“Tequila“, H.B. SURF REPORT, YouTube
As someone said in this video’s comments, “God does have a sense of humor!” 😉
It’s been one of those weeks, I’m pretty sure I’ll have Saturday’s post out in time, but I needed a break.
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, or whatever is appropriate: and may God bless.
We didn’t get a white Christmas this year, here in Sauk Centre, which isn’t all that unusual.
But it’s definitely winter now. The furnace is still working, happily, and tomorrow morning I’ll find out if the family van will start.
I hope so. It didn’t last Sunday, and I’d rather not miss Mass two weeks running.
Now, I’ll go to the other end of the house. It’s gotten a tad chilly, here at my desk.
Good afternoon, good night, or whatever is appropriate as you read this: and may God bless.
Headlines about Tyrannosaurus rex, scientists, and “what we thought we knew” being wrong started showing up in my news feed last week.
It’s been a while since I talked about dinosaurs, and I found Nicholas R. Longrich and Evan T. Saitta’s research paper: a pre-publication copy, at any rate.
So this week I thought I’d talk about T. rex, Nanotyrannus, and what they’d learned.
That’s what I thought.
Here’s what I wound up with, after diving down delightfully diverse rabbit holes:
Headlines like these started showing up in my news feed last week:1
- “What we thought we knew about T. rex was wrong, researchers say in new study”
New York Post (January 7, 2024)- “Research Resurrects Dinosaur Debate Over ‘Baby T. rex’ That Roamed Wyoming”
Cowboy State Daily (January 7, 2024)- “Nanotyrannus vs. T. rex saga continues: Controversial study ‘doesn’t settle the question at all'”
Live Science (January 3, 2024)- “‘Teenage T. Rex’ skulls belong to different dinosaur, scientists say after decades of debate”
Sky News (January 3, 2024)- “What’s in a Name? The Battle of Baby T. Rex and Nanotyrannus.”
The New York Times (January 2, 2024)
I think the Live Science headline’s quote is right. The Gorgosaurus lancensis — Nanotyrannus — teen T-rex question is not over.
“…But other experts aren’t backing the idea that the fossils belong to Nanotyrannus. ‘The article doesn’t settle the question at all,’ Thomas Carr, a vertebrate paleontologist and an associate professor of biology at Carthage College in Wisconsin, told Live Science in an email. ‘The authors don’t seem to have a solid grasp on growth variation in tyrannosaurs.’…”
“Nanotyrannus vs. T. rex saga continues: Controversial study ‘doesn’t settle the question at all’“, Sascha Pare, Live Science (January 3, 2024)
[emphasis mine]
I’m no expert in dinosaur physiology, so I won’t insist that Nicholas R. Longrich (University of Bath) and Evan Thomas Saitta (University of Chicago) must be right. Or that they must be wrong, because their analysis doesn’t agree with another expert’s.
But I do think that we have a great deal left to learn about dinosaurs in general, and fossils of a sports-model tyrannosaurid — juvenile T. rex — or something else — in particular. And that’s what I’m talking about this week.
I remember when dinosaurs were supposed to be slow-moving, cold-blooded, and none too bright. That last was mostly implied by saying that stegosaurus had an almost ridiculously small brain. Which it did, and I’m drifting off-topic.
Textbook illustrations of dinosaur superstars like Tyrannosaurus rex still looked like C. R. Knight’s 1919 painting.
I gather that the head’s the wrong shape: too short, maybe, although the ‘this is wrong’ text didn’t get specific.
More to the point, C. R. Knight gave T. rex an extra finger.
But we didn’t find a complete T. rex forelimb until 1989, so that detail doesn’t bother me all that much.
Particularly since the first (1915) public display of T. rex (American Museum of Natural History, under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn) showed the critter with three fingers.
Why Henry Fairfield Osborn — he’d described T. rex in 1905 — decided to equip his dino-display with overly-long three-fingered forelimbs, that I don’t know.
I do know that I can hardly blame artists like Charles Robert Knight for accurately rendering what an expert described.
By the time I was out of high school, folks like Robert T. Bakker had been publishing convincing arguments for dinosaurs being warm-blooded. Some of them, at any rate.
I gather that where various dinosaur metabolisms rank on a ‘lizard-to-bird’ scale is still a hot-button topic in some circles.
One more item before moving on.
H. F. Osborn named his dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex. The name’s based on Greek and Latin: tyrannos (tyrant) and sauros (lizard), plus rex (king). So the critter’s monker, translated, is “King Tyrant Lizard”.2 Which, more than a century later, is still a pretty cool name.
