Trump's State Department Echoes Hillary's State Department -- Until Hillary Flipped -- September 21, 2018

Keystone XL will not have material adverse environmental impact.

TransCanada Corp plans to start construction in 2019, spokesman Matthew John said.
The company’s Chief Executive Russ Girling said last month that it could make a final investment decision on the project late this year or in early 2019, pending some regulatory approvals and court challenges.

My most recent "long" post on the Keystone XL was July 31, 2018.

Keystone XL milestones here.

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Friday Night At Barnes and Noble

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Steve Brusatte, c. 2018.

First note here.

Geologic time: the Permian Period, Paleozoic Era, immediately preceding the Age of Dinosaurs

Mesozoic Era: the Age of Dinosaurs -- Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous

Final 30 million years of the Triassic (252 - 201 million years ago)

• early dinosaurs struggling; competing with giant salamanders
• one huge continent: Pangea -- started breaking apart; volcanic eruptions
• Pangea splits: water rushes in to the void, becomes the Atlantic Ocean
• the volcanic lava and noxious gases: biggest mass extinction in the history of life
• a mass die-off that claimed at least 30% of all species
• paradoxically, the mass extinction favored the small dinosaurs
• the Palisades, western cliffs of the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side; a sill; formed with Pangea split; formed at the end of the Triassic
• age of Nixon: Riker Hill Fossil Site, Livingston, NJ; the story of Paul Olsen 
• Newark Basin; a rift basin
• smaller rift basins all along the eastern seaboard; the tearing up caused by Pangea splitting; think of pizza being pulled apart
• the Newark Basin: Morocco; Brazil
• the footprints of dinosaurs along the eastern seaboard
• then the volcanic eruptions went into high gear
• counter-intuitively: the rise of the big dinosaurs: they became more diverse; more abundant, and larger
• volcanoes run out of lava and the 600,000-year reign of terror ends
• the world (early Jurassic) is now a very different place than it was in the Late Triassic
• almost every animal alive had now disappeared; one exception -- the only pseudosuchians that made it through the great Pangean breakup were a few types of primitive crocodiles, a handful of battle-worn stragglers that would eventually evolve into the modern alligators and crocodiles but would never enjoy the same success they had in the Late Triassic; pseudosuchians: false crocodiles)
• somehow dinosaurs were the victors
• no good answer why they survived the earthquakes, the noxious gases, the lava
• the Jurassic Period marks the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs proper
• but remember, the first true dinosaurs entered 30 million years earlier, during the Late Triassic
• but with the break-up of Pangea, the dinosaurs pretty much had the world to themselves
• the evolution of the sauropods
• Ischigualasto (Argentina)
• sauropods: everywhere; but failed to achieve full potential because they could not survive the deserts
• roamed everywhere; now finding giant sauropods in Scotland, Isle of Skye
• Dugald Ross; Ellishadder; very Tokienesque; Gaelic; the Staffin Museum; Jurassic fossils
• p. 108; we'll stop there -- begins the story of the giant sauropods 

From wiki:

Pseudosuchia ("false crocodiles") is one of two major divisions of Archosauria and includes living crocodilians and all archosaurs more closely related to crocodilians than to birds (what are often called "crocodilian-line archosaurs"). Since 2011 it has replaced “Crurotarsi” when inconsistencies were found in the definition of the latter name.

The sister clade to the pseudosuchia: the Avemetatarsalia: bird-line archosaurs, including pterosaurs and dinosaurs (the latter including birds).

Archosaurs: ruling reptiles. Living representatives are crocodiles and birds. Archosaurs: diapsid amniotes.

From wiki:

The mammals represent the only living Synapsida, which together with the Sauropsida form the Amniota clade. 

The early synapsid mammalian ancestors were sphenacodont pelycosaurs, a group that produced the non-mammalian Dimetrodon.

At the end of the Carboniferous period, this group diverged from the sauropsid line that led to today's reptiles and birds.

The line following the stem group Sphenacodontia split-off several diverse groups of non-mammalian synapsids—sometimes referred to as mammal-like reptiles—before giving rise to the proto-mammals (Therapsida) in the early Mesozoic era.

The modern mammalian orders arose in the Paleogene and Neogene periods of the Cenozoic era, after the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, and have been among the dominant terrestrial animal groups from 66 million years ago to the present.

Okay, enough of this.