Tuesday, February 17, 2004
The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution, 20th Anniversary Edition
By David Rains Wallace
This is a classic of natural history about the area in which we live. I've been reading it out loud to my daughter in the morning. Sometimes my son listens too. Its very complex and we often find words we don't know and look them up. Today we found a mammal mentioned - one we'd never heard of before. Well here's what the book says:
"An Oligocene epoch (about thirty million years ago) floodplain deposit near Weaverville on the Trinity River has yielded a fossil flora more suitable to the Florida Everglades than to contemporary California: leaves and brances of bald cypress, fig, and magnolia. Judging from fossils found in other parts of California, the Oligocene Klamath swamps probably supported alligators, tapirs, rhinoceroses, and many other present-day exotics (as well as a few still-native creatures such as squirrels and aplodontias)."Neither of us heard of aplodontias before and we were curious what strange creature this was that still lives in our neighborhood, that also existed thirty million years ago!
Naturally I turned to the internet... it was either that or the dictionary, and I really wanted to see a picture. I was not disappointed - I found this one and we both think its adorable. An aplodontia is a mountain beaver and looks something like a guinea pig with a beaver's face.
