Waco Mammoth National Monument

Once in a great while something amazing happens: a stork flies through the sky carrying a little green and gray bundle of joy and lands upon some public land and BAM! A new national monument is born.

Of course the real process is a lot less cute and has massively more paperwork (a statement which is also true for human infants). In actuality, the Antiquities Act of 1906 made it so that to bring a new national monument into being, you must have a proclamation of the President of the United States. National parks, on the other hand, are created by an act of Congress (which these days is about as simple to elicit as an act of God). On July 10th 2015 President Obama designated the Waco Mammoth Site as our newest national monument - much to the delight of Amy, who lives only an hour and a half from the newest monument.

Awesome Dead Shit: Glyptodonts

Amy saw an armadillo last week so she is now inspired to write about some of their extinct cousins, the glyptodonts.

Awesome art by NachoSammich

Glyptodonts were crazy cool mammals that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch from 2.58 Ma until they went extinct about 10,000 years ago, possibly from climate, disease, or from people over-hunting them and using their shells as emergency shelters. Talk about a fulfilling meal! They lived in South America and migrated as far north as Arizona and Texas during the Great American Biotic Interchange about 2 million years ago along with some other South American fauna, like our old friend Thylacoleo. This biotic interchange was the first time South America had come into contact with another continent since the breakup of Gondwana back in the Mesozoic, meaning that the South American fauna had ~63 million un-interrupted years of evolution all to themselves, which is why those endemic species are so flippin' WEIRD. Glyptodonts are no exception to that rule and belong in the superorder Xenarthra along with sloths, anteaters, and armadillos, which of course means they are phylogenetically awesome.