Podcasts about triassic jurassic

(image source: http://bit.ly/3ZuaOcH) Host Matthew Donald and guest co-host Christina Eilert discuss Dracoraptor, the very first Jurassic dinosaur known and a survivor of the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction, the one everyone seems to forget for some reason. It was a multiple impact event, people! Probably. From the Early Jurassic, this 3-foot coelophysid didn't really have much going for it, and probably is some offshoot of Coelophysis that made it past the extinction. This is more of an excuse to talk about that extinction, honestly. It needs more love! Again, multiple impact event! Again though, probably. But maybe not. Want to further support the show? Sign up to our Patreon for exclusive bonus content at Patreon.com/MatthewDonald. Also, you can purchase Matthew Donald's dinosaur book "Megazoic" on Amazon by clicking here, its sequel "Megazoic: The Primeval Power" by clicking here, its third installment "Megazoic: The Hunted Ones" by clicking here, or its final installment "Megazoic: An Era's End" by clicking here, as well as his non-dinosaur-related book "Teslanauts" by clicking here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(image source: https://bit.ly/34JG3sD)   Host Matthew Donald and guest co-host Natasha Krech discuss Postosuchus, the top predator of its habitat that loved to munch on early dinosaurs before its morning coffee. From the Late Triassic, this 20-foot rauisuchian was one of those crocodylomorph archosaurs that ruled before the dinosaurian archosaurs took over after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction. Boy, this must be all Greek to non-dino fans, huh? And dino fans too, since “morph” and “archo” are actual Greek terms.   Want to further support the show? Sign up to our Patreon for exclusive bonus content at Patreon.com/MatthewDonald. Also, you can purchase Matthew Donald's dinosaur book "Megazoic" on Amazon by clicking here, its sequel "Megazoic: The Primeval Power" by clicking here, its third installment "Megazoic: The Hunted Ones" by clicking here, or its final installment "Megazoic: An Era's End" by clicking here. 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Pangea: The Worst of Times, published by John G. Halstead on the AI Alignment Forum. 260 million years ago, our planet had an unfamiliar geography. Nearly all of the landmasses were united into a single giant continent known as ‘Pangea' that stretched from pole to pole. On the other side of the world you would find a vast ocean, even larger than the present Pacific, called Panthalassa. The Pangean era lasted 160 million years, and 80 million of these were extremely inhospitable to animal and plant life, coinciding with two mass extinctions and four other major extinction events. This is why Paul Wignall, a Professor of Palaeoenvironments at Leeds has called the Pangean era ‘The Worst of Times'. Understanding why the Pangean era was so miserable helps inform several questions of interest to those studying existential risk. ● What level of natural existential risk do we face now, and have we faced in the past? ● What is the threat of super-volcanic eruptions? ● How much existential risk does anthropogenic climate change pose? 1. Background There have been five mass extinctions so far. The Ordovician–Silurian (450-440 million years ago) and the Late Devonian (375-360 million years ago) each preceded the age of Pangea. The Pangean period coincided with the two worst mass extinctions, the huge Permian-Triassic mass extinction (252 million years ago) and the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event (201 million years ago).[1] The last crisis, the Cretaceous–Paleogene event (65 million years ago), accounted for the dinosaurs and occurred once continental drift had done its business and Pangea had broken apart. With the exception of the end Cretaceous extinction, since the breakup of Pangea, it has been relatively plain sailing for Earth's various species, until humans started killing off other species themselves. [2] As one can see on this diagram, in the 145 million years since the start of the Cretaceous, the average rate of global genus extinctions from extinction events has been around 5% and never passed 15%, except for the death of the dinosaurs. But in the 80 million years from the first Pangean extinction event, the Capitanian, to the early Jurassic extinction events, the average rate of global genus extinctions in extinction events is more around 15-20%, and 12 events produced global genus extinction rates in excess of 15%. Below is a useful chart from Wikipedia on the Phanerozoic, which shows the long-term trend in biodiversity as well as the impact of different extinction events. Again, this highlights how unusually bad things were in the Pangean era - specifically the 80 million years after the Capitanian extinction event 260 million years ago. But it also highlights how good things have been since the end of the Pangean era and the start of the Cretaceous (145 million years ago). 2. What caused such ecological trauma in Pangea? Huge volcanic eruptions were implicated in all of the six major extinction events in the Pangean era. One can see this in the first diagram above, where the volcanic eruptions are shown at the top and the line traces down to corresponding extinction events at the bottom. Every Pangean extinction event coincided with the outpouring of enormous fields of lava that, once cooled, produced what geologists call Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs).[3] To put these LIPs in context, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 produced 10 cubic km of magma, which caused the Earth to cool by about half a degree. The eruption of the Siberian Traps which appeared to cause the end Permian extinction produced 3 million cubic km of magma. You can see the volume of magma for all major LIPs at the top of the first diagram above. These volcanic eruptions emitted sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and halogen gases, each of which could potentially have an effect on the ecosys...

