Mammoth Tooth Found In Downtown San Francisco 66
DevotedSkeptic writes with this excerpt pulled from the San Francisco Chronicle:"A seemingly ordinary day at the Transbay Transit Center construction site became a mammoth day of discovery Monday when a mild-mannered crane operator reached deep into the earth and pulled out a tooth. This was no ordinary tooth. The 10-inch-long brown, black and beige chomper, broken in two and missing a chunk, once belonged to a woolly mammoth, an elephantine creature that roamed the grassy valley that's now San Francisco Bay 10 to 15 thousand years ago in the Pleistocene epoch."
meet the (Score:5, Funny)
I hope he held it high in the air and yelled "Yabba dabba dooooooo!"
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Wish I had some mod points. That's a good one.
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Maybe Firefox on Android would work better?
It's a memory pig compared to the built-in Android browser, though.
Re:meet the (Score:5, Funny)
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stop. just...stop.
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Re:meet the (Score:4, Funny)
I wish I could, but I can't. What's E.T. short for?
Evolutionary reasons- the gravity on his home planet is relatively high.
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Thank you for introducing me to Slashdot Japan in English. With headlines like "Why do you need the growth of the railway children" I know which site I'll be visiting more often.
Yes, I can only assume that Japanese is a language that isn't as simple to auto-translate to English as others. Google Translate does quite a good job on some European languages, but Japanese comes across as quaintly bizarre at best and downright incomprehensible way too often. :-)
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Yes, I can only assume that Japanese is a language that isn't as simple to auto-translate to English as others. Google Translate does quite a good job on some European languages, but Japanese comes across as quaintly bizarre at best and downright incomprehensible way too often. :-)
So what you're saying is that it's similar to human-translation of Japanese to English?
Hey Barney! (Score:5, Funny)
"A seemingly ordinary day at the Transbay Transit Center construction site became a mammoth day of discovery Monday when a mild-mannered crane operator reached deep into the earth and pulled out a tooth.
He proceeded to shout in a peculiar dialect and then slide barefoot down the spine of his crane to the bedrock below. Excited about this new discovery... or maybe it was that it was quittin time, he sang a catchy little tune and pushed his car home. According to legend, he had ribs for dinner.
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"mild-mannered crane operator"
Why do they mention "mild-mannered" in this rather explicit manner? Is it somehow important for the narrative? Did the touch of the tooth mutate him intro a violent prehistoric ancestor of the Hulk?
Even if the rest of the HSR project is never built (Score:2)
...at least we'll have a mammoth tooth!
San Francisco (Score:1)
Pleistocene was a paradise (Score:5, Funny)
There was no SF Bay when that mammoth was walking around. Evil humans hadn't begun changing the climate and melting glaciers yet, so the sea level was at its optimum. SF and NY were hundreds of miles inland, so real estate prices were affordable. Chicago was under several kilometers of ice, thank goodness.
All in all, a wonderful time.
Re:Pleistocene was a paradise (Score:4, Funny)
Stop work! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Stop work! NOT (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly for the Transit Authority, all work will have to be stopped and archeologists will have to be called in. I expect this project will lose at least two years in construction time.
From TFA
"Excavation work in the area was halted while the find was examined, but Allen said that because of the depth of the discovery, it's unsafe and unrealistic to send someone down to inspect the site, so digging was allowed to continue. "
if we can't get jurrasic park (Score:4, Interesting)
can we at least get pleistocene park?
you will be the coolest bastard since pt barnum and have instant historical fame
there's got to be some internet bazillionaire who doesn't want to fly into space, but really wants a f**cking wooly mammoth in his back yard
ok then. get it done!
the gobs of dna we have from many specimens, some elephant zygote blanked out, and an elephant surrogate mother... i mean we're on the cusp of this happening, aren't we?
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cave bears!
irish elk!
wooly rhinos!
giant ground sloths!
sabretooth motherfucknig tigers!
damn man, for real, let's do this already you rich bastards
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It wasn't mother nature who did in the pleistocene guys
Twas us
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We aren't nature?
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No, we're not
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That's odd. Then where did we come from if not from nature? Are you saying we are somehow special, separate from the universe? And when did we become 'unnatural'?
