it as a thankful relief as they evaporated, the rest were, as usual, very, very angry.   

That corner of that cluster of that galaxy of that tiny chunk of the universe was very quiet.  Only a pair of colourless, lightless weights on the fabric of everything remained, straining existence through their vast gravity wells in sullen silence. 
About a billion years passed calmly, and then:
“Say what you will about this whole sorry mess…”
“Yes?”
“… but I believe that my mass is greater.”

“The Argument” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.

Once again, it is my birthday, as tends to happen.  Once again, I am tastelessly abandoning my duty to hand you something that at least pretends to be content, and shall depart henceforth to bloat on vidjagames and idleness.  In return, here is a list of things that are awesome.  Probably. 

-Manly men who do manly things while secretly wearing pink floral print boxers. 
-Dinosaur fossils that have been jam-packed full of extremely hi-tech electronics. 
-Irate invertebrates whose gripes are well-founded. 
-Someone born in Hawaii who will grow up to be the greatest architect of snow forts ever to live. 
-Household chores done in the style of rip-snortin’ 1930s serials. 
-The square roots of fictional numbers.  
-An elaborate and labyrinthian palace of wondrous sumptuousness made entirely from twigs and used dirt. 
-Bears who heroically manage to fight off and kill attacking humans armed only with their paws and teeth. 
-Forms of entertainment that get so meta that you’re no longer sure if you don’t give a shit or if you’re secretly intended to not give a shit, in which case you want to care just to spite the creator. 
-Danged punk earthquakes that just hang around major population centres, threatening to start something but then running away laughing at the last moment every time. 
-Beavers that qualify for the title of Senior Architect that nevertheless still just build stuff wherever the sound of running water is. 
-Suspiciously delicious candy.
-The popular conception of the future changing every ten years to something that still suspiciously resembles modern life with more shiny bits and a few aliens. 
-Rampant kittens. 
-A snailshell large enough to use as a house.  Or a house small enough to use as a snailshell. 
-That one colour that’s sort of blue but not really and maybe could be green I’m not sure. 
-Thugs throwing pies at Superman mean-spiritedly. 
-Ancient, powerful, invincible weapons that heroes use to slay just one monster and then stick on the shelf and forget about. 
-Games of Scrabble using human tiles that end in bloodbaths over the correct spelling of “Worcestershire.”
-Ancient and depraved cults dedicated to worshipping laundry. 
-Clowns that aren’t actually all that scary. 
-Stephen King engaging in fisticuffs with Dean Koontz.  But only if he wins by picking up Koontz and throwing him out of the ring head-first. 
-That sound your knuckles make when you smack ‘em together. 
-Monkeys that prefer tangerines to bananas and have been steadily building up to a shooting spree over it. 
-Crocodiles that say “crikey” unironically.
-A keyboard God made so large that even He couldn’t log into Facebook with it.  That He then uses anyways. 
-A sub sandwich the size of the Chrysler Building that wishes deep down inside that it was the size of the Empire State Building. 
-Things that are exactly the same size as a bread box. 
-A man holding a spleen raffle for charity. 
-Unexpected limb loss that makes the victim laugh out loud. 
-Supervillains who forget that cops don’t have a never-kill rule and get gunned down in front of their traumatized nemeses during a dramatic monologue. 
-Really big whelks. 
-A scientist who invents functional anti-gravity fields and only uses them to have incredible trampoline parties. 
-A couple of drunken idiots making dangerous and irresponsible use of chips while next to a zoo’s lion pit. 
-A couple of ancient feuding gods giving the chess-game-with-mortal-pawns a pass and just playing tiddlywinks so they can have a good time for once. 
-Soccer with violence allowed as long as you don’t use your hands. 
-A little lightbulb inside the helmet of a suit of armour.  Maybe a mini-minibar in the visor, too. 
-Mr. Clean wrassling a shark with both parties restricted to teeth only. 
-A home-made biplane. 
-A Tyrannosaurus tackling a Triceratops, then getting sent to the penalty box for cross-checking. 
-An angsty palm tree that wallows in self-pity as happy couples make out underneath it. 
-Tailgating spacecraft. 
-A nuclear aircraft carrier pulling into a drive-thru for some fries. 
-Giant, rampaging teddy bears that are defeated by mounting needles and thread onto ballistic missiles. 
-Murals that are accidentally painted onto floors because someone bumped the artist’s elbow. 
-Non-toxic, recycling-friendly, eco-green, biodegradable civilizations, cultures, and religious systems. 
-Shortlisted Wonders of the World. 
-Someone pasting a poster for a summer blockbuster over exceptionally artistic graffiti. 
-A Cyclops poking someone in the eye. 
-Really tasty strawberries. 
-An arthritic haemophilic klutz bowling using lightbulbs. 
-Gods that become monotheistic in a snit after their buddies stop returning their calls. 
-Shuffling layers of bedrock. 
-An uncontrollably ticklish blue whale. 
-Prokaryotic grand opera. 
-That one tune some slave worker in Mesopotamia hummed about five thousand years ago.  It was only about twenty seconds long, but man. 
-Saucy, socially misplaced heart attacks. 
-Any palaeontologist who has ever scientifically named a species including the phrase “thunder” in the genus simply because he’d wanted to do that since he was six. 
-Antisocial Jehovah’s Witnesses. 
-Poetic Portuguese Man-o-Wars.
-Prisoners of war who diet. 
-Zippy, heartwarming family musicals about famous serial killers. 
-Nonaggression pacts signed in pencil, preferably with half-erased spelling errors.

