Great Beasts Research Articles

Is Biblical Studies Stuck in Antiquarianism? The Case of Behemoth and Leviathan

Abstract In this article, a trajectory is traced that demonstrates that the soft consensus that Behemoth and Leviathan are the hippo and croc, respectively, is part of a larger phenomenon whereby these originally monstrous beasts have become domesticated and demythologized or their mythological nature rationalized. The great beasts as natural Egyptian animals only goes back to a 17th century Huguenot who was an etymologist, orientalist, antiquarian, and minister. This process of/domestication/demythologization in a weak form actually can be discerned in the Hebrew Bible itself but reaches its zenith during the Enlightenment. In the article, a trajectory of protest against this process is mapped out. And, finally, monsters are shown to be important theodicean agents in the ancient world as well as representing important mechanisms of cultural identity.

Lands of Frosts and Great Beasts: Poland and Lithuania in the Accounts of Papal and Venetian Diplomats

Abstract As surprising as it may seem at the first sight, one of the most detailed fragments of a diplomatic report summarizing a mission to Poland and Lithuania written in 1572 by a secretary of a papal nuncio dealt with an animal – the European bison. In fact, representations of nature were omnipresent in sixteenth-century papal and Venetian diplomatic accounts about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The main aim of this article is to demonstrate how and why climate, landscapes, natural resources, and animals came to be an important part of early modern diplomatic communication.

Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism, by Caroline Hovanec

Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism, by Caroline Hovanec

Mammoth-Killer Impact Flunks Out

After a new study failed to find nanodiamonds, impact experts are flatly rejecting outsiders' claims that an impact 12,900 years ago devastated the megafauna.

The Ethical Disconnect of the Circus: Humanity's Acceptance of Performing Elephants - Author's Note Added 2 Feb 2011

In America, People grow up attending circuses and most people love them. The purpose of this article is to provide information about elephants and convince current circus attendees and people with fond memories of childhood circuses not to attend animal circuses in the future. This is not an easy task. I have been writing on various issues of Animal Rights (AR) and other animal-centric subjects for some time now and the plight of the elephant is one very dear to me. It is true that all performing animals suffer, but these great beasts seems to suffer more and it is my vain hope that this small article will in someway increase awareness about them and help them, whom I love so much.

The Emersonian Choice: Connections between Dragons and Humans in Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle

Life and death—more of Le Guin’s famous dualities? But what of wildness? These creatures are initially presented in A Wizard of Earthsea as beings with language and thought, beings whose native tongue is Old or True Speech, the Language of Making, the speech wizards use in their Art-Magic. Yet, they are great beasts, whose fire ravages and destroys. In Tehanu we learn that dragons and humans were once “one people, one race, winged, and speaking the True Language. . .But in time nothing can be without becoming” (11). Change is the one constant. Some of the dragon-people stayed in the west choosing wildness, flight, and freedom while others sailed east, choosing knowledge and treasure building, learning, making, and shaping. Or, as I am going to argue: dragons chose to be Nature; humans chose to be a part of nature. We made the Emersonian choice of the active and connected