Photo: Classic New York City brownstone apartment building in the Boro Park (often spelled Borough Park) neighborhood in New York City's Brooklyn borough. Brownstone, a brown Triassic-Jurassic sandstone, was an immensely popular building material in cities across Americain the second half of the 19th Century . CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow Eric Adams from Brooklyn and Queens to City Hall 2022. @HarrySiegel @NYDaily News. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/nyregion/eric-adams-mayor-nyc.html

Casey and Karen take this weeks episode in completely different directions. Karen takes us to a Petrified Forest State Park and shows us why Casey is cursed. Casey covers the land and lore of New Jersey's Pine Barrens. You guessed it, The Jersey Devil. Artwork: Jovana StekovicLogo:  nydaaaMusic: Home Base Groove by Kevin MacLeod   Karen's Sources:https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/petrified-forest-national-park-ga2.htmhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ask-smithsonian-what-is-dinosaur-180967448/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelophysis#Descriptionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chindesaurushttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassic–Jurassic_extinction_eventhttp://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/kataigidodon-venetus-09022.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynodonthttps://www.nps.gov/pefo/learn/news/new-fossils-discovered-at-petrified-forest-national-park.htmhttps://www.havasunews.com/free_access/strange-ancient-animal-species-discovered-in-fossils-at-arizonas-petrified-forest/article_6e6632a4-1f39-11eb-b9f2-cf47ad4f87b9.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucariaceaehttps://kjzz.org/content/270722/new-species-extinct-reptile-found-arizona's-petrified-foresthttps://www.visitarizona.com/places/parks-monuments/the-painted-desert/https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/curse-of-the-petrified-forest/https://www.legendsofamerica.com/az-petrifiedcurse/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/slide-show-bad-luck-petrified-foresthttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-dinosaurs-roamed-petrified-forest-180958510/#:~:text=In%20Petrified%20Forest%20there%20are,evolved%20into%20enormous%20Jurassic%20beastsCasey's Sources: https://hiddensandiego.net/things-to-do/places/elfin-foresthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Barrens_(New_Jersey)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_coastal_pine_barrenshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_coniferous_foresthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_and_tales_of_the_New_Jersey_Pine_Barrenshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Devilhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-osyEryBrUhttps://pinelandsalliance.org/learn-about-the-pinelands/ecosystem/wildlife/mammal-portraits/https://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/02/12/pine-barrens-new-jersey/ Home Base Groove by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Source:  http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100563 Artist:  http://incompetech.com/ 

FRoM YeR BloOD.... Join us as we Dive into Dino Data and talk about the GREATEST and most scientifically accurate movie ever... Jurassic Park!!! We also give popular dinosaurs new "doggo meme" names. And can you find the pert we were supposed to edit out? Have feedback, comments, concerns? Please email us at muchadoaboutnerding2020@gmail.com or slide into our DMs on Instagram much_ado_about_nerding_podcast Message on Twitter Much Ado About Nerding (@AdoNerding) Comment on a previous episode or give us ideas for future episodes, we look forward to hearing from you. Episodes are written produced and edited by Joe and Selena Otero (with a ton of help from our friends) theme song was created by Selena. Thanks for listening and until next time be rad and NERDY ON! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/selena-otero/message

The gang discusses two papers that look at the extinction and survivorship patterns of clades across the Triassic mass extinction event. Specifically, they look at changes in morphospace in ray-finned fishes as well as phylogenetic patterns of extinction in early archosaurs. Interestingly enough, both studies suggest very low ecological selection (at least in the characteristics we can study in the fossil record), but the archosaur study shows clear phylogenetic clustering of extinction. Meanwhile, James works on his social media engagement, Amanda perfects the concept of a joke, and Curt discovers this podcast’s theme far too late.   Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): The friends talk about two papers which look at a time that was really bad when nearly anything died. But this time is slightly different from the other, more well known ones. Its not the biggest, and its not the one everyone thinks of. Instead, this bad time when everything dies happens just a little after the worst of the bad times where everything dies, and may have been important for the angry animals with no hair and large teeth. The friends talk about how two different types of animals that were changed by this really bad time. The first are things living in the water who can move through the water and have a flipper where their legs and arms should be. This first paper looks at how the form of these flipper animals changed before and after the bad time. What they found was that the form of these flipper animals didn't get changed by the both the really bad time, and the bad time very few people think about. They think this might mean that the bad time focused on hurting flipper animals that liked it to be warm or cold wet or dry. It also could be that these animals had a single job in their home. This is because form often changes when animals take on new jobs or move to a new home with different things the animals have to deal with. This might mean that these flipper animals just were not changed in any way but these big bad times of death. But the other paper looks at animals on land who are aunt and uncle to the big angry animals with no hair and large teeth. This paper did not look at the form of these aunts and uncles, but it did look at the sons and daughters and brothers and sisters that these animals had. It also looked at how these aunts and uncles of big angry animals lived; what was their job and how did they like it (warm, cold, wet, dry)? What the paper found was the bad time of death did not kill these aunts and uncles of big angry animals because of their jobs or how they liked to live. So this seems pretty much the same as the paper about the flipper animals. However, the paper also found that if a close brother or sister died during the bad time, their closest brothers and sisters were also going to die. This makes things hard to understand, because close brothers and sisters usually live in places that are almost or very much the same and/or have jobs that are almost or very much the same. The bad time seems to be killing close families, but not because of how they like to live or their job. This could mean that we are missing important things about how this animals liked to live which we just aren't looking for, or maybe we can't look for. It also makes us wonder if more animals might show something very much the same to these flipper animals and these aunts and uncles of big angry animals.   References: Smithwick, Fiann M., and Thomas L. Stubbs. "Phanerozoic survivors: Actinopterygian evolution through the Permo‐Triassic and Triassic‐Jurassic mass extinction events." Evolution 72.2 (2018): 348-362.   Allen, Bethany J., et al. "Archosauromorph extinction selectivity during the Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction." Palaeontology 62.2 (2019): 211-224. 

The Triassic–Jurassic extinction event marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, 201.3 million years ago, and is one of the major extinction events of the Phanerozoic eon, profoundly affecting life on land and in the oceans. In the seas, a whole class (conodonts) and 34% of marine genera disappeared. On land, all archosaurs other than crocodylomorphs (Sphenosuchia and Crocodyliformes) and Avemetatarsalia (pterosaurs and dinosaurs), some remaining therapsids, and many of the large amphibians became extinct.

The Triassic–Jurassic extinction event marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, 201.3 million years ago, and is one of the major extinction events of the Phanerozoic eon, profoundly affecting life on land and in the oceans. In the seas, a whole class (conodonts) and 34% of marine genera disappeared. On land, all archosaurs other than crocodylomorphs (Sphenosuchia and Crocodyliformes) and Avemetatarsalia (pterosaurs and dinosaurs), some remaining therapsids, and many of the large amphibians became extinct.

The gang discuss a recent paper which suggests that pollinating butterflies and moths may have evolved well before the evolution of flowering plants (angiosperms). Curt seizes this opportunity to force them all to read about exaptation. Meanwhile, James has some unique ideas about automotive safety and Amanda demonstrates her amazing Google skills in the face of uncertainty.    Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):   Today our friends talk about a thing that is very important. Many people have an idea that a thing came about because it had a use. But it might be, sometimes, that a thing came about because it was together with a thing that had a use. Or maybe it even came about because it just did. Maybe not everything has to come about because it has a use. One of the things our friends read comes up with a name for this idea. And it talks about things that mean maybe that idea is right. And it also talks a lot about words and one of our friends thinks that that part is not fun. The other thing our friends read is about little things that fly and are colored pretty. These little pretty-colored things that fly are thought to have come about along with green things that smell good. But it seems that maybe these pretty-colored things that fly come about a lot earlier than the green things that smell good. This is just like that idea where a thing has come about even though it had no use for it yet.   References: Gould, Stephen Jay, and Elisabeth S. Vrba. "Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form." Paleobiology 8.1 (1982): 4-15.   van Eldijk, Timo JB, et al. "A Triassic-Jurassic window into the evolution of Lepidoptera." Science advances 4.1 (2018): e1701568. 

