Salt is complicated, in that people's experience with salt has changed dramatically in recent times.

"It is striking that helpful and friendly people are considered ‘sweet' because taste would seem to have little in common with personality or behavior."

"You should see tumors in these animals, but we have very [few?] descriptions of that"

With a little global warming, they'd be goldmines for hydro power too.

As Baxter Stockman once said:

Okay, those guys might have an edge on the toads.

Rewatching TNG episodes on Netflix . . . some of the things those characters went through should have fundamentally transformed them for the rest of the series. That episode where Picard lives an entire lifetime as somebody else (including having a wife and raising children to adulthood) . . . that wouldn't be…

Didn't hurt that, 40 million years ago, Africa and South America were probably 20-25% closer than they are now (given that they separated maybe 140-150 million years ago).

And seedless watermelon don't reproduce sexually, on account of being seedless. The toads are definitely the winners in the "how difficult can you make your reproduction" contest.

Thanks to this article, and the subsequent Wikipedia dive, I have now learned:

The bones below the jaw are the hyoid bones. They're not always preserved. They would have attached to the tongue.

You all scoff, but these things are dangerous. I was killed by a champagne cork just the other day.

In the Batman Universe, big gatherings like "Occupy Wall Street" are magnets for the grandiose mass-murder plots of Gotham's dime-a-dozen asylum patients. The Joker would be gassing protesters out of a giant clown blimp in 5 minutes flat.

Triceratops was not a mistake.

Dinosaur torsos are kind of shaped like shampoo bottles . . . so they like to roll over onto the wide flat side, rather than the narrow back/belly. Plus the weight of the legs helps pull the carcass over.

Which would be more effective in combat . . . to have soldiers who aren't afraid, or enemies who aren't afraid?

After the Terra Nova colony establishes itself, humanity spreads to cover the globe, eventually devastating the Cretaceous ecology. Descendents of the original colonists discover a second-space time rift which allows them to send a second small group of humans back to the Permian, in hopes of saving humanity for real…

The article was changed after I made that comment.

If I may propose a different (uninformed, wildly speculative) interpretation of this data:

"From a strictly evolutionary perspective, pessimism is a bad idea. After all, if you're constantly assuming bad things will happen, you'll probably be ill-prepared when good things inevitably come along."