Notes for today

• Turkeys were domesticated twice! All kinds of interesting information in that article. Turkeys are the only New World domesticated animal that has been spread globally (quick: Name all the New World animals that were domesticated and then spread elsewhere). Apparently the turkey was domesticated twice: Once in Mesoamerica (think Mayans) and once in the SW US (think Athabaskan...I think). Apparently the SW US domestication was done not for meat, but for feathers.
• I've said it before and I'll say it again, nothing is more amazing to me than the reality that we can get a good idea of what animals looked like that lived over 65 million years ago. They can now get a pretty good idea of what dinosaur feather patterns looked like. The photo accompanying that article is amazing.
• And on the flip side: How weird is it that we can build something like a windmill and then not understand why it isn't working?
• I believe many people wish they could see dinosaurs or mammoths or other extinct creatures (I, for one, would love to see a stand of mature American Chestnut trees). However, I'm fairly certain that if humans and dinosaurs had co-existed, we would have killed them and eaten them hundreds of years ago. Just look at what we're continuing to do to the whales. And it turns out there may have been far more of them than we previously thought.