Interview with Dr. Victoria Arbour a NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum/University of Toronto, Canada and an ankylosaur expert. We discuss her latest (and greatest) ankylosaur discovery—Zuul. You can follow her on twitter @VictoriaArbour In the news: A sauropod was discovered near Winton, Australia with possible gut contents; Sensory organs on spinosaurid snouts may not be definitive evidence of aquatic behavior; Nearly 200 new dinosaur prints including a possible running ornithischian found in Morrocco; Volcanoes at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary; More prints, events, exhibits, books, and more Dinosaur of the day Olorotitan, the "Russian swan" of hadrosaurs If you would like your opinion heard, please fill out our listener survey and help us cater the show to you! http://bit.ly/IKD2017 Check out http://iknowdino.com/olorotitan-episode-137 for links to every news story, all the details we shared about Olorotitan, a transcript of our interview with Victoria, and our fun fact. Visit http://www.IKnowDino.com for more information including a map of dinosaur museums near you, and let us know if your favorite is missing! You can also visit https://www.patreon.com/iknowdino to get the inside scoop on I Know Dino.

Curiosity Fruit Machine by S. Qiouyi Lu "What is it?" Alliq says. Jalzy runs eir hands over the object. It's a box of some sort, made from metal with organic paneling; a narrow lever sticks out from one side. Ey finds emself reaching out to the lever, eir fingers grasping the pockmarked knob at the end as if working from unearthed muscle memory. "I have no clue," Jalzy says. "But... I kinda wanna pull this and see what happens."   CURIOSITY FRUIT MACHINE and THE SLOW ONES are both GlitterShip Originals. [Full transcript after the cut]  ----more---- Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 33 for February 14, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing these stories with you. We have two stories this week, "Curiosity Fruit Machine" by S. Qiouyi Lu and "The Slow Ones" by JY Yang. Even better, S. narrated both stories for us! S. Qiouyi Lu is a writer, artist, narrator, and translator; their stories have appeared in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction, and their poetry has appeared in Liminality and Uncanny. They are a 2016 graduate of the Clarion West writers workshop and a dread member of the Queer Asian SFFH Illuminati. Find them online at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter at @sqiouyilu. JY Yang is a queer, non-binary writer and editor who has short fiction published or forthcoming in places like Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. Their debut novellas, THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE and THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN, will be out from Tor.com Publishing in Fall 2017. They live in Singapore, edit fiction at Epigram Books, and swan about Twitter as @halleluyang.     Curiosity Fruit Machine by S. Qiouyi Lu   "What is it?" Alliq says. Jalzy runs eir hands over the object. It's a box of some sort, made from metal with organic paneling; a narrow lever sticks out from one side. Ey finds emself reaching out to the lever, eir fingers grasping the pockmarked knob at the end as if working from unearthed muscle memory. "I have no clue," Jalzy says. "But... I kinda wanna pull this and see what happens." Alliq frowns. "Don't. For all we know, that thing could be some sort of weapon. We should probably wait for the others to catch up so we can get the engineering team to take a proper look." Alliq's voice fades into a mumble. Jalzy presses eir nose to the glass front of the object and brushes a tight curl of hair out of eir face. Ey can just barely make out some lettering—PAY. Eir grasp of 21st-century English is weak, but this seems to be a money machine of some sort. Surely, ey thinks, bringing eir arm down, a money machine can't hurt em... "Don't—!" The object whirs to life, three wheels inside the glass case spinning; a few of the bulbs lining the edge buzz and spark. Jalzy jumps back. Oh crap. Ccccccclackkkclackkclackkk—didn't old-timey explosives make that sound? Or were explosives more of a tick-tock sound? One of the wheels clicks as it stops—Jalzy grabs Alliq by the wrist, drags xem to a safe spot behind a wall of heavy crates—then another click—they brace themselves—and—click! Alliq flinches. Jalzy waits a moment—a dud, perhaps?—before peeking past the edge of the crates. The object's face shows one symbol, then two of the same symbol. The first is an oblong, yellow shape, and the next two are round, red orbs connected by an inverted green V. "I think we're safe," Jalzy whispers. Alliq comes up from xyr braced position. "Goddammit, don't do this to me," Alliq hisses. Xe's sweating a little, xyr forehead shining, and Jalzy has to suppress a giggle. "Hey, we're fine, right?" Ey steps out from behind the crates and goes back to the object. Ey crouches down. There's a metal trough underneath the symbols, but it's empty. Do they need to put something in there? "Jalzy," Alliq says from over eir shoulder, "those are—those are pictures of fruit." "What's a fruit?" "Seriously?" Alliq says, voice laden with exasperation. When Jalzy gives xem a blank stare, Alliq points at the oblong symbol