Or “marine reptiles,” if you must be so crude.  Which you must.  Really, I insist. 

Marine reptiles are exactly what the label suggests, and since I’m fond of redundancy I’ll tell you: reptiles with watery habits living in watery habitats.  Technically I’ve covered quite a few here already, such as your saltwater crocodiles and your sea snakes, and then there’s other stuff like your Galapagos marine iguanas and such.  But you know what?  They have the same problem all life currently present on earth does.  Too small.  Too petite, minute, tiny, eensy-weensy, itty-bitty.  Too familiar.  Too…..non-humongous. 

But can it swallow a grown man whole?

So let’s look at some Mesozoic stuff!  Who says the middle era is always the one the parents love the least, eh?

Truly, our era is impoverished of awesome.

Marine reptiles were a concept that had some potential in the Permian, but they became a boom industry sometime in the Triassic – which, I need not remind you, as I do so, is the first of the Mesozoic’s three periods.  Some of the more notable groups that sprung up around this time include nothosaurs, which were possibly sort of a lizardy version of seals, going for fish and such, and placodonts, which were a sort of bulky mollusk-eating (“malacivores” – great word, isn’t it?  Learn something every day…) bunch that started off looking kind of but not really like marine iguanas, found out what “predation” meant the harsh way, and ended up looking kind of but not really like sea turtles. 

If these don’t seem that well known to you, that’s probably because they all died out at the end of the Triassic.  Life’s mean that way.  However, a contemporary of theirs did indeed make the cut: the ichthyosaurs.  There are some scientific names you can accuse of being vaguely related at best to their subjects, but not these, not the “fish-lizards,” who were so devoted to reaching that perfect ideal of streamlined limblessness that they even developed live birth for it.  They were elegant, they were sleek, and they’d already had a shot at growing grossly large by the end of the period (Shonisaurus was fifty feet long and swam in schools).  They were also Stephen Jay Gould’s favourite example of convergent evolution – the development of similar biological structures for similar jobs by unrelated species; which in this case was “swim fast, find fish, chase fish, eat fish.”  Sharks, swordfish, dolphins, ichthyosaurs…there are only so many quick-and-fast-hunter shapes available to be used in the water, although the customization takes over once the basic mould’s been set (a few ampullae of Lorenzini here, a long swordbill there, tendency to murder your own species’ young for amusement, maybe the phasing-out of teeth over time). 

Think of them as dolphins, but with less Flipper. And thus, innately superior.

Ichthyosaurs went on to a long and prosperous history.  They cleaned up in the Triassic marine reptiles sweepstakes, kept it going strong for most of the Jurassic, and then gradually petered out and expired towards the Late Cretaceous, cause unknown, which is, I’d like to say, a way no doubt we all wish we could go.  By then, of course, they had competition, but they’d been coping with that for millions of years beforehand.  Let’s look at some of that competition now. 

Don't brag about your fishing rod unless it's built into your spine.

The next big ice-breakers on the scene were the plesiosaurs.  Relatives of the nothosaurs, they escaped the fate of their cousins and started to throw their weight around come the Jurassic, popping up in the Early and getting bigger and better throughout the Middle to Late.  Now, an important distinction must be made: plesiosaurs themselves were split into two groups: long-necked plesiosaurs, and short-necked pliosaurs, as seen below with our good buddy Kronosaurus.

Pictured above, a portion of the reason why sharks weren't the top predators during the Mesozoic.

