Awesome picture, no?

That is reportedly from the Condon Visitor Center up in John Day country and shows an angry North American sabercat (lower right) about to have its meal (and its life) interrupted by the Rattlesnake Creek Tuff eruption, one of the earliest and biggest eruptions of the High Lava Plains.

That species is not Smilodon or Homotherium — those two came a couple million years later, after the Miocene bridge.

So…cats.

If you read the last update, you may have noticed that posts, etc., didn’t exactly go as planned. That’s because I figured it would be good to do some volcano posts on Sundays, too, because of the new book and also out of curiosity about Newberry, about a hundred miles southeast of here.

Now, I’m holding off on local volcanoes purposely, until my journalistic stuff is more together, so I can do a full approach on each one for Sunday Morning Volcanoes, with interviews, multimedia, etc.

But I’d heard Newberry was special, so I checked it out online, learned also about the High Lava Plains, and then saw the tie-in with Yellowstone Hotspot and had to look into it. (I’d been holding off on Yellowstone, too, as it’s so big and famous — just scratched the surface with yesterday’s post, really: there is a book in that, possibly, but down the road a ways.)

So NOW I’m going to do the eBook formatting for the cat books and then get to Smilodon, who’s still purring patiently up on the shelf.

Freelancing is ongoing, too, though only at the query stage thus far.

Anyway, there will be a hiatus in posts here through all that because writing, in all its aspects, including formatting and proofing, is hard work.

As the cat eBooks go up, I’ll put the links in that “book block” underneath the search box.

And of course I’ll cover breaking news, if anything comes up.

Eventually, and fairly soon if all goes well, I’ll be back with Smilodon.

Thank you so much for your interest, likes, follows, and comments!

Featured image: A. Davey, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0