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About the banner graphic
Hi, I’m Chris, and I’ll be your guide on this tour of the marvelous Rancholabrean Pinole Creek scene in the banner painting, brought to us by the fantabulous time machine of the wonderful Carl Buell. Please keep your arms and heads inside the blog as we get going. Thank you.
First things first. The thing to keep in mind about Pinole Creek in this part of the Rancholabrean (late Pleistocene) is that much of the planet’s water is locked up in gigantic ice sheets covering Eurasia, North America, and Antarctica, and the ocean only comes up to 150 feet below year 2007 sea level. Sea level changed dramatically during the Pleistocene: 100,000 years ago or so, there were oyster beds living in shallow salt water about three miles past those bison on the right. But right now, San Pablo Bay isn’t there. Nor is San Francisco Bay, and the Gulf of the Farallones, out the other side of the Golden Gate, is actually the Farallon Plain, a Pleistocene coastal Californian Serengeti with camels and elephants and horses and other strange animals, some of which you are about to meet close up. But don’t worry! We’re equipped with the latest in tranquilizer gun technology.
In the far background, the hills in places that will eventually be called Sonoma, Marin, and Napa counties turn blue in afternoon sun. There is probably a high fog coming in off the Pacific. In front of them, weaving through the broad basin between the Hayward/Rodgers Creek and Calaveras faults that will become San Pablo Bay, is the California River, carrying the combined flow of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers westward toward the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, then south toward Raccoon Strait between Tiburon and Angel (will be an) Island (someday), through a river canyon break in the coast ranges that’s now called the Golden Gate, and out across the Farallon Plain anywhere from 12 to 30 miles to the Pacific.
In left foreground, Paramylodon, a giant ground sloth in the Mylodontidae family about six feet from nose to rump, looks for some leafy green vegetables to eat. She is not especially closely related to Nothrotheriops, CRN’s other patron sloth. As a Megatherian, Nothrotheriops is actually more closely related to two-toed sloths of the current day than it is to Paramylodon.
A few dozen yards downhill from the ground sloth, you’ll see a group of teratorns, like condors but with 12-foot wingspans. Teratorns are thought by some scientists to be a possible living basis for the thunderbird myths. These big birds are eating some recently dead megafaunum. I can’t really see what it is from here. It could be anything from part of a Columbian mammoth to another ground sloth, a horse or a tapir (though it’d have to be a big tapir) or a grizzly, perhaps even a saber-tooth cat or short-faced bear. Teratorns, which were big enough and (it is thought) predatory enough to have taken live rabbits and small children, probably played an important role is opening up megafaunal carrion for other scavengers, such as condors, vultures, and ravens— so now we know what that raven is circling around waiting for. Another teratorn is coming in for a landing. Just think: each of those wings is longer than most of you are tall.
In the distance is a coniferous forest, most likely composed primarily of coast redwood and coastal Douglas fir, or at least a very close relation of the latter. There are probably some pines in there as well, likely some relations of the closed-cone pines like the Monterey or Bishop pines. The broad-leaved trees at the ecotone of forest and grazer-wallower-trampler grassland might include alder and elder, Baccharis and oak and tanoak. Looks like it’s been a while since the mammoths have eaten here. Maybe there are more tempting pickings down by the river: looks pretty trampled down there toward what will eventually become Rodeo and Vallejo.
On our side of Pleistocene Pinole Creek, a coyote, Canis latrans, peers through the creek’s fringing willows and tules at the dining teratorns. Or wait a minute: maybe that’s Zeke. No, the fur’s too dark, and besides Zeke’s tail would be firmly tucked between his legs with all these megafauna around. Coyote should be careful, too: she might be the top predator in the biologically depauperate urban Holocene, but right now there are lots of meat-eaters bigger, stronger, and hungrier than she is. If modern-day Yellowstone is any indication, wolves have a thing for killing coyotes: reintroduction of the wolves to Yellowstone has seriously depressed the coyote population, and you can probably interpret that in the population dynamics and psychological senses both. And along Rancholabrean Pinole Creek, coyote not only has to contend with the gray wolves we know, but also with the seven-foot-long, 200-pound dire wolf, Canis dirus, the biggest Big Dog ever. Now some paleontologists think that due to Canis dirus’ bone structure, which was theoretically ill-suited for cursorial hunting, the dire wolves may have functioned more as scavengers and opportunistic hunters rather than gray-wolf-style pack hunters. Still. Seven feet long and two hundred pounds? Cave canem. If that’s not enough, there are still those previously mentioned saber-tooths and short-faced bears. They likely preferred bigger game than the coyote, but why take the risk? Watch your butt, Coyote.