The slower plesiosaurs were predominately fish-and-invertebrate-eaters, while the faster, heavy-jawed pliosaurs went after larger prey, including other marine reptiles.  They were the super-orcas of their day, eating the things that ate everyone else and grinning all the while, with discoveries over the last few years being excavated in Svalbard exposing 50 foot+ monsters lurking out there.  Incidentally, some unrelated triva: plesiosaurs are both an order (the above mentioned whole shebang of this group of marine reptiles), a superfamily (the plesiosaur half of the plesiosaur/pliosaur division), and a species (Plesiosaurus, a fairly generic 10-16 footish example of the prior groups).  This isn’t confusing because science. 
The plesiosaurs thrived right up until the Cretaceous extinction, when they abruptly vanished alongside most of the lifeforms on our planet that were actually interesting.  Even after the icthyosaurs left them, however, they still had plenty of company.  Roll tape!

Why has no one written Moby-Dick with Mesozoic marine reptiles again?

Oh right, no videos.  Whoops.  The nice picture above shows Tylosaurus, among the lengthiest of all of the mosasaurs (50 or so feet, give or take a whistle), a group of marine reptiles whose closest living relatives today are probably snakes.  They sprang up somewhere within spitting distance of the Middle Cretaceous, and despite their fashionable lateness they were soon swarming over the oceans like gangbusters, becoming the most prolific of all marine reptiles and the dominant predators de facto.  They had at least 20 million years of glorious sea serpent-hood, their fins and elongated paddle-tails stretching boldly across the oceans, before they went out with the plesiosaurs.  Alas and alackaday. 

Odds and ends were still about, of course.  Some crocodiles went for broke and became almost fully aquatic along the rim of the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, experimenting quite a ways into the latter period.  Sea turtles popped up at some point, and have kept going on quietly and steadily in the face of absolutely everything and anything (so far…).  But we have those already, sort of.  And as any six-year-old knows, it’s what you don’t have that’s the most interesting.  And as any sixty-year-old knows, it’s what you missed out on that’s always the most depressing.  Poor us, over sixty-five million years too late to see a mosasaur eel past a dock.  Poor us, forever having to make do with dolphins where we could see icthyosaurs gallavanting at the bow waves of ships.  Poor us, for being robbed of the chance to see a giant pliosaur and a bull sperm whale go at each other flipper to flipper, jaw to jaw. 

Ah well.  Take what you can get.  So listen up and save those whales, damnit – because they’re the next best thing we’ve got. 

Picture Credits

• Marine Iguanas: Marine iguana from Philip Greenspun’s Weblog. 
• Pliosaur: Drawn by Tor Sponga, BT, from BBC article:.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7264856.stm. 
• Nothosaur: Ceresiosaurus: Drawn by Dmitry Bogdanov, 2008, taken from Wikipedia. 
• Placodus: Drawn by Dan Varner, found at http://www.oceansofkansas.com/placodnt.html. 
• Icthyosaur: Platypterygius: Drawn by Dmitry Bogdanov, 2008, taken from Wikipedia. 
• Pleisosaurus: Drawn by Dmitry Bogdanov, 2008, taken from Wikipedia. 
• Kronosaurus: Public domain image from Wikipedia, May 9th 2007, by ДиБгд. 
• Mosasaurus: Drawn by Carl Buell, found at http://www.oceansofkansas.com/mosa-sty.html.

As per usual, I have completed a course.  As per usual, I believe that my final exam was 85% desperate floundering and 15% filling out simple definitions while feeling smug.  In this case, it was on aboriginal cultures of North America.  So a little depressing, but interesting.  Also as per usual, I will generously share my misconceptions and useless notes that did me so much good a few days ago. Quite a lot of these will be from things I haven’t known of or cared about for over four months, so there’s an added fact-filter there too. 

You have failed to impress Sitting Bull in the slightest.

First off, let me tell you about culture areas.  Culture areas are what you get when you take a map and divide it into big lumps, then stand back, squint, and say “I guess the guys in there sort of live similarly kind of really.”
Okay, not really.  Culture areas are based around a few ideas that work together.  First off, in an environment, people will probably use the stuff in it.  Second, they’ll probably use it in a way that’s useful.  Third, if they find out someone else is doing something neat (“GRINDING the acorns for flour, as opposed to stuffing them in your ears, you say?….”), they’ll probably try it out themselves.  The upshot of this is that groups living in the same broad vicinity of each other, within the same environment, will likely exploit the same resources and share certain methods of doing so through diffusion.  That’s the concept of culture areas, really – you live in sort of the same place as some other people, you’ll all probably have broad similarities.  Naturally, this isn’t as easy as it looks, don’t try this at home kids, etcetera, etcetera, excrement. 

