A Brief History On December 31, 1853, one of the strangest dinner parties held to that point in history occurred when the Crystal Palace Park of London was host to a dinner inside the mold of an extinct dinosaur. Digging Deeper Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Sir Richard Owen had been contracted to construct replicas of 33 dinosaurs by the Crystal Palace company, formerly the site of the Great London Exhibition of 1851. Commissioned in 1852, the exhibit of extinct dinosaurs and ancient mammals was called the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs or simply Dinosaur Court. Open to the public in 1854, the…
Browsing: Nature
A Brief History On November 12-13, 1970, an Indian Ocean cyclone with winds over 150 mph hit what is now Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) killing more than three times the number of people killed in the Atom Bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined! Half a million people died in the low lands of the Ganges River delta, mostly from the storm surge that flooded the area. Digging Deeper In addition to massive loss of human life, thousands of homes and other buildings were washed away, thousands of acres of crops were destroyed, thousands of domestic and wild animals died,…
A Brief History On November 7, 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus made his epic voyage to the New World, a large meteor fell on the town of Ensisheim, Alsace, Austria, in what is now France. Seen as a falling fireball 100 miles away, the meteorite (when it hits the ground, a meteor becomes a “meteorite”) landed safely in a wheat field. Digging Deeper The 280 pound rock left a crater 3 feet deep (not bad for a rock that size) and was quickly set upon by curious villagers. Contrary to popular belief, people back then were not a…
A Brief History On July 10, 1997, British scientists in London conducted DNA tests on a Neanderthal skeleton which showed the likelihood of a common ancestor for all men having originated in Africa, perhaps 200,000 years ago. Digging Deeper Neanderthal man is the stereotypical cave man of cultural reference, powerfully built and immensely strong, with males average height about 5’6” and females about 5’1”. Their brains were actually larger than modern human brains, 1600 cc versus 1400 cc. The theory of human evolution has modern man and Neanderthal both evolving from a common ancestor 200,000 or so years ago in…
A Brief History On July 9, 1958, an earthquake (7.9 to 8.3 on the Richter scale) struck Alaska, shaking off a 90 million (long) ton block of rock and ice into Lituya Bay in southern Alaska, resulting in the biggest wave ever recorded. Digging Deeper A megatsunami is created when an impact event occurs, such as a meteor striking the water, a landslide causing large amounts of material to fall into the water, or violent volcanic activity. This differs from normal tsunamis that originate from volcanic or tectonic activity on the sea floor, while megatsunamis events are created by impact…