And in the right middle distance, those bison are… well, they’re a calendar, for one thing, something a weary time-traveler could use to get her bearings. Birders distinguish among seemingly identical birds by taking range into account, remembering that species A lives nearby while species B is only found four hundred miles away and then only by fluke. These bison call that to mind, except that the range difference is a temporal one. If this is more than 22,000 years ago, those are Bison latifrons. Less than that, they’re Bison antiquus. Bison latifrons is otherwise known as the “long-horned bison,” due to its really long, dramatically arching horns. Those bison down the hill there look to have shorter horns, so that makes them Bison antiquus, which means we’re at 22KYA or later, really rather close to the Holocene in geological terms. Better enjoy this scene before we pave it.
And of course right up there in the foreground is a raven, Corvus corax, a representation of which species I have learned better than to try to run a blog without.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this tour of Rancholabrean Pinole Creek as much as I’ve enjoyed touring it to you. If you’ll all just make sure your harnesses are secure, our captain will set a course back to your homes in the year 2035, in the glorious waning years of the Jenna Bush administration, where you can… what? I’m sorry, there must be some mixup. Aren’t you with the Iraq-Iran-Syria-Turkey-France war veterans group? Damn. Well, no worries: you can fill out the relocation forms at our office, which you can reach by heading through our fabulous gift shop. Buh-buy, now. Buh-buy.
And thanks, Carl.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
great stuff, Carl.
well told, Chris.
Is there any way you could, y’know, extend the tour a little bit for a couple of us? My buddy here—yeah, the messed-up one—he really wants to see a short-faced bear.
C’mon. I’ll give you my air filter.
By: By pi on 2007 01 25
Wonderful - illustration and narration both. It’s a nice thing to see in a week marred by back pain and not enough sleep.
By: By Rana on 2007 01 25
The bison are all looking that way—I think that might be somebody they knew hosting the teratorn dinner party.
When I lived in Mammoth Lakes, a few hundred miles and twenty thousand years or so away from this scene, the word “pristine” got tossed around an awful lot, in relation to the nearby John Muir Wilderness, and even the frontcountry outside the boundaries of the wilderness area.
I was there a few years before it really dawned on me that there was NOTHING in that area that was “pristine.� This “wilderness� was managed completely for human interests, and every square inch of it had been waffle-stomped under man-feet. (Jeezus-effing-keerist, Mammoth Lakes even has a DIRT BIKE TRACK ON NATIONAL FOREST LAND.)
To us city folk, it looked paradisiacal, but ... the signs of campers and hikers and hunters – and even air travelers (jet contrails are an inescapable fact of the Sierra sky) – were literally everywhere.
I always wondered: What would it be like to see a place where there were no human traces at all?
I once located a lake on the topo map which had no mapped trail to it, and hiked close to where I thought it might be, and discovered that it had no actual trail to it. After a bit of searching, I found it. I stayed there for two days, and I didn’t see sign of a single other human – no campsights, no fire rings, no discarded worm cups, no snarls of monofilament line in the willows, no initials carved on the bark of the aspens, no poorly-hidden wads of toilet paper five feet off the trail.
)I also heard the weirdest, ungodly noise in the night there, down at the other end of the lake, and decided later it must have been a mountain lion, making the weird ungodly pseudo-Bigfoot noise they reportedly sometimes make.)
I like me them humans, but damn, sometimes I want to get AWAY from those swarming bastards. This lake – I’ll never tell its name, or even what map quadrangle it lives on – was that one moment in my life when I felt that I had accomplished that.
I believed, for that one extended moment, that I had experienced “pristine.�
This is all a roundabout way of getting to where I say that this painting gives me the same feeling.
...
I can’t resist thinking of the teratorn tableau as a busy restaurant scene: The one standing upright next to the carcass is the waiter, saying “Shearbeak, party of two? Right this way, please. We have a nice table for you right down near the haunch. I do have to warn you we’re all out of eyeballs and anus this evening, and I think we only have about a foot or so of lower intestine left. However we can start you off with our delectable rancid humpfat appetizers, with a piquant botulism-bile dipping sauce, and the chef tells me we have quite a bit of lovely green meat down near the spinal column for the main course.�
By: By Hank Fox on 2007 01 25
Beautiful, both of you.
By: By Stephanie on 2007 01 25
I love it. You and Carl should do more of the same.
By: By Rita Xavier on 2007 01 25
Fantastic travelogue, Chris. And between Carl and Carel, a lot of great blogs are looking better every day.