Now that we’re all up to speed and sped up, here’s a vague overview of the culture areas within North America.  Probably.

The Arctic

These bears can't imagine why someone would need so much metal to go swimming in subzero water.

The place: The Arctic is a fun place to live.  There’s not much to eat, so if you CAN eat something you’d damned well better.  A lot of it’s going to be meat – there’s a reason the polar bear is the only real pure carnivore of its family, you know.  Plant life on the tundra packs everything it’s got into a neurotic and paranoid summer of buoyant growth before dropping into a pathetic coma afterwards. 
The people: You can lop the Arctic’s inhabitants into three big crude groups: Aleuts (who lived in…well, the Aleutian Islands, and part of the Alaskan Peninsula), Yup’ik (south-southwest Alaska and the Asian shore of the Bering Strait), and Inuit (the entire top of North America, the Arctic Archipelago, and Greenland’s coasts).  The Aleutians and Pacific Yu’pik liked a lot of seafood – and they had a lot of seafood, enough to get some complex society going, with chiefs and slaves and commoners and everything! –  and the inland Yu’pik and Inuit less so, with more caribou and such in their diets. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Global warming and the Arctic are playing happy funtime pals, and there’s oil in them thar hills. 

The Subarctic

Too pretty to be funny.

The place: Strictly speaking, what you’re in if you walk south of the little dotted line that says “Arctic” on it.  The Subarctic covers a lot of Canada, with forests being more and more evergreeny the farther north you go (near the top, lots of spruce).  Usually there isn’t a lot of rain or other precipitation.  The eastern Subarctic is heavily defined by the Canadian Shield (the hugeass rock base that surrounds Hudson’s Bay on all sides), and has all sorts of bogs, swamps, lakes, and rivers, speckled with fur-bearing animals, fish, moose, caribou, and all sorts of other stuff (like blueberries – everybody loves blueberries).   The western side of the Subarctic in Canada wanders a bit north of the treeline into tundra territory, with lots of lich and nary a tree to be found.  Caribou are all over the place, making their meat a must over here, spiced up with fish and migrating birds and whatever else you can find.  Which includes musk ox.  Everybody loves musk oxen!
The people:  From here on we’re running on examples of one or two cultures per area.  In this case, the eastern Subarctic has the Cree, the western the Chipewyan/Dene (“Chipewyan” being a Cree word for “pointed skins,” which apparently refers to the dangling points on poncho-like thingies the men wore), who lived spread thinly across tundra eating lots of caribou and a good deal of fish.  There are quite a lot of Cree – their geographic territory has actually increased since contact, and they’re one of the largest First Nations groups in North America – but they’ve rubbed elbows with Europeans for so long that figuring out their precontact lifestyles and beliefs in any sort of great detail is like searching for semidigested food in Gandhi’s gullet. The Chipewyan were and are a lot less numerous, and it took quite some time for any Europeans to run into them – none of whom managed to get back really reliable input.  After a while they migrated into trapping as a business, some of them went a bit farther south, and they absorbed a rag-bag of miscellaneous concepts, beliefs, and attitudes – notably from the Cree. 
How they’re/have been screwed: The James Bay Cree in particular are stuck in an off-again-on-again-off-a-hahahahaha-no-it’s-on-again dispute with the federal government and Quebec over why exactly they would prefer not having giant honking hydroelectric dams built near them, which they’ve kept on top of (which may sort of kind of not really have been possibly worked out..to a degree).  The Chipewyan are spared such issues, because they already went through the whole decimated-by-disease-and-forced-schooling-of-children-far-away-from-their-parents things (in the 1800s and 1935+ respectively) and have decided they’re through with it. 

California 

Once upon a time, this was in no way associated with Hollywood.

The place: California’s geography is all over the place – high, low, desert, forest, barren, fertile.  Depending on where you’re living you’re grinding mesquite beans into nutritious mush, gathering acorns to make a deliciously gritty flour, fishing for salmon, or maybe hunting sea lions.  Surfing, however, simply was not done. 
The people: The California culture area is pretty varied, so the Cahuilla end up as the  standard example simply by dint of having more information about them than anyone else.  Such as about the vast, fresh harvest of money the Palm Springs Cahuilla reap every day from thousands of suckers entering their casinos.  There’s three rough population divisions of Cahuilla – desert (Palm Springs), mountain, and pass.  The desert Cahuilla own billions of dollars worth of land, two casinos, a spa hotel, and whatever other stuff they feel like. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Exactly the way you’d expect any minority group owning a lot of money to be.  Technically they’re tax-exempt, but there’s an awful lot of pressure to give more and more cuts to the state and such.  There’s also the fun situation of being a major gambling player in a state that sends around $9 billion worth of business to Las Vegas every year.  They aren’t friendly competitors. 

