Good morning.
Whitewater’s Wednesday will be a sunny day, with a high of fifty-nine. Not a bad Wednesday, at all.
I’ll have a political recap later today of Whitewater’s elections, for Common Council, for the Whitewater Schools referendum, and a post about county election websites from across the area. However you voted, don’t you feel better today, for having voted? I know I do. The day after an election should, fundamentally, always feel better.
In the city today, there will be a meeting of the Landmarks Commission at 5 PM.
Why did the dodo become extinct? Perhaps their demise was more the result of nature than human predation:
An extended drought that struck Mauritius about 4200 years ago turned one of the island’s few sources of fresh water into a muddy death trap for dodos, giant tortoises, and other wildlife, a new study suggests. The excavations have yielded the fossils of small creatures–including insects, bats, and snails–as well as the pollen and seeds of plants that lived in the area, giving scientists a much more comprehensive look at the dodo’s ecosystem.
Mauritius, an island nation in the southwest Indian Ocean about 870 kilometers east of Madagascar, is famed as the home of the dodo, a flightless, turkey-sized relative of pigeons and doves whose name has become synonymous with extinction. Even though dodos died out in the late 1600s, about 80 years after Europeans first colonized the islands, only a few descriptions of the bird exist, and those accounts are often contradictory, says Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, several excavations on the island recovered large amounts of dodo remains, but at the time it wasn’t routine to collect information that could provide ecological context.
See, Sid Perkins’s Death by Dry Spell.
Google’s daily puzzle tests knowledge of biology: “If one monozygotic twin has an innie, is it guaranteed that the other will as well?”