By: By Mike on 2007 01 25
Hey pi, here’s a short-faced bear for your pal.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 01 25
You can tell anyone you want about Ionian Basin - good luck getting there! (We almost made it last summer - if the no snow season continues in the Sierra, it should be a lot easier this year.) Also, I’m pretty sure almost nobody ever goes to Young America Lake below the Sierra Buttes - have a look at a topo map and you’ll see why… Little South Fork Lake in the Trinity Alps also belongs on the list of “pristine” because it’s unbelievable hell to get there.
By: By Fred Levitan on 2007 01 25
I live across from the La Brea Tar Pits (the The Tar Tar Pits), and I love going to the Page Museum over there. Thanks for the tour!
By: By uccellina on 2007 01 25
That banner is sooooo beautiful. And thanks for the great tour.
By: By Oaktown Girl on 2007 01 25
Spyder, when I worked at Red’s Meadow pack station and later, Mammoth Lakes Pack Outfit, we more than once packed Forest Service workers in with chainsaws so they could cut up downed trees, or with dynamite so they could do trail building or maintenance. (*)
I soon realized the term “wilderness” hardly applied to anything so heavily MANAGED. I felt moved to come up with an alternate term to describe the area.
Rather than wilderness, such places are “museum-quality wilderness.�
...
(* Actually, at least once, a Red’s Meadow employee went into the backcountry with a chainsaw and cut down a hundred or so trees without USFS permission. They got not so much as a slap on the wrist, as I recall.)
By: By Hank Fox on 2007 01 25
Hey pi, here’s a short-faced bear for your pal.
Excellent! He likes it! Thanks, Chris! Short-faced bears are (were?) the boss!
The air filter’s a little banged up, but it’s got all the latest patches, so it should be good against biologicals, retros and nanos. I figure I won’t need it in the Amazonian desert.
Fred: re: LSF Lake: quiet, man. There are folks who take such statements as a challenge…
By: By pi on 2007 01 25
Stunning artwork by Carl Buell, and some very fine (time) travel writing by Chris. Those are my childhood stomping grounds being depicted but I don’t remember it that way for some reason. I’ll always regret having missed the Teratorns.
By: By zeladoniac on 2007 01 25
OK, everyone, listen up. Including all of you coming by from PZ’s joint (and howdy!)
You all absolutely have to click on zeladoniac’s link up there in the comment above (or in this one) if you like natural history illustration. Wow!
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 01 25
What a great idea to do that. It was so much fun to read and see.
By: By eRobin on 2007 01 25
Really, really cool. Thanks!
By: By Charles on 2007 01 26
I fancy that this is the apotheosis of Creek Running North.
Carl Buel’s frozen moment is all Chris’s best palaeo posts made flesh.
From the perspective of a country, Australia, where all but one large predatory mammal and one large raptor had disappeared in a cataclysmic short time along with their megafaunal prey very recently (late Quaternary) - and where the remaining carnivorous mammal, Thylacinus cynocephalus, was then hunted to extinction within a century and a half by colonising farming dimwittery, and the raptor, Aquila audax pushed to an edge whence it needed specific measures taken to be able to recover - I’m hungry for such beautiful history of systems where predation and scavenging of megafauna had a working place.
There is, of course, good popularisation of Australian palaeoecology by workers in that field, but we have not yet seen a web gift along the lines of CRN for Australia.
Congratulations to both of you.
By: By darkymac on 2007 01 26
Edit to my above comment:
“remaining carnivorous mammal” may imply only if not read as large, which I introduced it as in the preceding sentence.
There are, of course, heaps of little and vicious meat-eaters in the Australian fauna.
Apologies. And that’s why I am not a writer and big Chris is. Communication is ultimately a gift, no matter how hard you work at it.
By: By darkymac on 2007 01 26
Aw, c’mon, Darkymac. Good writing is 50 percent editing after the fact. And the other 50 percent is editing before the fact.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 01 26
Signing off now after a good read.
See you in another few weeks, when I’ll try to remember to come out of lurk - and I don’t buy your 50/50 thesis; some writers can make anything interesting.
By: By darkymac on 2007 01 27
the dire wolves may have functioned more as predators and opportunistic hunters rather than gray-wolf-style pack hunters.
scavengers, dammit. Scavengers. I hate when I don’t notice the brain farts until two days later. Edited to correct.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 01 27
All carnivores are scavengers on occasion, some are just much less patient than others.
By: By Carl Buell (OGeorge) on 2007 01 28
And your writing flowed so well, Chris, that I understood scavenger in the first mis-cast version.
By: By darkymac on 2007 02 06
Categories:
The Creek
Paleontology