The Great Basin

Not quite Mars, but the next best thing.

The place: The Great Basin is named for a fun little feature of its geography: not a single one of its waterways flows into the sea.  Instead, it’s pretty much evaporation or nothing.  Alas, the culture area of the Great Basin extends slightly outside the basin itself, which takes up a big chunk of the American West including most of Nevada, lots of Utah, and bits and pieces of Mexico, California, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon.  It’s not all hot sagebrush and steppe though – just nearly all.  The higher the land, the more precipitation and coolness it gets, and there’s some highland trees that make a decent living partway up the mountain ranges, to say nothing of the flora you’ll get along the waterways. 
The people: Our item today is the Western Shoshone, who were one of those peoples that weren’t let in on the whole “Hello, melanin-deprived individuals are taking over your stuff” thing until a bit of the way into the 1800s – around 1828-1829, to be precise, when the Ogden party came along the Humboldt River to do some trapping.  They said they were a bunch of poor, wretched jerks that had to eat roots or starve to death, then their livestock ate some of their edible foods and they left.  When the next bunch of trappers arrived, the Shoshone were somewhat annoyed, and told them to give them food and horses or else.  The trappers politely disagreed by killing some of them, and relations didn’t exactly go anywhere mellow from then on. 
To be fair, the Shoshone DID eat roots..and seeds, and hares, and rabbits, and antelope, and nuts, and just about anything else that was around, from migratory birds to bighorn sheep.  They were very flexible. 
How they’re/have been screwed: The Ogden party was really the best indicator of things to come the Western Shoshone could’ve recieved.  Miners and settlers passed through to California and Oregon, using up resouces along the way, and both they and the Shoshone had their hands full quietly murdering each other out of resentment.  Salt Lake City sprung up, and ranchers and farmers started taking up good food and water.  The 1862 Homestead Act sent more and more people after land, and a lot of it was Western Shoshone land.  Shoshone collecting silver at Battle Mountain for crafts were displaced without compensation in 1862 up until the early 2000s – during which time the miners at the silver deposits were piping in lots of local water, using vast amounts of charcoal, and heaving around heavy equipment.  A reserve at Ruby Valley was made, was crappy, and was abandoned, and the solution was apparently to build a fort (Fort Ruby, naturally) and systematically kill Shoshone to make them calm down a little.  The Treaty of Ruby Valley eventually gave the Western Shoshone some sort of half-assed right to their own land and some supplies every year that often were stolen or stolen and sold back to them, in exchange for agreeing not to molest any settlers, which they grudgingly abided by. 
On the bright side, smallpox wasn’t as nasty as it could’ve been.  Its 1860 arrival was blunted by the Western Shoshone living mostly in small, disparate groups, and a quick federal vaccination program.  

The Plateau

Yep, that's a plateau all right.

The place: The Plateau itself consists of the Interior Plateau of British Columbia – the continuation of said plateau into the states is the Columbia Plateau.  Plateau, plateau, plateau – yes, by now I believe it’s lost all meaning in my head. 
The Plateau is a diverse, higgledy-piggledy environment, with a continental climate and vegetation gradiating from forested Upper Columbia to mixed coniferous Fraser River grasslands and down to sagebrush steppe in Middle Columbia.  The main connecting features between its many peoples, tangled up as they are in its diverse environment, are as follows:

3 there corresponded nicely with Columbia and its river systems (the Fraser and the Columbia), so for the most part that worked out. 
The people: The plateau’s peoples, as said above, were nicely diverse.  In Upper Columbia you had the Northern Okanagan and the Ktunaxa/Kootenai; in the Fraser River area the Salishan, and Middle Columbia had the Sahaptians and some Salishan outliers.  Most of them weren’t living in enormous groups – a chieftain would lead a large village, or a few connected small ones.  Beyond the salmon, plant harvesting was a biggie – and the acquisition of them was half-gathering, half-horticulture – such as yellow avalanche lilies, which were harvested before having their bulbs and tips replanted, often in good soil where they wouldn’t be able to find their way naturally, or at least with any ease. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Well, the BC gold rushes of the 1850s-1860s didn’t exactly do ANYONE any good, but it was especially hard on the St’at’imx, Secwepemc, and  Okanagan.  The smallpox epidemic of ’62 wasn’t a helpful followup, and by the time the gold rushers finally left in the 1870s settlers had followed along.  By the 1880s the locals had been turfed out of most of the most fertile land. 
The Kootenai of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, as a small example, were encouraged to relocate from their prime, luscious valley bottom land to the Flathead Reservation of Montana.  Those who weren’t quite gullible enough to leave were grudginly allocated their land by 1887, which was divided into tiny little allotments that they were told to farm, ignoring the issue of it being too small for farming or their more traditional gathering practices.  By the time a few generations of inheritance had passed by, the allotments were tiny beyond belief and mostly leased to farmers in what were occasionally bills of sale. 

