The flood and things that lived

Last weekend I had a plan to go to Anavilhanas national park, which is some way up Rio Negro from Manaus. In the park there is the second largest river archipelago in the world. However, during the week I got a huge inspiration to do some world and character building for the thing I'm writing, and since those come way, way too rarely, I decided to make this one count and stayed at home and basically spent five days in Wikipedia reading through articles about extinct life forms. (If you just want to read about cool animals instead of the flood at my house, you can skip the part with the pictures.)

And I don't regret it. Not only because I got many, many hours of research done, but also because at about half past three on Saturday afternoon my ceiling started dripping water again.
You may remember the dripping ceiling from about a month ago, if you bothered reading the post about my terrible week. I don't blame you if you didn't, it was essentially just me complaining about everything.
Anyway, on Thursday one of my roommates noticed also the garage ceiling (which is right next to my room) was dripping, so on Friday morning a plumber came over and fixed that. About an hour after he left, my ceiling started dripping again. I have no idea what he did up there, but yeah, my ceiling was dripping, and I was annoyed. So we called the plumber back and he fixed what ever was making the ceiling leak.

His fix worked for a little over a day. And that's why I'm happy I was home on Saturday afternoon when the ceiling started to leak again. I was sitting in my hammock, when the dripping started. I groaned to myself, because this was seriously getting old. So I got the mattress and the hammock out of the way, and put a plate under the leak. In about half a minute I realised that would not be enough, and went out to get the biggest kettle we have, which is only a few liters, but bigger than the plate. In another few minutes I realised the kettle would not be enough, because the dripping had turned to something closer to a shower. So Iran around the house, trying to find someone who knows how to cut the water off, and I am so happy I wasn't alone at home. I moved the mattress and all my electronics out of the room, tried to empty the kettle fast enough that my room wouldn't completely overflow, put our big trashcan under the second practically-shower leak in the hallway that had appeared there, and started scooping the water off the floor. (You can't actually see the amount of water on the floor here very well, but I can tell you my floor is not actually shiny enough to reflect things.)

And there was a lot of water. This was not a small leak. Me and one of my housemates spent an hour moving the water out of my room and the hall and pushing it outside using one (well, two) of those things you use in showers and swimming halls and what ever to guide the water into the right place on the floor so it's drained. At the end of the hour, the floor in the hallway was not exactly dry, but dry enough to dry quickly on its own. My ceiling was still dripping (despite the fact that the water had been turned off an hour earlier), but the floor was dry enough there too that I decided that there wasn't more I could do before the dripping stopped. So I went out to get some ice cream, because ice cream makes everything better.

And I found avocado ice cream! I'd heard that avocado ice cream is a thing here more than two months ago, but I hadn't seen it until now, despite the fact that I'd been looking for it. It didn't really taste like avocado, though, if you ask me. It just tasted sweet.
Apparently avocado is eaten here as a sweet thing, not as a salty-food-thing like we're used to. Although to be fair, the avocados they get here are different to those we get in Finland. The avocados here are big and smooth, and sweeter than the avocados we're used to in Finland. They also get those normal avocados here, but they're apparently imported and expensive. Then again, since they're imported and expensive in Finland too, I wouldn't so much say that they're expensive, just that the local avocados are very cheap.
Anyway, when I got back home the ceiling was still dripping, though now only dripping, so I scooped some more water off the floor and got to doing some other things. The dripping finally stopped around seven, three hours after the water had been turned off.
So that was great. I'm just happy we live in a house without doorsteps and where you can just sweep the water directly out the door. It would have been way, way worse if I was living in an apartment, or a place with doorsteps. Oh, and the fact that our floors are ceramic tile instead of wood or something is also good. It can take the flood.

Ok, enough about the flood.
Before the house started flooding, I wanted to tell you about some of the highlights of my research into the past lifeforms. I suppose you might be wondering why I'm researching those for a story. Shortly explained the story is located on a tidally locked planet, which means I basically have to invent the kind of life they have there, and ancient, now-extinct animals are a great source of ideas for creatures that are very different from the current ones. I also want to do the life there well, because my main character is a monk of the god of terrestrial life, which means he's really familiar with the plants and animals there, which means I need to be too.
Anyway. Here are some of the most interesting things I've found so far during my hours on Wikipedia.