Since dinosaurs — other than the ones we call birds, and that’s another topic — haven’t been around for something like 66,000,000 years, studying them in their natural habitat isn’t an option.
But we have been developing pretty good analytic tools that let scientists work out how critters move, and how they can move. Even when all we’ve got are bones and footprints.
That’s what some folks in the Netherlands did.
“New Study Finds T. Rex Walked at a Slow Pace of Three Miles Per Hour“
Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine (April 23, 2021)“…On the big screen, the Tyrannosaurus rex is often depicted as a predator that could easily catch up to a speeding car with a few swift stomps. That’s probably because paleontologists had suggested that the T. rex clocked a top speed of 30 miles per hour and a walking speed between 4.5 and 6.7 miles per hour, reports Jeff Spry for SYFY Wire….
“…According to the new study published in Royal Society Open Science, the predators walked at just under 3 miles per hour….”
“…Dinosaurs overall had unique tails that are not found in any other animals today and may have played a crucial role in the way they walked….”
“…To calculate how the tail propelled the T. rex, the researchers used an adult T. rex specimen at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden known as ‘Trix.’ They scanned and modeled Trix’s tail bones to find where the ligaments would have been attached….”
This reconstruction used one particular T. rex, and a specific set of footprints. So I figure that what they’ve shown is how this individual could have walked.3
Whether or not that individual could have run, and what that run would have looked like: that may show up in someone else’s research.
I see the Netherlands study as another piece of a puzzle: and I’m quite sure we’ll keep finding others.
That drawing is the first published restoration of a Tyrannosaurus skeleton — the holotype, CM 9380.
And it’s wrong. That’s what its Wikimedia Commons page says, anyway, and whoever made the entry has a point. Several. Including the T. rex posture.
“Note: This historical image is not a factually accurate dinosaur restoration.
“Reason: Skull shape is wrong, Tyrannosaurus had two fingers (not three as pictured), tail was held level with body in real life.”
(File:Tyrannosaurus skeleton.jpg, Wikimedia Commons)
I’m not sure what makes the skull shape “wrong”. Maybe the problem is that it’s too short, or the holes are in the wrong places. And the wrong shape.
Or maybe Henry Fairfield Osborn — he was the American Museum of Natural History president at the time, and set up the first T. rex display — based his research on an oddly-shaped T. rex skull. That seems unlikely, though.
Osborn’s also the one who defined the T. rex species, in 1905. He was working with the AMNH 973 fossil — it’s been re-designated CM 9380 — which is now in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.4
The human skeleton’s hands strike me as a bit wonky, too; which may not matter so much, since it’s just there for scale.
If Osborn’s T. rex had been a caveman, I’d suspect that his ideas about Nordic and Anglo-Saxon superiority over folks like me was a factor in his T. rex being shown with the “wrong” shape head.
But I’ve never run across someone saying that ‘inferior races’ are degenerate dinosaurs. And that’s yet another topic. Topics, actually.
Let’s see, what else?
I’ve mentioned that Osborn gave his T. rex three fingers instead of two, and that we didn’t have a complete T. rex forelimb until 1989. Or 1988. I’ve seen both years given as the ‘found it’ date.
A holotype is the single specimen or illustration used in a species description.
A species description is a formal scientific description of a species: generally a ‘haven’t seen this before’ plant, animal or whatever.
Osborn knew that Gorgosaurus looked a lot like T. rex and had two fingers, but instead he apparently used Allosaurus as as the model for his T. rex arms. Why, I don’t know.
Gorgosaurus, Albertosaurus, and T. rex are all tyrannosaurids; and at the moment they’re seen as different species. Allosaurus is the name of a genus, not a species. Genus is the next step up from species in our taxonomy of critters.
I’ve mentioned taxonomy, and how we’ve been revising Linnaean taxonomy for centuries, but I’ve yet to talk much about the system itself.
I haven’t talked at all about taphonomy. That’s the study of happens as organisms decay and (sometimes) fossilize. It ties in with taxonomy, since bones and other bits don’t always stay the same size and shape.5
Enough about taxonomy, taphonomy, and “The Mystery of the Three-Fingered Dinosaur”.
That’s almost the entire description for the “Skull of Tyrannosaurus rex. From the US Department of the Interior” photo in Wikimedia Commons. The rest is mainly when it was taken: “1900s”.
“Skull of Tyrannosaurus rex…” looked a bit like the Osborn T. rex skull, so I went looking for its origins.
By Thursday noon, I’d done a middling-fair online search for another copy of that photo and found nothing. Nothing in English, that is. But I did find a caption for the photo on the German-language Wikipedia Tyrannosaurs page.