The Apocalyptic Ibsen: When We Dead Awaken

And four great beasts came up from the sea.... ... second, like a bear. It was raised up on one side, and had three ribs in its mouth, between its teeth. And they said thus it: Arise, devour much flesh. Daniel 7.4-5 Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he ... causes all ... Receive ... the mark ... of the beast Revelation 13.11, 16, 17 And he carried me away in the Spirit a great and high mountain.... Revelation 21.10 And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal... Revelation 22.1 And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God.... sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. Revelation 20.12-13 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Revelation 21.1 Those familiar with Ibsen's dramatic epilogue, as he called his final play, When We Dead Awaken, may recall in it versions of these images from the Book of Daniel and from Revelation. Though the play immediately linked apocalypse through its title, the mind rightly rebels at identifying the canny ironist Ibsen with the fevered imagery of the classic apocalyptic texts, their candles, seals, beasts, whores, horned dragons, and women clothed in the sun. An Artaud might go in this direction, maybe a German expressionist, but not Ibsen. Ibsen would be a classicist, a romantic, a Scribean, a realist, a symbolist, not mention a Hegelian and a feminist, before he would be an apocalyptic. apocalyptic, or perhaps more properly, millennialist, Ibsen has scarcely been explored. An aging artist, his spirited young wife, his spectral former model, and a blood-and-guts bear hunter--a foursome that reconfigures throughout When We Dead Awaken into shifting romantic and allegorical pairings--climb upward on a mountain range pursuing their differing visions of ascent: freedom, excitement, inspiration, retribution. For three of the four the pursuit Life as each conceives it; but for Irene, the half-mad former artist's model swathed in folds of white like a marble figure atop a sarcophagus, the search perhaps for deliverance from torment. At a crucial mountain pass, from which ascent and descent are equally perilous, the bear hunter slings the artist's sexy young wife over his shoulder and heads down the mountain, in the direction of warmth, green, and pleasure. life-denying artist and the life-starved Irene advance ecstatically up from the desolate icy height before us an invisible peak beyond consummate their spiritual union, reawakening life, one supposes, at the highest level of consciousness. And then comes the single most apocalyptic moment in Ibsen-apocalyptic in the popular sense of catastrophic, as well as in its more recondite millenarianism-the avalanche that sweeps away these awakening dead. In Ibsen's dry-eyed portrait of the jaded sculptor Rubek and the group of characters who surround him in the play has been seen either Ibsen's final reckoning with his own life in art, or, in less biographical terms, a meditation on the conflict between artistic dedication and the ordinary life of the senses. On the spectrum of possibilities between Perfection of the life, or of the work, as Yeats offers in The Choice, critics such as Brian Johnston see Ibsen returning, in cyclical fashion, the animalic (92); others see Rubek's and Irene's deadly climb as a triumph of spiritual transcendence; and still others, as in Errol Durbach's delicately ironic reading, see him depicting an impasse between these two modes of existence. In this reading, to move into the abyss of process, sexuality, and change, as do Maja and the bear hunter, is embrace death as surely as transcend life in mythical constructs of the Romantic imagination [147]. …

Escaping the software tar pit

"No scene from prehistory is quite so vivid as that of the mortal struggles of great beasts in the tar pits… Large system programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it…"Everyone seems to have been surprised by the stickiness of the problem, and it is hard to discern the nature of it. But we must try to understand it if we are to solve it."Fred Brooks, 1975Several recent books and reports have confirmed that the software tar pit is at least as hazardous today as it was in 1975. Our research into several classes of models used to guide software development (product models, process models, property models, success models), has convinced us that the concept of model clashes among these classes of models helps explain much of the stickiness of the software tar-pit problem.We have been developing and experimentally evolving an approach called MBASE -- Model-Based (System) Architecting and Software Engineering -- which helps identify and avoid software model clashes. Section 2 of this paper introduces the concept of model clashes, and provides examples of common clashes for each combination of product, process, property, and success model. Sections 3 and 4 introduce the MBASE approach for endowing a software project with a mutually supportive set of models, and illustrate the application of MBASE to an example corporate resource scheduling system. Section 5 summarizes the results of applying the MBASE approach to a family of small digital library projects. Section 6 presents conclusions to date.

The medical importance of cockroaches.

Cockroaches have great significance for the dermatologic finger nails, and other hard parts of the soles of the feet and palms of the hands, nibbled by [the roaches].’’3 Other community, if only because of the many reports and claims implicating the cockroach as a vector for human disease. reports, dating back to the early 1700s and continuing through the 1900s, confirm that roaches will bite humans,4 This review discusses aspects fundamental to cockroach biology and summarizes some of the basic and clinical although there do not appear to be any reports of someone actually dying from these attacks. One writer described the scientific works which contribute to the claims about roaches. roach as ‘‘a destructive insect to clothes, books, c nevertheless, there is a growing population of at least 3500 Roach oddities named species, which range in length from 5 mm to 90 mm.1 Although one is apt to think of roaches primarily as The current view of the roach appears to have come full circle from being an object of man’s longing to an object pests, far less than 1% of roach species actually cause concern for humans;1 however, some of the early records of most people’s loathing. Roaches have been used in one manner or another to treat about 30 medical conditions of human interaction with cockroaches might lead one to think otherwise. Consider these letters to Nature in 1870, of humans, ranging from boils and indigestion to warts and heart disease.4 Specifically, in the mid-1800s, a powder ‘‘A [sailor] was marked for life by [roaches] on board a ship coming home from Jamaica.’’2 The writer goes on to made from dried cockroaches was recommended as a diuretic;6 however, the efficacy of these concoctions has say, ‘‘I have known bread, &c., in the West Indies uneatable from being run over by the small dark Cockroach...while never been substantiated. While roaches are known to be found in kitchens, in the great pale species...is utterly unbearable.’’2 One might think these were great beasts with which to contend, given cabinets, or on counters, even in the most clean homes, they have also been found in other places. Specifically, the following account, ‘‘In some ships infested with these insects, sailors frequently complain of having their toe and roaches have been reported to crawl into the most incon90

Lee Bontecou's “Warnings”

In other days there were the “mouth of truth” and the lion's mouths of the Venetian Inquisition, then, there is the terror of the yawning mouths of cannons, of violent craters, of windows opened to receive your flight without return, and the jaws of great beasts; and now we have Lee's warnings.

