North Dakota Crude Oil Production Down Another 2%; Break-Even Cost For Existing Wells -- $26/Bbl -- August 12, 2016

From SeekingAlpha:

• North Dakota's crude oil production fell 2% in June to 1.03M bbl/day, hitting its lowest level in more than two years.
• The state's Department of Minerals Resources says production may already have dropped below 1 million bopd and could take at least a year to recover if the level is breached.
• But in a positive sign for the industry, the state says the breakeven price for oil production at its existing wells has slipped to $26/bbl, showing that existing production remains profitable for companies that have aggressively cut costs.

**************************

In Search of Deep Time:

Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life

Henry Gee

c. 1999

Deep Time: coined by John McPhee, writer on geology, to distinguish geological time from the scale of time that governs our everyday lives; the concept was developed by James Hutton, Scottish

"Phylogenetic systematics": became known as cladistics; 1950, German entomologist, Willi Hennig

Chapter 1: Nothing Beside Remains
Introduction to cladistics

Chapter 2: Hunting Unicorns
Fishes: more species of fishes than of amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds put together
tetrapods represent a small group of specialized fishes
tetrapods sprang from a subgroup of bony fishes called the Sarcopterygii ("lobe-finned" fishes)
there are four extant non-tetrapod sarcopterygians
chapter provides the author's education (p 60)

Chapter 3: There Are More Things
hypotheses
NeoDarwinist
author challenges Robert T Bakker's suggestion that Triceratops was a galloper

Chapter 4: Darwin and His Precursors
discusses the extinction of the dinosaurs
uses analogy of the Periodic Table to discuss affinities
nature's organization as seen by Linnaeus
discusses the problem of "species"

Chapter 5: The Gang of Four
Donn Rosen, Peter Forey, Colin Patterson, Brian Gardiner: the Gang of Four
1981: 112-page technical monograph
published as an article in the scholarly Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History
argued that lungfishes were the closest living relatives of the tetrapods
used cladistics
discusses "grades" and "clades" (I had not seen "grades" before and it does not seem the term survived the test of time)

Chapter 6: The Being and Becoming of Birds
when did birds become birds (clades and grades)
flight is so difficult and energetic an exercise that birds gave it up as soon as the opportunity presents itself; the world is full of flightless birds; fossil record contains early records of the abandonment of flight

Chapter 7: Are We Not Men
a cladogram of hominid interrelationships
the cladogram is "nicer" than the usual "evolutionary tree we often see; it's easier to work backwards from the right (the "end") to the left (the "beginning")

****************************