and says, "Look, the first one is a lemon. Those two on the right, those are cherries." Jalzy squints. "I thought 'cherry' and 'lemon' were just colors. You know, like how we also have orange nutriblocks in our sustenance packs." Alliq snorts. "You know there used to be a fruit called 'orange', right? It wasn't just a color. Those are actually flavors. They came from these." Jalzy straightens up and paces around the object. "So what is this, a fruit-making machine?" "Did you never take terrabiology?" Alliq says. "History of Earth? Anything?" "Look, I took astrophysics so I wouldn't have to deal with so much reading, okay," Jalzy says, flipping eir crown of curls over eir shoulder. "So just educate me already, O All-Knowing Alliq." Alliq crosses xyr arms over xyr chest in a huff. "Fruit comes from seeds, not machines. I mean, we perfected the science to duplicate the flavors all the way back in the 21st century, but we never really got down how to duplicate the organic material. So the best we've got now is our nutriblocks." Xe unfolds xyr arms and circles around the object. "This—this is something else entirely. I don't think it actually has anything to do with food." "So, if it doesn't seem to be a weapon, and it doesn't produce anything... wanna pull the lever again and see what happens?" Jalzy grins slyly at Alliq, who raises xyr hands in surrender. "I'm going to check out the other room. If I were you, I'd just keep doing inventory until engineering gets here and can confirm what kind of object that is." Jalzy sticks out eir tongue. "Good thing you're not me," ey says. And ey pulls the lever again.   END       The Slow Ones by JY Yang   "The grass is dying." Kira looked up from squeezing a sachet of turkey-flavored sludge into the cat's bowl. Thom was standing by the living room window in his bathrobe still, holding a chipped mug of coffee and gazing out. "What?" she asked. "The grass. In the garden. It's gone all brown." She dumped the sachet in the trash and almost rinsed her sticky fingers under the kitchen faucet. But she remembered in time, and instead wiped them on the dishtowel she'd hung up. She hurried into the living room. "There," Thom said, "see?" In the small rectangle of dirt they called a garden the sparse tufts of grass had shriveled and turned colorless like the hair on an old man's head. A flap of crisp packet gleamed in the far corner, silver-underside-up, chicken bones scattered around it. The neighborhood kids. Kira wondered how long they had been there. Maybe forever. Everything seemed stuck in stasis these days. The grass had been in decline for a long time, months before the invasion began. Once upon a time Kira had plans for that patch. She had imagined cultivating flowers: Tulips, daffodils, rosebushes. Climbing ivies for the trellis. Maybe even one of those outdoor water features. But there hadn't been any time, had there? "Hasn't rained in weeks," Thom said. "Might never rain again." Kira exhaled and stormed back to the kitchen. The clock said five to three and she wished it didn't. She took a box of porkloin out of the freezer and popped it into the fridge. "Might as well dig it all up," Thom said from the living room. "Yeah, why don't you do it?" she said, louder than she'd intended. The cat had cleaned out her bowl and now stood staring at Kira, tail stiff in expectation. Kira snatched the water dish off the floor, then gingerly ran a centimeter of water into it. "Don't waste it," she told the cat as she sat it down again. In the living room Thom had settled into the armchair, knees apart, eyes blank. "What would be the point?" "What?" He turned to look at her, framed in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, and shrugged. "There's no point." "Whatever," she said, and went to put her boots on. The cat had followed her out of the kitchen. "Come here, girl," she heard Thom say, his voice soft and charming, like it always used to be. Kira shoved her feet into the narrow confines of her boots. "I've left pork chops in the fridge to defrost," she said. "If you have time, you could make dinner." She knew he wouldn't. The cat settled on the windowsill to watch her as she stepped outside and locked the front door. Kira pulled her coat around herself, and then, because she had to, like pulling a plaster off, to get it over with; because she couldn't just ignore it, she looked up at the sky. From horizon to horizon, the sky above their street was filled with aliens. A thick layer of massive silver bodies, like cumulus rolls made of mercury, slid by over the tops of the streetlamps, the roofs, the twisted fingers of bare trees. Sunlight sometimes leaked through their bulk, but not often; the world had been in a state of weak thunderstorm dusk for weeks. The president of the United States had called them the Slow Ones, and the name stuck. Their enormous smooth bodies slipped against one another in a never-ending parade. There were scales and faint markings on each one whose purpose was impossible to discern. Concentric discs in alternating light and dark colors, larger across than a commercial jetliner, were assumed by observers to be eyes. But the gaping maw in front of each one, leading into unfathomable darkness: That one everyone could agree on. It was a mouth. A permanently open mouth. They were sucking up all the