Will the Dinosaurs Rise Again?

The movie Jurassic Park has engendered much excitement and some speculation among both the general public and the scientific community as to the possibilities of genetic research and molecular preservation.But will the dinosaurs “rise” again? Will scientists be able to ‘clone’ a dinosaur out of bits of genetic material and once again unleash these great beasts to walk the earth? If it is possible, should it be attempted? If not, why are time, money and effort being expended by several groups of investigators in attempts to isolate and characterize the DNA of these extinct creatures, if such DNA can possibly still exist? What can we hope to learn from these efforts, should they be fruitful?

Guest Editorial: Caribou, Muskoxen, Lichen - Reflections on Northern Research

The June 1990 issue of Arctic carried a lament by Ed Struzik about the possible demise of the Boreal Institute and the lack of support for northern research in Canada. This editorial begged a number of questions about the North and research there. What is northern research about? Expanding the frontiers of knowledge? Academic publication, promotion and prestige? Aiding northern development - or conservation? Informing policy makers in Ottawa - or empowering local residents? Getting off campus for the summer and into a less claustrophobic place? ... [The author discusses his experiences in northern research and the northern dilemma - to exploit or conserve - and concludes with this wisdom:] ... from the North I carried away first-hand knowledge of three living forms and their fate that point the way to possible futures for the North - and Canada. Caribou that fight tangle their antlers and die when they cannot free themselves. Muskoxen, when attacked by wolves, form a circle, horns pointing outwards. This ancient strategy provided no defence against Peary and his people, who shot down these great beasts for food: we found their heaped, bullet-shattered skulls in northern Elesmere Island. We also found many forms of lichen, flourishing where nothing else grew, drawing sustenance from air and rock. Lichens are symbioses of algae and fungi, two completely different forms of life. Through mutual aid, each serving the need of the other for nutrition, they produce a myriad of colourful forms that cannot be created by separate organisms. Lichen are not theories, concepts, hypotheses or even paradigms. They are living presences and witnesses to the necessity of cooperation for survival in a vast and hostile land at the very end of the earth. They indicate how traditional ways and modern science, northern peoples and southern in-comers, theory and practice, rational and intuitive ways, the North and the nation can be developed. They point the middle way to a North that can be more than a place to loot and leave - or where only man is vile. And from our northern experience, in science and in the daily struggle to solve practical problems, Canadians can carry messages about cooperation and symbiosis to a world weary of conflict and confrontation.

A BIOENGINEER'S ANALYSIS OF VERTEBRATE GIANTS

This is a dinosaur book with a difference. There are no color plates showing imaginative restorations of the great beasts in deadly combat or guarding their young. Description is minimal and selective. Instead, basic principles of engineering are applied to giant extinct vertebrates-the largest reptiles of land, sea, and air, and also the biggest birds and mammals-in order to learn how they may have lived. This is an idea book, not a gee whiz story: we learn much about the animals, but many answers are tentative; the game of the analytical process is no less important than the goal of understanding. Functional morphologists who are familiar with R. McNeill Alexander's research (and few would not be) know that he can plunge into difficult mathematics in the second paragraph, yet he can also write clearly for a general audience. This book is direct and not difficult to follow. It is suitable for all biology buffs, from high school students to professors. The former should know enough of the language of algebra to follow easy equations; the latter, according to specialty, may care to skip paragraphs about kinds of dinosaurs or the basic principles of natural selection, surface-to-volume ratios, and aerodynamics. Each of the 13 chapters ends with a succinct summary and a list of principal sources, and we are told what material was taken from each reference. Many titles cited are from Alexander's prolific laboratory and attest to the author's broad interests and versatility. The 164 text pages are profusely illustrated by 83 figures and 11 tables. The figures are simple line drawings which are usually clear; the outline of an elephant or Triceratops is sufficient because laymen already know what these animals look like. The same is not true of dinosaur pelves or sections of tooth rows, however, and such drawings (several lacking keys to their orientation) are barely adequate. The first chapter introduces the dinosaurs and reminds the reader how fossils are preserved, age-dated, and named. In the second chapter, two methods are given for finding the weights of extinct quadrupeds. Other workers have summed the circumferences of the upper leg bones (humerus and femur) of a wide range of modern mammals and have plotted the values against the masses of the animals. The regression obtained is then extended to include dinosaurs. Instead, Alexander first approximates the volume of various dinosaurs by weighing models (from the Natural History Museum, London) in and out of water (one gram of displaced

Ontogeny and phylogeny.