The Plains 

Back in MY day, we HAD to walk through the tall grass. And beat off the 'raptors with HALF a stick.

The place: The plains that are permanently known as “great,” these formerly-grassed stretches of absolute Flat occupy a nice core of North America, from Texas to Alberta.  You can also call them “prairies” because that is much more stylish and Canadian*.  Whatever.  They consist of lots and lots of rolling grasslands, or did, before we wandered in and replaced an awful lot of it with crops.  To do this we had to evict an awful lot of people. 
The people: A grossly abbreviated list of peoples that at one time or another have been on the prairies would include the Crow, Blackfoot, Bungi, Assiniboine, eventually the Plains Cree, the Comanche, and about seven zillion others, give or take a few.  Some roamed around the shortgrass plains (sometimes with dogs to haul stuff), some farmed along the eastern edges. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Well, there’s the obvious issue of loads of them rather enjoying bison, leading to the whole attempted extinction of them and such, but there’s a bit more.  Interestingly, part of the issue was horses.  The shortgrass nomads took to them like ducks to water, and it’s interesting to note that the word for horse in many plains languages means something along the lines of “big/great/better/AWESOMETASTIC dog.”  A horse was like a dog, but better in every conceivable way – it hauled more, could carry you, made travelling miles a breeze, and hunting bison was a chore no more.  The less nomadic villagers agreed, used it to hunt buffalo, and were promptly beaten to a pulp whenever they tried that shit by nomads, who weren’t tied down to stupidly vulnerable houses and crops and didn’t appreciate the competition. 
So, the nomads got nice toys at least?  Wrong.  The farther north you got, the more likely your horses wouldn’t make it through the winter.  The Blackfoot in particular got it hard – only the southernmost branch of them, the Piegans, got anything near parity, and they did it with help from living in the warm-wind’d chinook belt by the Eastern Rockies.  The Crow were similarly advantaged, living in a cold, northern area near the Rockies that nevertheless had the Windy River Basin and some woody riversides for overwintering.  Everyone else near them (like the Blackfoot and Gros Ventres) just had to deal with replacing horses constantly, and tended to take it out on them.  In general, horses were so valuable that raiding for them was common and war became common as hell – not only did those other dicks have horses YOU should have, but they were taking up grazing ground YOU should use!  Oh, and the Crow had to get guns to fight back, got guns with a free microbe bonus, died in droves, and then were nearly obliterated when the Lakotas moved into town.  Their existance from then on largely depending on clinging very closely to other people – Gros Ventres, Assiniboine, and Americans. 
Well, it was better for the southerly tribes…right?  Alas, no.  They could get loads of horses – the Comanche were veritable horse emperors for a time – but they competed fiercely for grazing ground with the very buffalo that, thanks to the horses, was being overhunted.  To throw another wrench into the bargain, the previously eglatarian societies had realized that everyone being equal worked only when everyone was poor, and now they had tons of horses.  Societal stratification went from zero to through the roof. 
Pretty much the only people that got pure mileage out of the horses was the Lakota Sioux, and that was because they had the lousy luck to live in an unusually chilly spot with a shitty growing season.  This kept their herds on the small side – not stunted, but small – and prevented any buffalo-based collateral damage.  At least until the US army stepped in, and well, past that I think we know what happened.

(*Canadians are always stylish) 

The Northeast

The gorgeous telephone poles of the New England autumn.

