From May 29, 2019
While I grow older and vegetate in the doctor’s waiting room this morning, we have a request from “Unknowable” for Byron the Quokka’s baby picture. Always happy to oblige, so here it is.
There is, of course, a whole family album to trot out; but Byron eschews celebrity status. I am not sure he knows what “eschews” means. The last time I used that word, he said “Gesundheit.”
From January 28, 2023
Oh, that Golden Treasury of Natural History! I couldn’t get enough of it. Dinosaurs and woolly mammoths! By the time I was in third grade, they used to have me visit the other classrooms and give a little talk on dinosaurs. “Just like listening to a professor at college!” the school secretary once said.
At a very early age I already had an unquestioning belief in Evolution, whatever it was. Why not? Nobody questioned Evolution! Darwin wins, hands down. We started out as parameciums or something and wound up with Mozart. All the books said so.
But the Bible did not say so. And yet, like the rest of America, I toodled off to Sunday school or church on Sunday morning and never suspected there would be even the slightest flaw in my belief system. We were all Christians, weren’t we? (I was including Jews.) I was just a kid, but I never heard an adult question Evolution.
But I’m afraid my beliefs have evolved since then. I have lost my faith in Evolution.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That’s the first sentence in the Bible. Everything follows from it. I mean, if you literally start quibbling with it from the get-go, how far are you going to get with the rest of it?
God did not leave us blueprints, recipes, or a here’s-how-you-do-it manual. He’s left us with plenty to find out on our own. We’ll have plenty to study in the sweet by and by.
Either God is the Almighty, the Creator, and the ultimate supreme Authority, or He is not. And if He is not, then who is?
I don’t like any of the answers proposed to that question. God protect us from all-devouring governments. God save us from the know-it-alls.
I still love dinosaurs. God created them. We don’t have them here among us anymore, but God has the entire universe at His disposal.
And I don’t believe in Evolution anymore. The more I study the matter, the less sense it makes. All it does, in the long run, is leave us marooned on a truly barren desert island.
Evidently, California uses goats for wildfire prevention. Somehow this bunch decided to head out and ended up in this suburban neighborhood.
It’s great to see. Wish I could see this in my neighborhood.
I thought they had said this river was drying up and that was really bad. I’m confused. Much flooding worldwide. Crazy weather and earthquakes. May God protect us all.
From July 26, 2025
Boy, oh, boy! You’re all the way up in Maine, where the water just doesn’t get that warm… and what do you see?
I didn’t think the great white shark was all that fond of northern waters. Then again, I’m from New Jersey and we’ve had our share of lethal shark attacks, over the years. And as you can see from this video, where there’s one great white, there’s more.
Matawan Creek, Beach Haven, Spring Lake–and those were just the sites of the infamous attacks of 1916… again, right here in New Jersey. But if you really want to be sure of not being attacked by any kind of shark… try Kansas.
Kansas? Oops! Never mind. Back in the Cretaceous Period, Kansas was covered by an inland sea just chock-full of monsters. You think great white sharks are bad? Once upon a time there were Mosasaurs. You’d never get through the first verse of “Farewell and Adieu.”
From June 2, 2018
To this video I must add a small tribute to the mother wolf spider, who carries her eggs until they hatch into tiny spiders the size of a pin-head, then carries the babies until they’re old enough to take care of themselves. If one of the multitude of babies falls off her back, she knows it instantly–don’t ask me how!–and will search until she finds it and returns it to its place.
As Rev. D. James Kennedy used to say, “Ain’t chance grand?”
God’s stuff always works.
Hi! Mr. Nature here.
Right now it’s snowing sideways and we’ve already got almost two feet of it on the ground, with more to come. Dig that Global Warming.
But here’s an animal that normally inhabits the northern coast of Greenland and some of the really, really cold parts of Canada–the musk ox.
The babies are cute as buttons. They will grow up to weigh 800 pounds with very sharp horns, and for big animals, they’re very light on their feet. In modern times they’ve been introduced to places where they lived during prehistoric times, such as Siberia, where they seem to be doing well.
North coast of Greenland–wow. Who would expect anything to be able to live there–let alone a large herbivorous mammal?
There’s no quibbling with God’s stuff, though. It always works.
From July 17, 2019
Somewhere in the treetops in the jungles of New Guinea, a momma cuscus grooms her rather hefty child–that’s the big white thing scrunched up in her lap.
Byron the Quokka assures me that business will take off “like a bloomin’ rocket” if I hire a cuscus to assist him him managing my blog contests. He’s up to something, depend upon it.
Well, I remain open to persuasion. Toss in your two cents, anybody, if you want to. I have to get on to some nooze coverage.
From July 16, 2019
I’ve wondered about this animal ever since I saw it in a picture book when I was six or seven years old. It’s called a cuscus–“common spotted cuscus,” if you want to be formal–and it’s hard to look up in the Internet because the computer keeps trying to direct you to “couscous,” which is something altogether different.
The cuscus lives in trees in the jungles of New Guinea and mostly comes out at night, when it’s difficult to see them: they’re very shy. There are also a few in Cape York, Australia. They have prehensile tails, very similar to a chameleon’s.
Byron the Quokka has been dropping subtle hints about being able to do his contest-runner job better if a cuscus might be hired to assist him. “You just want more pictures of cute animals to pump up viewership,” I parry. “So that’s a bad idea?” Well, he’s got me there. Anyway, if you can’t trot out a cuscus or a potto now and then, what’s the point of blogging?
Fantastically varied realms of nature brought to you by God the Father, who created it all.
From May 15, 2016
Way back in 2004, some scientists–I use the word advisedly–trotted out a theory that Homo erectus, formerly known as Java Man, had a really thick skull, much thicker than ours, because the males had a habit of popping each other over the head with clubs. This cartoon-like image was carefully dressed in the most posh scientific language , but it’s still a cartoon.
Working from scanty evidence, if we might be so kind as to call it that, scientists reasoned (if we may call it that) that Mr. Erectus evolved his thick skull because the other guys were beatin’ on him: in their words, a lot of Erectus’ anatomical features “evolved in response to interpersonal violence.”
I can’t tell whether this is bosh or tommyrot. Are they really asking us to imagine untold generations of Alley Oop conking each other on the noggin until thicker skulls “evolve”?
Yeah, yeah, I know, natural selection and all that: the lads with the thin skulls get clubbed out of existence, and only the ones with the thick skulls survive to make bambinos with thick skulls, chips off the old blockhead. Except DNA can be so uncooperative in that regard! It keeps on reproducing the same thing, unless somehow interfered with. But most of those random mutations are either harmful or totally without effect, so the great humanist god, Chance, is called upon to work miracles.
Loaves and fishes, no. Thick skulls from thin skulls, can you gimme halleluia?
Meanwhile it’s 50 degrees outside today on May 15 and there’s a frost warning on for tonight… and you can bet the house that sooner or later some government scientist is going to come along and declare that this has been the warmest May in recorded history, blah-blah-blah…
And they say we Christians believe in silly things.