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When we started terraforming based on our abstract ideas rather than purely our genetic need to reproduce
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Our 'abstract' ideas come from a very normal, natural brain that wants to survive and reproduce like everything else. What is there that makes them any less natural? Sounds more like plain old evolution to me. Did the connection break somewhere that I'm not aware of? You don't see 'abstract' ideas as a survival tactic or reproductive aid?
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memetics versus genetics
genetics is the natural world, which governs us now in only irrelevant ways
we are now governed by memetics, the transmission of ideas via language
it's a new game dude
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i don't hate humanity
your social skillset lesson for the evening is to find the ability to differentiate what happens inside your head, and what a person actually says, and how they might not be the same thing
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That makes no sense at all. 'Memetics' (whatever the hell that is) still comes from the very plain old physical brain, and even if it is something 'special', it's still merely evolutionary. Eh, whatever... at least now I can see where you've gone totally off base... and it explains how humans can become so arrogant that they think they're 'above' nature. Sorry to tell you, bub, you're no different than any other life form in this universe. Culture = tribe... same old shit with a fancy name, nothing more.
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genetics is just chemistry
so it's like you are saying i'm stupid because i insist on talking about genetics when obviously it's all just chemistry, i'm arrogant for talking about this stupid thing called genetics
it's a new game above and beyond genetics: the transmission of ideas between people, and their retention and modification across generations
memetics
relax, weirdo
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genetics is just chemistry
so we can't talk about genetics? because it's just chemistry?
we can talk about the transmission and retention and modification of ideas between people and across generations and cultures. it's a perfectly valid subject matter. the desire to reduce everything to one perspective is rather... non-adaptive of you
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You're full of it. Every single thought, idea, desire, emotion whatever you want to call it, memetics if you like, is a result of chemistry and electrical charges in the brain. I can poke an electrode in there and make you have any feeling or idea I want you to have. You are what your brain does and senses. You are under some impression there's some divine process from outside the universe involved, making it pretty obvious who the weirdo is. You still haven't explained where you think 'memetics' comes from
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what is wrong with you?
chemistry is just physics. therefore, the field of chemistry is an invalid field of inquiry?
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damn, you're just a prick teaser...
Re:if we can't get jurrasic park (Score:4, Funny)
We can't even manage Holocene Park properly - the dominant animal at the top of the food chain runs rampant, destroying everything in its sight, and is starting to escape its confines and invade neighbouring locations - and you want to start on Pleistocene Park?
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Dont worry, the holocene ends Dec 21, 2012. Blank slate, wiped clean, start over with the prokaryotes
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can we at least get pleistocene park?
Well, these dinosaurs [youtube.com] are obviously from the, er, Plasticine era. ;-)
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"there's got to be some internet bazillionaire who doesn't want to fly into space, but really wants a f**cking wooly mammoth in his back yard"
He can marry my mother-in-law instead.
Tooth Fairy (Score:5, Funny)
It's not a mammoth's (Score:2)
Still Playing Catchup to LA (Score:3)
That's nice, but they've got a long way to go to compete with the La Brea Tar Pits. When they were building a new parking site for the LA County Museum, they found an almost complete mammoth skeleton, not just one tooth. That and a whole bunch of other incredibly cool fossils. One more reason to prefer Southern California.
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That's nice, but they've got a long way to go to compete with the La Brea Tar Pits. When they were building a new parking site for the LA County Museum, they found an almost complete mammoth skeleton, not just one tooth. That and a whole bunch of other incredibly cool fossils. THE ONLY reason to prefer Southern California.
FTFY.
When the Big One hits, I'm praying for southern California to fall into the ocean, and the rest to stay put.
A Tooth? Big Deal (Score:2)
Check out this guy [berkeley.edu], who turned up a few year ago in San Jose, about an hour's drive south of SF.
Elephants in SF, NOT (Score:1)
Keep digging, you might find a Republican. Or the missing ballots from the last election.
Lost and found (Score:1)
Timmy! Put that thing down and get the hell away from it! TIMMY!
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British people have dentists?
Totally misread that... (Score:2)
When I first read the headline I read "Mammoth Tool Discovered in Downtown SF". I thought "Why is that news? plenty of THOSE around there"
It's just a prehistoric iPhone prototype . . . (Score:2)
. . . left by an Apple employee in a bar in the Pleistocene epoch. The cops and Apple private detectives will come by soon to claim it.
And, yes, it has round corners.
broken in two and missing a chunk
The caveman wasn't holding it right.
Mammoth Tooth (Score:2)