The place: Or the Eastern Woodlands, if you would be so kind.  Lakes, rivers, richly mixed coniferous AND deciduous forests, teaming with game, fruits, nuts, roots, and even wild rice.  Good growin’ foods include maize, beans, and squash.  Fish and all other manner of life aquatic were eminently devourable. 
The people: Two ultra-broad groups for the most part: Algonquian-speakers and Iroquoian-speakers.  The Iroquoian-speakers farmed a little more, and the Algonquian-speakers hunted, fished, and gathered a little more, although they both dabbled in one another’s specialities quite heavily.  Groups included the Mi’kmaq (who were highly maritime-based hunter/gatherers – much more productive than land-based gathering), Huron/Wendat (Iroquoian-speaking horticulturists), and the groups of the Iroquoian Confederacy – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, which formed the Six Nations (ditto).  Technically, the Huron/Wendat were a similar assemblage, and this kind of confederacy of tribes was sort of a thing in the area in general. 
How they’re/have been screwed: The entire Northeast coast was pretty much ground zero for most of North America’s colonialism, or at least some of the fiercest bickering over it.  The Iroquois played a game of balance-the-powers for a long time, between British, French, and American, and although they were damned careful at it, sooner or later there were always gaps in the warfare, and whenever the European powers weren’t beating each other up they were perfectly happy to start sniping at them.  The Huron allied themselves a little too closely to the French, and were sufficiently weakened by smallpox from their good missionary friends that in 1648-1649 winter attacks from the British-backed Iroquois absolutely destroyed all of Huronia as a nation and united people.  The Mi’kmaq also fell in with the French, were encouraged to strike out against the British, and in return recieved systematic genocide and some accidental bacterial fallout from their own allies (deja vu).  Peace agreements made at Halifax in the mid-1700s weren’t long-lasting or nearly enough, and the bounties on their heads thinned them down farther still.  Food and land pressure became unbearable post-1775.

The Northwest Coast

The Northwest Coast's primary artform consisted of beautifully hand-carved inadvertant stereotypes.

The place: The temperate rainforests of the Pacific coast stretch from the northish edge of California into south Alaska, and they’re filled to the brim with salmon spawning routes and more shoals, schools, and beaches of marine food than you could toss a net over and devour messily.  Add in the gratuitous quantities of red and yellow cedar prime for the chopping and shaping into, well, practically ANTHING, and you’ve got yourself a pretty serious spot to settle down and make some excellence.  Which many people did. 
The people: The first Northwest Coasters were probably among the very first people to wander into North America.  The easiest route past the glaciers that were busy throttling most of Canada (uncovering the Canadian shield from underneath all that troublesome soil in the process) was the coast, which was relatively ice-free.  The common languages of the area show some signs of age too.  The Haida, the Tlingit, the Tsimshian… all of them shared a lot in common, most notably a desire to get their hands on as much salmon as humanly possible.  Salmon was THE food, salmon oil THE condiment and preservative, and getting ahold of as much as possible every run was SERIOUS BUSINESS.  No matter how much salmon might flow, there was something like a 1,000% peak variation in salmon frequency over the four-year cycle they followed, and you can’t really risk under-fishing when you’re all clumped together using up tons of food and the winters are harsh.  Plus, if you lived in the interior, you were getting oil-poor salmon that had tuckered themselves out getting all the way inland, so you had an extra handicap. 
The Northwest Coast societies had quite a lot, and like all societies where people have a lot, some people ended up with QUITE a lot and others merely a lot.  Ranking was based on household positioning, clan segment, and clan, aided by personal merit.  There weren’t exactly classes, just lots and lots of ranks (bar slaves, but, as is the case with slaves, no one especially cared about that). 
How they’re/have been screwed: Once salmons canneries opened up on the coast (and my goodness, there were a LOT of them opening up on the coast), someone noticed that there were these uppity savages out there taking all the salmon by gumdrops and gumption we can’t have that.  Throw in abrupt efforts at controlling fisheries, reservations out of nowhere, gold mining pouring from every orifice, and in the US’s case a serious overdose of rapid “MANIFEST DESTIIIIIIIIINYYYY!” and you’ve got nothing but acres and acres of troublesomeness. 

The Southeast

There is no way to say anything about the South that is both funny and nonoffensive.

The place: The Southeast is pretty much where you’d think it’d be, and the environment likewise.  Some hunting, some fishing, some farming beans, squash, and gourds. 
The people: The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek Confederacy, and Chickasaw are jointly referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes.”   The Cherokee, who covered the most land, certainly met any standards being thrown at them – they reacted to the strange things being thrown at them (“Wait, you think every one of our villages is responsible for what the others do?  OKAY GUYS, TIME TO CENTRALIZE GOVERNMENT!”) with flexible adaptation.  They already had political parties (the reds and whites – the former expected to be war-happy young idiots, the later older and mellower) of sorts, and they organized a sort of centralized priest-state during the 1700s.  Along the way they ran into slavery, decided it bore some similarity to the way they treated war captives, and adopted it, carefully learning from escaped Cherokee slaves the best methods to squeeze the most labour out of theirs – the men became skilled slave catchers.   In 1827 they founded the Cherokee Nation, with a government modelled after that of the US.  A man named Sequoya/George Gist had invented an entire syllabary a few years earlier in 1821, and it was adopted as the nation’s written language – within no time at all, almost everyone was literte. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Unfortunately, the Cherokee still lacked the most important facet of civilization, which was being white people, and so in 1829 most of the Cherokee Nation was made into state holdings by Georgia.  In 1838 soldiers shoved whatever leftover Cherokee they could find in stockades and shipped them out to Oklahoma, or “Indian Territory.”  4,000 out of 15,000 died in the Trail of Tears.  The Qualla Indian Boundary, land purchased for them in North Carolina by allies (they couldn’t buy it themselves; I’ll let you guess why), was pretty much their last eastern holdout. 

