Upwardly Mobile -- June 10, 2022

Billionaire athletes: three but only two are active, if one can consider Tiger Woods still active:

• Michael Jordan
• LeBron James
• Tiger Woods
• my hunch is that Phil Mickelson wants to join this group; well on his way after he joined the LIV Tour, though his endorsements have cratered
  

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Streets of Gold

Link here.

Some suspect the graphic may be "suspect." Germany is listed twice. However, this may be due to the fact that in 1980 (see chart) there were still two "Germanies": East Germany and West Germany. They were not reunited until 1990.

If I'm correct, my hunch is that "East Germany" is the "higher" one and "West Germany" is the "lower" one. 

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The Book Page

Wow, wow, wow.

From Literary Hub today: On discovering the first fossil of a T. rex, Hell Creek, Montana. 

From Literary Hub: Paleontology. 

From the linked essay above:

As the last days of July 1902 ticked away in Hell Creek, Montana, Barnum Brown found himself torn. The party uncovered a Triceratops skull that was in decent ­condition, though its horns were missing. With enough work, it could be “a fine exhibition specimen,” he wrote to Osborn, knowing that would begin to make up for the crushed fossil now sitting in the museum in New York. If anything, the skull would buy him at least one more year of employment.

But he wanted more ...

.... As he looked down into the pit, Brown took in a shape that no human being had ever laid eyes on. “Quarry No. 1 contains the femur, pubes, [partial] humerus, three vertebrae, and two undetermined bones of a large Carnivorous Dinosaur not described by Marsh,” Brown wrote in a letter that evening to Osborn. “I have never seen anything like it...”

In time, the creature would become perhaps the most recognizable animal the world has ever seen, its deadly silhouette and Latin name familiar even to those with no interest in dinosaurs or science. Yet in that moment in the hot August sun, the animal that would soon take the name of Tyrannosaurus rex was entirely new—​an unmistakable set of clues that the history of life was more varied and surreal than anyone had imagined.

.... Brown knew that he was suddenly in a race against time. He had found the only specimen of a creature previously unknown to science, and there was no telling if he or anyone else would ever find another. With less than two months before the broiling landscape would become too cold to allow work to continue, Brown scrambled to uncover as much of the fossil as possible...

... Finally, in October, Brown pulled the last section of the skeleton free. The small team of horses strained under the load, pulling the haul to Miles City in shifts, eventually moving more than fifteen thousand pounds of bones to a boxcar that Osborn had arranged for them. As the first snow of winter fell, Brown watched as nineteen crates of fossils were loaded into the boxcar, a collection that included not only the new carnivorous dinosaur, but also the skeletons of a crocodile-​like Champsosaurus and a Triceratops—​both of which still stand on the floor of the American Museum.

Excerpted from The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World. Copyright (c) 2022 by David K. Randall.