water vapor in the atmosphere. That was what the scientists on the proper news channels—BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera—were all saying. But even the so-called experts knew so little about what was going on that people were no worse off reading crackpot theories on the Internet. Those had sprung up like mushrooms in the wake of rain, or perhaps, in the absence of it. They offered up all kinds of explanations as to what was happening: Act of God, benign migration, hostile invasion, collective hallucination. The first few days after the Slow Ones arrived, pouring into the sky above Alaska like reflective pancake batter until they blanketed the Earth, Thom had spent hours scrolling through theory after theory after theory, the most promising of which he served up to Kira over dinner, or texted to her while he was at work. That was when he still had work. The Slow Ones were aliens. This was something almost everyone—the scientist, the conspiracy theorist, the person on the street—agreed on. They were not of this world. The prevailing theory was that these were migratory creatures and they would leave for unknown pastures in good time. And then sunlight and blue skies and rain would return to the world. Wind and weather and water evaporation, all those good things. It was unlikely a theory as anything, but it allowed people to hold on to hope. Kira put her hood up and hurried down the street. If she walked fast enough, she might catch the three-fifteen bus to the city center. She missed the bus. When Kira finally arrived at the city center, the air under the Slow Ones was still. Not a wing stirred in it, not a guttural call rang out. Gulls were a year-round phenomenon in Norwich, sailing from spire to spire and filling public spaces with their noises regardless of the season. But their numbers in the market square had been dwindling since the Slow Ones arrived, and today was the day, it seemed, they passed the point of no return. Kira noted this with an odd trill in her belly. She, like everyone else, had grown numb to the clipped tones of a Dr. Somebody explaining to a presenter, in clinical terms, how the disruption to the Earth's water cycle was killing all the fish in the ocean. But it was another thing entirely to watch all the seabirds vanish before her eyes, relegated to an unknown fate. She hurried through the semi-sparse mid-afternoon crowd. When Thom's agency had moved him here a few years ago, she had been struck by how many retirees she saw on the streets. It felt like a different kind of fabric had been sewn in place compared to London which she had just gotten used to, and Kuala Lumpur where she had grown up. It was a good move for them, Thom being promoted to Norfolk branch manager, but Kira had wondered about all the people here, aging in place. It put in her mind an image of people sinking to the bottom of a lake, like sediment. Of course, at that time tourism was still a booming industry, and Thom had glowing images in his sights, futures full of holiday cottages and ski trips to the Alps. Neither of them knew what lay on the horizon: the shrinkings and the layoffs and the final collapse that awaited them. The arrival of the Slow Ones had only been a final straw. As she walked past the market square Charles, who ran one of the fruit stalls, waved at her. "All right?" he asked. An impulse seized her then, a screaming impulse, one which wanted to ask him how could he be so calm, couldn't he see what was happening? She wanted to grab him and shake him, point him to the sky and the shuttered fish stall next to him and the sad twisted things that were left of his wares, she wanted to do that and ask, Can't you see? Can't you see? She wanted to run at all the white-haired folk shuffling down the street getting on with their business as usual and shout it at them, shout it into their hairy wrinkled ears. She smiled at Charles. "Yeah, I'm alright." By the time she had gone down all the little streets that led her to the Pushcart she was half an hour late for work. As she came through the eatery's glass-paneled wooden door she caught a glimpse of Melanie's splendid silhouette at the till and her heart did that weird flutter it always did when Melanie was around. She shoved that sensation deep inside herself, where it belonged, and put on her shop-girl smile. In the afternoons the Pushcart sold tea and scones and crepes with bacon and maple syrup. Come evenings and the menu switched to alcohol and deep-fried things served in small silver buckets. Today the sign said no tea, they were under rations, bottled drinks only please. The warm brown interior of the cafe held a handful of lethargic patrons in various states of apathy, chewing fitfully or reading the news. Some of them were watching the TV nailed to the far wall, framed by old ship ropes and seashells. They usually kept it off unless there was footy going on, but since the Slow Ones came it had been permanently fixed to BBC News. The prevailing graphic, set to an indistinct voiceover, said WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR. (Nothing. They knew nothing. When governments and scientists sent drones and instruments up to the Slow Ones they stopped working, some kind of electromagnetic interference, they said. NASA was stumped. Everybody was stumped, grasping