The Southwest

If you want a more classic picture, go watch a Roadrunner cartoon or something.

The place: The Southwest is made up of bits of Utah, California, Colorado, and Texas, along with almost all of New Mexico and Arizona.  As you might guess, it’s a little hot.  And dry.  And rocky. 
The people: Groups include the Navajo/Navaho and the Pueblo peoples, which themselves include the Eastern Pueblos (Isleta, Zia, and Taos among them) and the Western Pueblos (including the Acoma, Hopi, and the Zuni). 
The Hopi didn’t move around much; their villages were small, but very stable.  To the point of insanity – Oraibi/Old Oraibi, their central village, has been settled for something like over a thousand years continuously, which makes it among the record-holders if not the record-holder of North America.  They farmed all sorts of plants (various beans, gourds, and sunflowers, maize, squash, and others), looked after wild species, and really liked the hell out of maize, because it was either that or eat about one third as much as everyone else. 
The Navaho, by contrast, only appeared as a distinct people until somewhere around 1725.  They’re numerous, highly well-known in general, and resilient – which, given where they chose to take up subsistence, seems a necessary qualification.  They’re well known for their blankets and silverworking, the former of which they help along by owning lots and lots of sheep,
How they’re/have been screwed: The Navaho EARNED that label of “resilient.”  They were pestered by slavers for ages, and when the US got ahold of New Mexico it also inherited a lot of angry Navaho, which it utterly failed to placate.  Fort-building followed, and around 1863 they gathered up 9,000 or so Navaho and herded them 300 miles to Bosque Redondo, a distant fort.  Approximately 2,000 died on the Long Walk itself or at the fort, and an equal number evaded capture – quite a few of which were nabbed by slavers.  Then the livestock reduction policies of the 1940s cut down harshly on their sheep herds to prevent erosion, jobs went flying everywhere, the herding economy went belly-up, and in general things sucked. 
The Hopi had fun under the thumb of the Spanish from about 1540 to 1680, when they joined in the Pueblo Revolt and then ran for it.  After that they lay low, about eight hundred at their lowest ebb near 1755, many surviving only by living with the Zuni.  Navaho land disputes, erosion, and lots of smallpox followed the removal of the Spanish and the arrival of the Anglos in the mid-1800s.  Oh, and from 1964 onwards strip mining on Hopi and Navaho land for coal has been in the sort of swing best described as “full.”

Picture Credits

• Sitting Bull: Public domain image from Wikipedia, 1885, D. F. Barry. 
• Bears on a sub: Public domain image from Wikipedia, taken by US Navy Chief Yeoman Alphonso Braggs, October 2003. 
• Tundra: Public domain image from Wikipedia, Kongsfjorden from Blomstrandhalvøya, Kongsfjorden, Spitsbergen (Svalbard), August 18th 2005, Sphinx.
• Razorback Mountain: Image from Wikipedia, Black Rock Desert, August 6th, 2005, Ikluft.
• San Jacinto Mountains: Image from Wikipedia, July 25 2009, Florian Boyd from Palm Springs, USA.
• Interior Plateau: Public domain image from Wikipedia, July 31st 2006, Skookum1.
• Plains: Public domain image from Wikipedia, 1897, US geological survey, Haskell County, Kansas. 
• New Hampshire Woods: Image from Wikipedia, October 17th 2009, Werner Kunz, Grafton County, New Hampshire. 
• Tlingit Totem Pole: Public domain image from Wikipedia, prior to Jan 1st 1923, Alaska. 
• South Carolina: Image from Wikipedia, March 21st 2007, Lake Moultre, VashiDonsk. 
• Arizona: Public domain image from Wikipedia, 2005, Doug Dolde, Mongollon Rim above Payson, Arizona.