
1. Cíclopes y elefantes
2. Dinosaurios y dragones
3. Sirenas y manatíes
4. Unicornios y narvales
5. Protoceratops y grifos
6. Monstruos marinos
Más info y fuentes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Escrito por Aberrón a las 9:05 | 48 comentarios »
For thousands of years, humans everywhere have brought mythic creatures to life in stories, songs and works of art. The exhibition “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids”, at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, try to show us how tales of Griffins, Giants and Cyclopes arose from interpretation of the fossil evidence by the ancients. These are some of the most fascinating facts:
1. Cyclops and elephantsIn 1924, while travelling through Mediterranean islands, Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel unearthed several dwarf elephant skulls and concluded that ancient Greeks may have interpreted the large trunk opening in the fossils as the massive, single eye-socket of one eyed human-like creatures: cyclops. Many ancient Greeks thought the same thing: when they found bones like these from other kinds of mammoths, they often interpreted them as the bones of giants.
2. Dinosaurs and dragonsAncient peoples all over the world have told of unusual, reptile-like creatures that once roamed the earth. Many called them "dragons" and most of the descriptions sound similar to dinosaurs. In 1335 the cranium of a wooly rhinoceros from the ice-age was found in a gravel pit near Klagenfurt, Austria. It was instantly interpreted as the skull of a dragon.
3. Sirens and manateesManatees and sea cows were frequently mistaken for mermaids by early explorers. Sailing near the Dominican Republic in 1493, Christopher Columbus described in his log some "female forms" that "rose high out of the sea, but were not as beautiful as they are represented."
4. Unicorns and narwhalsIn the Middle Ages, Danish sailors and other merchants from the North brought narwhal tusks to European markets, where buyers considered them to be valuable, magical remains of elusive unicorns. From then on, nearly all descriptions of unicorn horns are consistent: they are long, white and spiraled, just like a Narwhal tooth.
5. Protoceratops and griffonsScythian nomads who prospected for gold in the Gobi Desert told the first stories about griffons — a lion-sized, four-legged, winged animal with a "cruel sharp beak" — that ferociously guarded its hoard of gold. Twentieth-century excavations in the Gobi have unearthed Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus skeletons, both beaked dinosaurs, from the same regions where the nomads prospected. It's quite possible that gold seekers made astute observations about their skeletal structures and speculated on the appearance of the live animal.
6. Sea monstersFolklore and early travelers' tales featured mermaids aplenty, and the old maps of the known world, were always fringed with sea monsters that many believed inhabited the surrounding waters. One of the most horrible creatures was de Kraken, which might have evolved from sightings of enormous squids, one of which was recently found in New Zealand, with single arms over 19 feet long.
More info and sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Escrito por Aberrón a las 8:59 | 3 comentarios »
Escrito por Aberrón a las 9:17 | 43 comentarios »
On February 20, 1943, a volcano suddenly rose from the ground at the Mexican state of Michoacan, and buried two villages in lava and ashes. Today, 64 years after the eruption, the only trace of the villages is the church tower of San Juan Parangaricutiro, a little building which stood above a sea of rugged lava.
The church of San Juan is now a ghostly and abandoned ruin in the middle of nowhere. During the eruption, the lava flowed around and into the church, and covered 3/4 of the town. Just beneath the church, the old houses and buildings keep buried under the rocks.
The man who saw a volcano born That day, on February 20, a mexican farmer, named Dionisio Pulido was working in his cornfield when the ground nearby opened in a fissure about 150 feet long. "I then felt a thunder," he recalled later, "the trees trembled, and is was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised it self 2 or 21/2 meters high".
Virtually under the farmer's feet, a volcano was being born. By the next morning, when he returned, the cone had grown to a height of 30 feet and was "hurling out rocks with great violence." During the day, the come grew another 120 feet. That night, incandescent bombs blew more than 1,000 feet up into the darkness, and a slaglike mass of lava rolled over Pulido's cornfields.Fortunately, no one died from the Parícutin volcano as all residents were evacuated before the villages were covered in lava. At the end of this phase, the volcano had grown 336 metres tall. For the next eight years the volcano would continue erupting, although this was dominated by relatively quiet eruptions of lava that would scorch the surrounding 25 km² of land.
Nowadays, the church buried by lava has become a tourist atraction and an important source for the economy of the region. Paricutin volcano is also included in many versions of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World lists.
* Thank you Muxfin!
More info and sources: 1, 2, 3, 4 y 5 / See more Abandoned places
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Located in northern China, the Siberian Tiger Park is the largest natural park for wild Siberian tigers in the world, and one of the most horrible places all over the planet. Thousands of tourists come everyday to this park, most of them interested in the bloody spectacle of tigers savaging live goats and cows. Because, for entertainment, visitors to the animal park can watch the 'live killing exhibition', a sick spectacle in which animals are 'hunted' and torn to pieces by tigers while onlookers cheer.
And that's not the worst part: visitors can also buy poultry or animals to feed the tigers themselves, including ducks, chickens, and even cows. Then, park employees will set the living animal free among the tigers, and visitors can see the "unique live action of tigers preying upon it".
In China the transformation of this jungle predator into a caged farm animal is becoming a dramatic fact. There are almost 200 farms of this kind in all the country, where an estimated 4,000 captive tigers are daily bred in order to sell its body parts. Consumers pay high prices for remedies, tonics and aphrodisiacs, as China has been using tigers for medicinal purposes for 5,000 years. The Chinese believe that the tiger's strength passes into the wine as its body decomposes. They also believe that it is a powerful medicine that wards off arthritis, strengthens bones and acts as a general tonic.
Although China committed to the ban on trading in tiger parts in 1993, now - under pressure from the owners of farms - it reportedly wants the prohibition amended to allow the sale of parts from farmed tigers. Conservationists say tiger farming is not only barbaric, it could lead to the animal's extinction in the wild. If present trends continue, tigers could be extinct in the wild within a decade. Three subspecies have already vanished. Chinese tigers are down to a pitiful 20 animals in the wild and are "functionally extinct".
More info and sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Escrito por Aberrón a las 22:36 | 3 comentarios »
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