Dirty Little Secrets poetry

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Here are my contributions to the Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets poetry corner.


What to do with Bones

From context we've (carefully) pried them.
We've cleaned them and, gently, we've dried them.
We draw and record them,
Return them, or hoard them,
While others just gnaw, and then hide them.


(One of the lecture videos included someone's little dog, chewing on a bone.  From a modern animal, not excavated from anywhere!)


Someone mentioned making the last line of a poem as long as possible.  Not that I took that as a challenge, or anything.....

As a teacher, our Sue is stupendous.
Toward deep thought, on hard questions, she'd send us.
Our world-view shifted,
As we pondered sand, sifted,
And the only downside to Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets, really, is that it's going to be a sadly long time before we encounter another teacher who is fit to polish Sue's pith helmet, and, OK, I gotta mention one more thing -- I can't believe Sue was RIGHT HERE at Michigan, some time in the past when I was too ignorant to hunt her down and haunt her classroom(s)!


And finally.....


Class ends, yet lingers.
New/old thoughts overflow heads.
"Secrets" suffuse hearts.

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clade

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I'm not only learning a lot of anatomy in Dinos 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology, I'm learning a lot of vocabulary, too.

We learned that one group of ornith(bird)ischian(hipped) dinos includes hadrosaurs and iguanodons.  I went to look up whether that is "iguanodon" or "iguanodonT"

I discovered that "Iguanodontia is a clade of herbivorous dinosaurs that lived from the Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous. Some members include Camptosaurus, Callovosaurus, Iguanodon, Tenontosaurus, and the hadrosaurids or 'duck-billed dinosaurs'."

Okayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.....  We know from the lecture that the group includes hadrosaurs and iguanodons (no T, apparently), but ... what's a "clade"????


"A clade (from Ancient Greek κλάδος, klados, "branch") or monophylum (see monophyletic) is a group consisting of an ancestor and all its descendants, a single "branch" on the "tree of life".^[1]"

(Both quotes from Wikipedia.).


I am learning stuff right and left!  That makes me happy................

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In Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets we had a poetry corner in the fora.  (I contributed a couple of limericks and a haiku.  I should probably publish them here, one day....)  There are a lot of people from DLS in dino class, and today someone opened a poetry corner in the dino fora.  I have contributed a limerick:

What I knew about breathing was lacking.
In Biology I must have been slacking.
I was clear that birds flew,
but ... air sacs?  Who knew?
I'll catch up, but I'd better get cracking!


Now I'm thinking I have to write something that includes the word "clade"............

Because it's cool, and it's new (to me), and it rhymes with a lot of words!

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