(Roughly) Daily

Among the many chastening revelations that come of aging, surely the most disturbing is the discovery that the dinosaurs whose names and characteristics one so lovingly committed to childhood memory didn’t actually exist…  at least not in forms that even vaguely resemble the ones one knew and loved.

Consider the pterodactyl, that leathery flying lizard, denizen of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World,

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and inspiration for Rodan.

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Turns out that no such beast actually existed.  Rather, the march of science has revealed, there were a family of creatures, Pterosaurs, with rather different– though not necessarily less cinematic– characteristics.  For instance,

Caulkicephalus trimicrodon (illustration: Luis Rey)

Happily, Dave Hone has created Pterosaur.net— a font of remedial information.

As we come to terms with the advance of knowledge, we might give a tip o’ the birthday hat to Susan Sontag, the essayist (“Against Interpretation,” “Illness as Metaphor”), critic (“Notes on Camp,” “On Photography”), novelist (Death Kit, The Volcano Lovers, In America— which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2000), and Berkeley grad; she was born on this date in 1933.

Susan Sontag, by (her partner) Annie Leibovitz