FRDT Author - The Meta Weta

Staying awake is hard... which is why I prefer magic beans to do the hard work for me. There are times when it feels like my sole purpose in life is to consume coffee, which means that I feel obligated to share some information about modern life's favourite bean. And I do mean that, since according to the Wiki of Pedia, ' Over 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed in the world every day .' Yeeps.  So here is a helpful, abbreviated summary of the magic bean we call 'coffee'.  Botany, a.k.a The Species You're Drinking Coffee is a flowering shrub native to Ethiopia, which coincidentally means it's from the same neck of the woods as our species ( no wonder we love it, we evolved right next to it ). There are multiple species of coffee plants, but the most significant ones from a coffee addict's perspective are  Coffea canephora  (also known as 'Robusta' coffee) and C. arabica , the two species which the majority of the world...

Bloody hell, it's been five years since Jurassic World came out and paleontology nerds the world over despaired at ever seeing scientifically accurate dinosaurs in cinema ever again. Bringing up that again wasn't what inspired this post, however. The recent speculative zoology binge I've been on got me thinking: what fun it would be to imagine a dinosaur. Back in the day, Jurassic World had a go and the Indominus Rex ended up being a rather boring design that was simultaneously too exaggerated and not outlandish enough. Naturally, this prompted the palaeontology nerds to rally and come up with much more interesting designs: Jolly good stuff, people. But now we can stop talking about the creatively bankrupt institution that is Hollywood, let's imagine some dinosaurs! First, some ground rules for the process: Our Dinosaurs Must be... - Physically possible. They shouldn't break the laws of physics or biology. - Placed somewhere on the dinosaur family tree....

Picture taken completely out of context.  Extinction is a bummer. It's also somewhat inevitable on a planet that is constantly changing. Seeing as the environment keeps changing, life must change with it or perish.  But you, the person reading this, might be wondering what that has to do with our planet being a world of smaller beasts. First off, you might be thinking that's hogwash. There are plenty of large animals around today: elephants, rhinos, hippos, bison, moose, cattle. Hell, the largest known animal to exist in earth's history lives now in the form of the blue whale: nearly 200 tons and 30 metres of pure Holocene giant.  It's so big, the World Wildlife Fund couldn't fit the entire thing into this picture.  But a look into the recent geological past says otherwise. Millions of years ago, there were animals that w eighed almost 100 tons and could peek into a fifth-story window . Less than a million years ago the world had many more kinds ...