Chalicotheres (46.2-0.78 Mya = million years ago) were a relative of horses. That's not so weird, it turns out there are a lot of things that are relatives of horses. What is weird, is that despite only eating leaves, they (well one lineage of them) had claws, which they used to pull the tree branches down to better reach the higher leaves. And, to avoid breaking those claws when walking, they evolved to walk on their knuckles. Like gorillas. What. Actually, I already knew about them before hand, because the youtube channel Eons did a video about them a few weeks back. You should watch it.

Also related to horses (probably a direct ancestor, if i'm not mistaken) were these animals called Mesohippus (30-40 Mya), which I guess basically means half-horse. Either way, they were still using more than one toe for walking, though most of the effort was on one. (Horses only walk on one toe, in case someone reading this didn't know. That's why it seems it doesn't have toes.) Anyway, Mesohuppus were only ~60 cm tall.

Mesonychia (66-33 Mya) was a group of ungulates (which include everything from pigs to hippos to deers to, yes, horses) that were carnivorous and apparently resembled wolves somewhat, except that they had hooves on all their four toes. Yes, a wolf-like thing with four hooves on each foot. (For reference, horses have one hoof per foot, and pigs and cows have two.)

Kopidodon (~56 Mya) was basically like a squirrel, except it wasn't a rodent, had huge canine teeth and was over a meter long.

Silvacola (~50 Mya) was a 5-6 cm long hedgehog. That's a tiny hedgehog.

Some pterosaurs (the flying reptiles that were not dinosaurs, 228-66 Mya) had practically fur. Well, it wasn't fur, exactly, because it had developed completely separately from mammalian hair, and has a different kind of structure, which is why it's not called hair, but instead pycnofibers. But it's practically fur.
Also, pterosaurs weren't awkward on ground, but (at least a lot of them) could probably walk or run perfectly well. Some even swam. Also, the biggest pterosaurs were the size of a giraffe. (There's also an Eons video about them. You should watch that too.)
One more pterosaur fact: the few-days-old pterosaurs are called flaplings.

If I understood right, there are three separate lineages of aquatic reptiles that used to live in the world, mosasaurs (101-66 Mya), ichthyosaurs (250-90 Mya) and plesiosaurs (204-66 Mya). They did actually apparently live at the same time for a while there, some 100 million years ago.

Tree ferns are a thing. I actually knew they had been a thing, but then they died and turned into the coal and oil we dig out of the ground today. So yes, I knew there used to be ferns that grew like things that long ago. What I didn't know is that there still are tree ferns around today, some 600-700 species of them. In case you're wandering what they're like, tree ferns are just simply ferns that grow at least a little bit of a trunk, so the leaves are higher from the ground. But yeah, the fact that they still exist came as a complete surprise to me. I think it's cool. I've always liked the idea of fern trees.

Cliona patera is a species of sponge (yes, still is) that grows in a cup-shape, which is why it's often called Neptune's cup. The cup can grow to be 5 meters in diameter. In the 1900's it was thought to be harvested to extinction, but some more were found 2011. Why were they harvested? Well, for example to be babies' bathtubs.

There is blue amber. Yeah, I got a bit sidetracked and ended up reading about fossil resins too, because I figured there might be something interesting there too. And there was. Blue amber. It's only found in the Dominican Republic, because that's where the chemical conditions have happened to be right. the amber looks normal in artificial light, but out in the sunlight it gets a blue hue and it's gorgeous. And expensive, because it's rare and only found in a small area. Though I actually googled it, because I was curious, and it's not as expensive as wikipedia made it sound. Oh, more expensive than regular amber, but I found one online store that sells apparently hand-made silver jewelery with blue amber, and the cost of the rings and necklaces was up from 100 USD.

Also, there was (is? I only read about the fossils) magnetic bacteria. Wikipedia says it better than I could: "Within the magnetotactic bacteria, magnetite and greigite crystals are biosynthesized within organelles called magnetosomes. These magnetosomes form chains within the bacterial cell and in doing so, provide the organism with a permanent magnetic dipole. The organism uses it for geomagnetic navigation, to align itself with the Earth's geomagnecit field and to reach the optimal position along vertical chemical gradients."

Oookay. I think that's probably enough for this week again.

There are so many cool things in the world.

~matu