The Market, Energy, And Political Page, Part 3, T+46 -- September 28, 2018 -- WTI Over $73

WTI: up almost 2%; up over a dollar; should close solidly above $73.

The market: not going to go through them again; pretty much unchanged from earlier this morning. But that WTI of $73,49 going into the weekend is really, really bullish.

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The Dinosaur Page

By the time I reached adulthood I was pretty much convinced that dinosaurs had had their 15 minutes of fame. Like the amphibians (who truly had only 15 minutes of fame), it appeared the dinosaurs were a dead-end branch.

Wow, was I wrong (and almost everyone else).

The dinosaurs, of course, never died out. They live on today as birds.

Not only do dinosaurs live on, but we continue to learn much from them, and much of what we learn can be used elsewhere.

It seems every time I buy the newest book on dinosaurs, it's obsolete almost as soon as it arrives in the mail. This past week we have another example. I just finished reading Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, c. 2018.

Now, this story: the largest dinosaur of the Jurassic period ever found. 

By the way, before going any further, it must be noted that the writer of this article made a huge mistake that was discovered only after the article was published. The writer originally said that the newly identified dinosaur was the largest dinosaur ever found. But then I read this from the article, a screenshot.

From the article:

A new study published Thursday in Current Biology reveals that Ledumahadi mafube, a Brontosaurus relative, could have weighed 12 metric tons. That's approximately 26,000 pounds. Its fossils were discovered in South Africa.

A different dinosaur called the Argentinosaurus huinculensis has been previously cited by other scientists as being the largest dinosaur at approximately 80 tons (160,000 pounds), and lived during the Late Cretaceous period around 99.6 million years ago.

So, how does that compute? How can the  Ledumahadi mafube be the biggest dinosaur of all time when it weighed only 26,000 pounds, compared to the Argentinosaurus huinculensis, at 160,000 pounds?

The Ledumahadi mafube was a dwarf compared to the A. huinculensis.

The scientists quickly notified the writer, Bonnie Burton, that the L. mafube was the largest dinosaur in the Jurassic period, but not the largest dinosaur ever.

Not by a long shot.

26,000 pounds vs 160,000 pounds.

This also explains why the link was taken down almost immediately by Matt Drudge when he saw the correction, and that this newly discovered dinosaur was a dwarf compared to its cousin.

By the way, "ledumahadi" translates to "a giant thunderclap at dawn" in the Sesotho language.

Mafube? Mafube Local Municipality is an administrative area in the Fezile Dabi District of the Free State in South Africa. The name is a Sesotho word meaning "dawning of the new day".