at straws.) Melanie didn't turn around as Kira stashed her things under the counter. That was an anomaly: For the past six months Kira's work routine had always begun with her warm and buttery smile. She studied her coworker's broad back, hunched over the till, noting the crooked way the apron was fastened around her waist. "You alright?" Melanie straightened up with a speed that suggested she hadn't heard Kira come in. "Hey. How's it going?" She looked tired, a collection of messy lines and dark smudges, as though the weekend had worn her face thin somehow. "You alright?" she repeated. "Yeah, I suppose. The sky hasn't fallen in, has it?" She gave Kira a laugh, and it was the kind that spoke less of mirth than it did of defeat. "How's life at home?" Kira's fingers fumbled with her apron strings. Melanie noticed her struggling and said, "Let me get that." With her back turned Kira said, "Life goes on. Thom's still moping." A firm tug at her waist. "He'll recover. Have faith." "I'm an atheist for a reason." She turned around. "How's Angie?" "Ha. Funny you should ask." Melanie sucked in a breath. "She's gone back to Sheffield." "What, you mean—" "Yeah. Permanently. She spent the weekend packing." Melanie was staring at her knuckles, which she kept lightly punching against the counter. "I'm sorry. What happened?" "Can't quite say, really. Just th— I don't know. She'd been planning it for a while, I think. She got back with her ex without telling me." She looked at Kira suddenly, eyes bright and shining. "Might as well, eh? End of the world and all that." "I'm sorry." She reached out and touched Melanie's forearm for a brief, hot moment. "I'm surprised, honestly." "Are you." "I mean, I—" She wanted to say, I always thought you two had the perfect relationship. "You two seemed so happy." "We did, didn't we?" She laughed again, and one corner of her mouth quirked upwards. In the slant of those lips Kira suddenly saw the cracking of facade and glimpsed familiar shores: the simmering irritations, the long silent nights, the cold stretches of not-arguments that thawed slowly into not-forgiveness. "Come help me with this till," Melanie said. "Something's wrong." They fought with the till. It was an old-fashioned one, just buttons and a drawer that popped out. It was jammed. They figured out the problem—a coin had gotten stuck, down the side of the drawer, and they fished it out with a flat screwdriver. "There you are, you little bastard," Melanie said, shaking the coin like a misbehaving puppy. She put it on top of the till, a tiny victory. At six a man barged into the Pushcart and slammed into the counter as Kira was ringing up an old lady's tea. "Turn your TV on," he rasped. "It's on," Kira said, pointing. The President of the United States, looking like he had aged ten years in as many days, was speaking inaudibly. In one corner a red block declared “LIVE.” The man was youngish, clean-shaven, dressed in clothes that were well looked-after. "Turn it up. Turn it up." Kira looked around, but she had no idea where Melanie was. The woman by the TV stepped up and reached for the volume dial. The voice of the US president, clipped and nasal, rose up and filled the room. "... THAT I AUTHORIZE THE USE OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS AGAINST THE PHENOMENON KNOWN AS THE SLOW ONES..." "He's going to nuke them," the man who'd burst in said. "It's mental." Titters of conversation filled the room. What could that mean? Kira felt like the ground under her was vanishing, but she couldn't tell if it was her or the planet that was evaporating. The US president said: The missiles would be released over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, far from any centers of civilization. The US president said: America could no longer wait for world powers to deliberate on a unified course of action. The US president said: America must take steps necessary to safeguard our future. A young man near the front of house was telling his girlfriend, in loud tones, how the radiation was going to get seeded in the atmosphere and kill them all. He was a physicist, he knew. The hawks running America, drunk on their Hollywood apocalypse dreams, were going to destroy life on the planet as we knew it. "It's war, you know," the old lady at the till said to Kira. "The Russians aren't going to like it. They're going to do something, you'll see." She declared it matter-of-factly, with utter conviction, and Kira saw the young girl she had been, bent over the radio, listening for news from the frontlines. On impulse she said, "It's on the house," and closed the till. "Go on, everything's free today." The man who had run in said, "Could I get—" "No, no, we're closing." Kira walked out from behind the counter, her legs shaky but still functional, and went to the glass-paneled door. The US president was still talking. She refused to look at the sky as she flipped the “OPEN” sign over. "I'm sorry. Please, everyone, could you just leave. We're closed. Everything's on the house." The scattered handfuls looked at her and each other, uncertain. "Go home," Kira said. "Call your mother, hug your children. Go home." She watched them file out onto the dark streets. When it was just her in the Pushcart she abandoned the unwashed, undressed tables and turned the lights out. Craig, the owner, only