history | Peregrine Pulp 2/3

TRASKASAURA DECLARED A NEW SPECIES

A strange dinosaur fossil first found in 1988 along the Puntledge River , flowing from Comox Lake through Courtenay on Vancouver Island (first described in 2002 and declared the Provincial Fossil of BC in 2023), was just now identified as a novel genus and unlike other elasmosaurids . Imagine something like a penguin-whale hybrid but with the neck of a giraffe (only six of those long, unlike the image above) and with the head of a komodo dragon, or something. Maybe a turt

Jun 7, 20252 min read

PEOPLING

The subject of the peopling of the Americas was always messy and it’s getting even more interesting all the time. Some will insist folks have always been on these lands while others conjecture about a traversal from Asia, across land, ice, or sea, or all of the above. When any of that took place is still more complicated. I bring this up here because so many disruptive findings have emerged in recent years, much of which changes the story pretty significantly but also doesn’t

Jun 3, 20257 min read

FONYO

Terry Fox was a kid who developed bone cancer and at age 18 had his leg amputated. In 1979 (a real great year) he revealed his plan to...

May 30, 20253 min read

TOO FAR?

Like so many places, until recently there were trolleys and trains zooming people all over Victoria and beyond. From 1888 to 1923, a foot...

May 28, 20254 min read

THE QUEEN

Other than the city of Victoria and a few other places being named after her, I realized I knew little more about Queen Victoria. Even just a cursory survey reveals a pretty interesting life. Queen Victoria was born Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent (named after her godfather, Russian Tsar Alexander I ) on May 24th, 1819. Her father, as you would expect, was an Englishman, Edward, Duke of Kent, and her mother German, Princess Maria Louisa Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfald.

May 7, 20257 min read

TUMBLED-DOWN LIZARD

For the first time ever, dinosaur nerds (who sometimes go by the label paleontologist ) have identified the 100-million-year-old fossilized footprints of an ankylosaurid, and a special one at that. You know the ankylosaurs, those guys from the Cretaceous who were low to the ground and built like a tank, with bony armour and a murder-mallet for a tail, doubtless for keeping carnivores at mating competition at bay. They look something like the ancient cousins of the armadillo

Apr 30, 20252 min read

"POINTS OF INTEREST"

Though I've been following along, I haven’t written at length about Ukraine since the opening weeks of this most recent Russian invasion. At that time, in late Winter and early Spring of 2022, knowing almost nothing about the conflict or what precipitated it, I was studying the previous decade of local and regional history with a focus on politics and ethnic violence. Doing so, most annoyingly, I was finding plenty that contradicted what I was hearing in the popular press and

Apr 2, 202515 min read

THE WRETCHED BLEMISH

What’s the deal with the measles? (Offered in the tone and tempo of Jerry Seinfeld, of course.) Measles outbreaks are taking up a lot of time and space, even here in Canada, in the traditional and new press. Along with that, I keep reading that RFK Jr, the new head of America’s Health and Human Services, is promoting things backward and upside down as preventatives or cures and generally making everything worse, as he's always so determined to do. So what do you suspect I wil

Mar 13, 202515 min read

PROBLEM SOLVING - A CAUTIONARY TALE

I was wanting to learn about and write something on how leaded gasoline became a thing. But then I came upon the biography of its inventor. Thomas Midgley, Jr. was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio and studied engineering at Cornell, earning a Master’s of Engineering in 1908 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1911. Five years later he was working for General Motors, at their Dayton Engineering Laboratories (DELCo) subsidiary in Ohio

Aug 31, 20246 min read

DIRECTIONS

Narendra : They’re not trying to hide anything from you, though. Adrenalina : Aren’t they? Narendra : They would if they could. For...

Aug 3, 202410 min read

FEMMES FATALES

In their ongoing effort to frame everything Palestinian as benevolent and peace-oriented, CBC sought once again to amplify the voice (and fabulous fabrications) of reporter and associate producer Keena Alwahaidi. Like so many before her, at the beginning of July Alwahaidi gleefully pushed the Gaza famine myth. That, of course, only came after this fiction had been debunked many times and on many fronts by anyone able and willing to muster the sympathy to look into the situati

Jul 20, 20249 min read

LOKI-FACED CERATOPS

As a kid I was always a big fan of triceratops. But at that time we knew only half the ceratopsian species we know today. There was a boom of ceratopsid discoveries between 1870 and 1925, then very little for almost a century. Then over the last two decades a whole bunch of new finds arrived. 1996 saw the discovery of Zuniceratops , significant for being the earliest-known ceratopsian with brow horns and, it must be noted, discovered by an eight-year-old in New Mexico. 2006 s

Jul 4, 20242 min read