Fossils
Monday, 16 March 2026 17:30![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThe Kotlin Crisis: Earth’s first mass extinction may have been far worse than previously believed
Fossils of the first sea creatures, long assumed to have vanished before a major mass extinction about 550 million years ago called the Kotlin Crisis, have now been found and are providing new details about that time period.
This discovery transforms what once looked like a routine species decline in Earth’s early history into what may be the first catastrophic extinction in animal history.
Second, actually, after the Great Farting Oxygen Event changed the atmosphere from reducing to oxydizing -- almost everything died, except a few archaea that found anoxic refuges and a few organisms that figured out how to use oxygen. But most people forget about that one.
( Read more... )
Fossils of the first sea creatures, long assumed to have vanished before a major mass extinction about 550 million years ago called the Kotlin Crisis, have now been found and are providing new details about that time period.
This discovery transforms what once looked like a routine species decline in Earth’s early history into what may be the first catastrophic extinction in animal history.
Second, actually, after the Great Farting Oxygen Event changed the atmosphere from reducing to oxydizing -- almost everything died, except a few archaea that found anoxic refuges and a few organisms that figured out how to use oxygen. But most people forget about that one.
( Read more... )
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Narrated by Matt Addis.
It’s Summer 1145. Bradecote and Catchpoll, complete with Under Serjeant Walkelin are sent to solve the murder of Walter, the steward of Evesham Abbey. There are tensions between the Sheriff and the Abbot, between Bradecote and the current castellan, and between the Abbey and the castle. It turns out that the Abbey’s steward is not the good man the Abbot thought he was, but a reprehensible individual, guilty of many different crimes. A second murder implicates the castle’s serjeant, who seems to be out of control. Is there a connection? It’s a twisty story which puzzles the Sheriff’s officers until the final revelation. Bradecote and Catchpoll eventually not only solve the present murders but a historical one, too. It’s nice to hear Matt Addis reading the story after Jonathan Keeble’s reading of the previous book I listened to.
Audiobook narrated by Jonathan Keeble.
April 1144. A distinctively dressed corpse is fished out of Flatbury Mill leat on the river. It turns out that he is an Evesham horse dealer who has been stabbed and tipped into the river upstream. Investigations lead Bradecote and Catchpoll (with under-serjeant Walkelin) at first to his young wife (who has a couple of lovers) and the man’s brother, but then they discover that the dead man’s sister has married the ill-tempered lord of Harvington and has died in mysterious circumstances, without her family being invited to the funeral. Is that another murder? There’s a dispute over the ownership of a mill between the lord of Harvington and the Abbey in Evesham, and Harvington has recently hanged a scribe for theft—the same scribe who verified the mill-lease as belonging to Harvington. When a Harvington serving girl is also killed, Walkelin is falsely accused. 
Audiobook narrated by Matt Addis.
