Trying to cross the creek (with ice in puddles nearby) was the wrong option (this is after walking 200 m, and losing the original inch of mud coating on the boots):
If this doesn’t work I don’t know what else to do. But perhaps you can see it on Fb if you find your way to my Fb friend Alessandra Vinciguerra’s page?
Funny looking bug under a Christmas wreath I was taking down. Seek says it is a curved face wind scorpion, sometimes called a camel spider. Minimally venomous and not aggressive, so let it go it’s own way into the new year.
We had those in Africa all the time! Solifuge is the name I recall from the book, but also “mijin kenama,” in Hausa, “husband of the scorpion.” They’ll eat all sort of bugs. They’ll snap their fangs at you if they’re frightened, but usually don’t bite unless really having something pushed in their face. Neat! I didn’t know they lived in Texas, though I heard of Arizona, so that makes sense.
A recent weekend trip to the beach offered a surprise we weren’t expecting. There was a group of folk digging for fossils in the clay at the beach’s edge. We knew sharks’ teeth often washed up on in the shingle but they were talking about gastropods. Huh?
We kept walking, the boys stopping every now and then to poke about in the clay. Then, something caught my eye… a spiral out of the mud. Easing it out, we found this… (Lego wizard for scale):
Doing some research I discovered two things. First, this shell belongs to Volutospina luctator (I think) and is somewhere between 41 & 37 MY old (from the Bartonian Eocene period). Second, the place where we found it between Highcliffe and Barton-on-Sea is apparently well known for its fossils and is in fact a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSI).
We’ve been walking that beach most weekends of the last year and never knew! We’ll certainly never look at it the same way again now.
@paleomalacologist has done a lot more work than I have on Eocene material. I agree that it looks like a slightly weird volutid (not as strange as Santeevoluta, which was rather convergent with Titanostrombus goliath). There seem to have been a lot of odd volutes in the Eocene. Around here (i.e., Atlantic Coast), almost everything older than about mid-Miocene is aragonite-leached, so most shell fossils are just molds.
More pictures of the pine savanna ( grass land ) taken today. It’s early winter and so most are no longer flowering and just have their beautiful seed heads in a field of browns and yellows. Lots of birds out here today hiding. Wish I could find some quail to get pictures of. Lots of work is being done to help bring them back.
It’s definitely warmer here. It was 70° when I was hiking earlier. I’m to start jogging there their 4 mile course everyday. Every month I’ll add 10lbs to the vest I’m using and stop at 40lbs and once there every few weeks I’ll start my sprinting a 1/8th mile earlier.
Quail have gotten scarce around here as well. Loss of habitat, perhaps fire ants affect them as bobwhite quail are ground nesters. I miss hearing their calls.
Yes, fire ants are a major problem for all ground-nesting birds that they come near. Having coyotes on the east side of the Mississippi is another threat.
And of course, the lovable death machines, the cat. It’s why I keep my cats inside unless I’m outside. They really need to do something to eliminate cats from breeding. I don’t particularly like the idea of killing them off through hunting. But I think more money needs to be funneled towards chemical castration in male cats and pressuring cat owners to fix and keep their cats inside unless they are outside with them or building them cat enclosures outside connected to the house.
Was excited today. This is the first time I’ve seen a river otter this close. I’ve seen them a few times before at a distance, or as road kill. Was fun watching it play around and hunt, and check me and the others out swimming close looking over at us before finally vanishing into the grassy water branches.