came in on Thursdays and weekends. She'd sort it out later. She found Melanie behind the storeroom door, chest still slowly heaving in the wake of a long fit of crying. She stood up, looking embarrassed, as Kira came in. "Sorry. I—still a bit of a mess—did something happen?" Kira ghosted towards her, fixed on her red-rimmed eyes, her lips. "The world's going to end." "What?" "The Americans are going to nuke the Slow Ones. They're doing it tomorrow." Melanie exhaled. "Madness." Madness, chaos, centers not holding. Just what was she clinging on to, anyway? Kira reached up and kissed her. Melanie's body reacted with surprise at first, then hunger. She had strong arms that could lift a double carton of coffee beans over her head, and they trembled around Kira's waist. As Kira sublimed into liquid Melanie closed the door behind them, so that nobody would hear. Later, as they sat together on the floor, sticky skin to sticky skin, Melanie asked, "Why?" No modifiers, no clauses. Just ”why.” Kira remained quiet for a while, pinching her toes inside the lingering damp heat of her boots. "Thom once told me about a theory he read. You know how they said the Slow Ones might be like migratory birds?" "I've heard that one. Sounds like tosh. But pretty much everything does these days." "Well, migratory birds come back every year. So why haven't we seen the Slow Ones before? Why has no-one, out of all of human history, ever mentioned them?" "So they're not migratory." Kira could still picture Thom's face as he had grilled her over this theory at the dinner table. How his freckled face had lit up with schoolboy excitement at the prospect of humanity's destruction, something interesting happening at last. "Well, the universe operates on a different scale, doesn't it? Billions and billions. What if the Slow Ones do come back, but so long that they only appear once every geologic age?" Melanie made a grunting noise. Kira settled her soft hip against Melanie's bony one. "It's the extinction events," she said. "What are those?" "Big die-offs." She curled her fingers around one of Melanie's nipples. "Like the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. That's the one everyone knows, but it wasn't the only one. The fossil record is full of mass extinctions. Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic... Once every thirty million years, like clockwork. Scientists don't know why." Melanie turned her head, her attention caught. "The Slow Ones?" "The oceans are already all dead. That's how it usually starts." "So we're going extinct." "Probably. I don't know. It's just a theory, anyway." Melanie blew air through wet lips. "It's not like we can get off this planet, is it?" Kira laid her head against Melanie's shoulder and listened to the sound of her breathing for a while. "You know," she said, "some scientists think extinction events are like planetary do-overs. Evolution speeds up after each extinction event. New forms of life start to flourish." "Like when you get left for a younger woman." Kira snorted. Melanie caught the edge of her hand and caressed the tip of her little finger, gently feeling around the shape of knuckle. How small our bones are, Kira thought, how fragile. What if whoever comes after us never finds them? It would be as if we never existed. A blank in the fossil record. "Are you going to tell Thom?" Melanie asked. Kira thought of what Thom's reaction might be. The things he would say, and the things he wouldn't. The look on his face, both accusatory and triumphant. She felt tired. "No," she said finally. "He's got enough on his mind." She could see him now, in his bathrobe still, standing at the window, watching grass die in their garden as the sky grew darker and darker. In the fridge, untouched, a pair of pork chops slowly defrosted, waiting and waiting and waiting. END     “Curiosity Fruit Machine” is copyright S. Qiouyi Lu, 2017. "The Slow Ones" is copyright JY Yang, 2017. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back on February 28 with a reprint of “for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her” by Agatha Tan. [Music plays out]

With thesis defenses on the horizon, the group looks to a comforting and familiar topic to escape their morose nerves; mass extinctions. Specifically, they discuss two papers about patterns of survivorship across mass extinction events and use this as a springboard to talking about general macroevolutionary patterns. Also, James fires Curt, Amanda fires James, and Curt decides to host his own private podcast in the middle of the real podcast with special guest Amanda. SPOILERS for House of Cards in the first 30 seconds of the podcast.   References: Jablonski, David. "Survival without recovery after mass extinctions."Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99.12 (2002): 8139-8144. Thorne, Philippa M., Marcello Ruta, and Michael J. Benton. "Resetting the evolution of marine reptiles at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.20 (2011): 8339-8344. Vrba, Elisabeth S., and Stephen Jay Gould. "The hierarchical expansion of sorting and selection: sorting and selection cannot be equated." Paleobiology(1986): 217-228. Vrba, Elisabeth S. "Levels of selection and sorting with special reference to the species level." Oxford surveys in evolutionary biology 6 (1989): 111-168.