When I have the opportunity to watch a bright young surgeon just a few years out of medical school as he casually stops his patient's heart and proceeds confidently with barely imaginable technical procedures while the patient's physiology is totally dependent on iatrogenic support, I feel like Darwin did as he looked at dinosaur bones in Patagonia. Darwin's companion and commanding officer, Captain FitzMorris, was a rigidly orthodox Roman Catholic who saw in the great strata full of dinosaur bones evidence that the Lord's hand had indeed been busy during the few millennia since Genesis; he believed these must be bones of great beasts who died in the flood. Darwin viewed these findings differently: he recognized this paleontological treasure as evidence that far, far more was there than could be accounted for in the limited years of Biblical history. Likewise, we know that the evolutionary processes that led to my

13 Utilization of Bison in the Great Plains

The Olsen-Chubbuck Site is a bison kill. Therefore, it is pertinent to review some of the characteristics of the quarry, for if the archaeologist is to understand the nature and meaning of such kills, he must first understand something about the nature and habits of the bison, particularly the characteristics which made these great beasts susceptible to the techniques of mass slaughter employed by the Indians who hunted them. Moreover, he must understand the methods which the Indians used to kill and butcher the bison, in order to extract the maximum amount of information from his excavations.If the archaeologist is dealing with prehistoric kills, he must assume that the habits of prehistoric and historic bison were essentially the same, and that the methods of hunting and utilizing them were similar. There can be no doubt that acculturation of the Indian to the use of gun and horse changed, in some cases drastically, the hunting methods of the historic Indians. Yet, the techniques observed by the earliest explorers of interior North America must have remained essentially unchanged over thousands of years. If these assumptions are valid, then we are in a position to comprehend and interpret the evidence recovered in our excavations of bison kills.

Man and Bear in Europe

The faunal environment of man, as is well known, has profoundly affected his mental as well as his physical life. The Altamira and other animal-drawings made by Palaeolithic man, whether regarded as disinterested efforts at pure art or as magical symbols intended to ensure success in the chase, are sufficient evidence of the extent to which the cave bear, the bison, the mammoth, and other great beasts figured in the minds of their human contemporaries. Professor Othenio Abel considers that Mousterian man associated certain cult-conceptions with the bears he had killed, and kindred ideas are still found in remote parts of the world. Finds of actual bear remains in more or less clear association with human remains or artifacts are of course numerous. Confining ourselves to Great Britain, bones attributed to Ursus spelaeus were ‘ very common ’ at Paviland cave, Glamorgan, which yielded also artifacts covering the period from Mousterian to the end of Aurignacian times. Cat’s Hole, Long Hole, and Hoyle’s Mouth, all in South Wales ; Kent’s cavern in Devonshire ; King Arthur’s cave in the Wye valley ; Aveline’s Hole, Gough’s cave, and Wookey Hole in the Mendips ; Ffynnon Beuno cave in the vale of Clwyd ; the Victoria cave in Yorkshire ; Creswell Crags and Langwith cave in Derbyshire ; are other sites which have yielded both remains of bear and human artifacts of various periods.

Book Reviews

THIS remarkable work should be read by all zoologists and others interested in animal life. It consists of what can best be described as a series of vivid verbal vignettes of incidents observed at Hagenbechs Stellingen zoo and elsewhere, and reveals much of the characters and temperaments of the great beasts and birds lodged in such establishments. The thirty-two magnificent photographic illustrations are as striking as the text itself. The translation is very well done.

Book Reviews

THIS remarkable work should be read by all zoologists and others interested in animal life. It consists of what can best be described as a series of vivid verbal vignettes of incidents observed at Hagenbechs Stellingen zoo and elsewhere, and reveals much of the characters and temperaments of the great beasts and birds lodged in such establishments. The thirty-two magnificent photographic illustrations are as striking as the text itself. The translation is very well done.

Book Reviews

THIS remarkable work should be read by all zoologists and others interested in animal life. It consists of what can best be described as a series of vivid verbal vignettes of incidents observed at Hagenbechs Stellingen zoo and elsewhere, and reveals much of the characters and temperaments of the great beasts and birds lodged in such establishments. The thirty-two magnificent photographic illustrations are as striking as the text itself. The translation is very well done.