Translation

So, here's a look at a 'book' (that's what I'm told it is, but it's awfully short to be a book) on paleontology that our school librarian asked me to look at. As he put it,'Just look over it and tell me if you understand it...'

Funny man...

Sixteen big mammals are present at Vialette. (Here he means 16 different fossilized mammal species) This site has given one of the most important collections of Auvergne tapirs which is a species closely linked to a closed and very wet environment which corresponds to the presence of two mastodons. Some species such as the Borson mastodon and the Auvergne tapir show the presence of scattered forests and when this environment disappeared some hundred thousands years later because of a drop in temperature, they did not survive.

In 1842, the museum was made a dontation by Adolphe Richond des Brus of a hyena skull remains which had been probably been discovered by a farmer. According to Boule (1893), Aymard discovered the skull of Pachycrocuta brevirostris in 1843. The site was searched by Aymard at least during the periods from 1842 to 1846 and 1851-1852, then by Schraub in 1913 and from 1927 to 1928. The last excavations were made by Eugène Bonifay from 1966 to 1973 which revealed lakeside levels containing the fauna already described by Aymard.

The powerful sedimentary series described from Eugène Bonifay's survey would result from the presence of a paleo-lake settled in a volcanic system of the maar kind. From the fluvio-lacustrine sediments in the highest part of the filling we get to real lakeside deposits in the lower part.

A cold and dry climate settled and will alternate with more temperate periods, it is the alteration between glacial periods and interglacials. The mammoth steppe spread over a large part of the territory, leaving the mountain summits to conifer forests. During the glacial periods, the natural relief of the Haute-Loire put up impassable barriers, hence the Loire and Allier were the main areas for passage.

His food was mainly composed of soft plants (leaves, shrubs) as it is suggested by the small heights of his long molars and the few number of its enamel lamels working like planes. He will live in the Haute-Loire towards 700,000-600,000 years. Mammoth's molars are composed of long enamel strips linked together by cement. The first three molars and the three definitive one follow each other in each mandible or maxillary.

So, I don't know if that gives you a good idea that this was really difficult. It was all about paleontology and all of these words are just echnical words that kind of get thrown around. Also, this is supposed to be a book for people with little scientific knowledge. Also, after looking at all this, it's hard to show you all how unclear his writing was. Some of these are just samples which kind of make sense, but the organization was terrible and he would just throw out names, scientific terms, names of towns without explaining anything. So, its entirety, it is next to impossible to learn anything from what was written, much less get a clear idea of what happened.

Anyway, I thought some of those were kind of funny, even if maybe it's not evident here how unclear and difficult it was to correct some of this writing. Actually, he and I communicate by email, so that was the hardest part: to to know what suggestions to suggest to him without talking to him (for example, is 700,000-600,000 700,000-600,000 years ago or between 700,000 and 600,000 B.C., and it was little things like this throughout 15 or so pages single-spaced paper that I had to type all the questions I had for him as well as list all the options I thought possible. Since he was only going to give me the manuscript once, I wanted to give him all my possible knowledge, but to that all in an email takes some major work.

Anywho!!! Everything's going well otherwise. Saw 'Alice in Wonderland' last night, but was not impressed. Has anyone else seen it? Maybe it was a bit better in English.

xoxo

Meg

Catch-up

Okay, so in the last, oh month or so, here's some things that I've been up to:

Last weekend, Julien and I road-tripped it with another couple to a theme park about 5 hours away, near a town called Poitiers, and that was fun. The theme park is called "Futuroscope", and it's a kind of technology-based theme park. (Doesn't that sentence just make you want to go?) Anyway, they used all kinds of sight and touch stuff to simulate different things. Example: car racing: we were in seats that moved and jerked around while the video from the point of view of the driver was projected on the screen in front of us. A lot of the park were different variations of this type of thing. However, they did have a planetarium where they showed a lot of "cosmic collisions" instead of just the night sky. One of the collisions they showed was how the earth and moon were made. Apparently, the moon and the earth collided into each other, and the moon was all in fragments which kept rotating around the earth because of the earth's gravitational pull. And all of these fragments kept colliding into each other and melding together and pretty soon all of these fragments got stuck together, and voilà, moon.

Um, what else...they had a big IMAX screen which not only projected the image in front of your face, but also below your feet (the chairs were on a plexiglass floor), so you had the feeling that you were flying over all of these nature scenes they showed. So that was cool. We saw a 40-minute 3D movie, which I fell asleep in (might I add that we left for Futuroscope at 5 a.m. on Saturday and got there at about 11 a.m.). Um, I didn't know about this movie before I came to France, and it's an American movie, but everybody seems to know about it here, it's called "Arthur and the Minimoys", and it's about this family who has a community of tiny people living in their backyard, and the grandson learns how to shrink himself to save them. So, they fly around in ladybug cars....sooooo, they had this attraction, and we got in "ladybug" cars which moved and everything, and we got 3D glasses, and then the image of the race was projected on the screen in 3D, and then we got blasted with water and air, and got "stung" by bees from the back of our seats. So, that kind of thing. And then there were also huge IMAX dome screens that we saw a movie about the ocean in 3D and then there was another about New Orleans and before and after Katrina and how fragile the bayou ecosystems are there. SO, it was kind of an ecological/technological park. So, it was cool, but it was quite cold and almost all of the waiting lines were out in the cold and were about 30 minutes each.

Then, for St. Patty's Day, a guy that works in the school's library is in an Irish band and they were playing at a local music gig place/restaurant, so a bunch of us assistants went and did some Irish dancing, and it turned out to be a nice night.