Folks new to this, ah, eclectic blog — Wonder is eclectic and ah sumetimez feels it 🦊😼🐆🌋⛈️🌍 — might be puzzled about how the bears got onto what is basically a list of pinned volcano activity posts (and a shameless plea for a little $$).
Simple answer: I found the Bear Cam a while back and tried a blog embed. Readers really liked it, and the occasional Ursid Thursday posts, too. It is fun, even if, like me, you’re not into it enough to know the name and story of every bear visible on cams along the Brooks River this season.
For instance, while getting the link to the fish-view cam yesterday, I found myself eye to eye with a live Alaskan sockeye salmon in real time — that this was possible made my day!
Longer answer: When I retired, I decided simply to find out how cats evolved and then write an eBook about it; several posts here show the general picture of how that went.
Cats are feliform carnivores, of course, so in came Order Carnivora and its distaff side — Caniformia — because that side, through competition, must have shaped feliform evolution in many ways.
So in came the dogs.
Bears aren’t in Canidae but the resemblance is there, especially in the muzzle.
As for volcanoes, it never hurts to have one more person online, lay or academic, writing as intelligently and accurately as possible about them and about volcanic hazards, even if that contribution is miniscule.
Personally, though, it’s complex. In terms of the earlier discussion of writing goals, while tracing the evolution of Carnivora through reading research papers — a very eclectic experience but valuable for the layperson who can sift through the arguments and find underlying simple points of scientific consensus even among experts who might be furiously disagreeing about other details that she knows she couldn’t possibly understand — I discovered the Precambrian.
“Red, pink, and yellow. It takes up most of the highway!” — Driver Cat. Check out the colorful lines outside the time circle (the one that led to cats, dogs, and bears, among other critters, is dark blue and starts around the 2-Ga line). (Images: Cat: Chriss Haight Pagani, CC BY-NC 2.0/ Wheel: Shutterstock)
And if you go back far enough, you come to something like this near the start of it all:
These high-rise critters are much more complex than the probably Hadean ancestors of Earth life.
There is a link between volcanoes and terrestrial life that goes WAY back.
And I can’t describe it. I can point in the general direction, though.
Featured image: Capucine from Pixabay, public domain.
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