“Das Typusexemplar von T. rex am Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Dieser Schädel wurde stark ausgebessert, wobei Allosaurus als Vorlage diente.“
“The type specimen of T. rex at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. This skull was heavily repaired using Allosaurus as a model.“
(Caption for ‘skull of Tyrannosaurs rex’ photo on Tyrannosaurus, Deutsche Wikipedia; translation by Google Translate) [emphasis mine]
And that led me to the page’s discussion of “Das Typusexemplar von T. rex/The type specimen, or holotype, of T. rex”.
“…Barnum Brown entdeckte das erste fragmentarische Skelett eines Tyrannosaurus rex im Jahr 1900 im östlichen Wyoming. Ein weiteres Skelett fand Brown im Jahr 1902 in der Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Henry Fairfield Osborn beschrieb beide Skelette im Jahr 1905 in ein und derselben Veröffentlichung. …
“…Insgesamt entdeckte Brown fünf Teilskelette von Tyrannosaurus. Im Jahr 1941 wurde Browns Fund aus 1902, das Holotyp-Exemplar, an das Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) verkauft. Browns vierter und größter Fund, ebenfalls aus der Hell-Creek-Formation, ist im American Museum of Natural History in New York zu besichtigen….”
“…Barnum Brown discovered the first fragmentary skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex in 1900 in eastern Wyoming. Brown found another skeleton in 1902 in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Henry Fairfield Osborn described both skeletons in one and the same in 1905 Publication. …
“…In total, Brown discovered five partial Tyrannosaurus skeletons. In 1941, Brown’s 1902 find, the holotype specimen, was sold to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Brown’s fourth and largest find, also from the Hell Creek Formation, can be viewed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York….”
(Tyrannosaurus, Deutsche Wikipedia; translation by Google Translate) [without footnote links] [emphasis mine]
That would make what I’ll call the Carnegie skull specimen, CM 9380, the T. rex holotype: but CM 9380 isn’t mentioned in either the English- or German-language Wikipedia page, and I didn’t spend time trying to confirm my suspicion with a wider search.
Given time, I could probably track down why B. Brown’s AMNH (American Museum of Natural History) 973 specimen was re-designated CM (Carnegie Museum) 9380.
My guess is that the re-designation happened because AMNH 973 ended up at the Carnegie Museum. But I don’t know.
I also don’t know why the comparatively-famous Henry Fairfield Osborn’s name is on the 1905 paper describing T. rex as a new dinosaur species.
The German-language caption for that T. rex skull photo, however, strongly suggests that the 1905 T. rex drawing — and later paleoart based on it — is “wrong” because someone filled in the gaps of specimen AMNH 973 with what was known about Allosaurus.
And that helps explain why today’s Carnegie Museum T. rex doesn’t look like Osborn’s version.6 Maybe they’ve still got the old ‘tyranno-allo-saur’ skull, but they’ve had more than a century to update their exhibits.
Tyrannosaurus rex may not have the star quality that made King Kong a perennial title character, but the dynamic dinosaur did dominate the occasional dramatic moment on the silver screen.
T. rex may be among the few dinosaurs — maybe the only one — folks who aren’t scientists or science fans know by it’s binomial “Tyrannosaurs rex” moniker.
How much of that’s thanks to Osborn picking a cool-sounding name has probably been debated, along with the influence of cinematic productions such as “King Kong”.
Speaking of which, the 1933 RKO “King Kong” T. rex has the Osborn three-fingered forelimbs and — judging by a quick look at a YouTube film clip — Osborn’ s tyranno-allo-saur head. Which, in 1933, may still have been the consensus scientific reconstruction.
Review and revision of T. rex didn’t, I gather, pick up until the 1960s, when 42 new T. rex skeletons showed up, one of them 80% complete.
By then, paleontologists had realized that the Osborn semi-upright posture for T. rex was somewhere between cripplingly difficult and downright impossible. Seems that Osborn took his cue from an 1865 Hadrosaur reconstruction.
Anyway, folks kept finding T. rex fossils: including RTMP 81.6.1, “Black Beauty”, the first T. rex fossil given a nickname. That habit caught on, so now we have Sue the dinosaur and Stan the dinosaur, both named after the folks who found them.7
“…They, … belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part..”
(“The Call of Cthulhu“, H. P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales (February 1928) via Wikisource)
I was born during the Truman administration, and grew up in a world where folks who weren’t ranting against communism and Catholicism acknowledged that we live in a vast and ancient universe.
So I probably can’t understand the horror and distress which such knowledge held for earlier generations. May have held, that is. For some.
Making matters worse, again for some, by the mid-19th century it was obvious that our world was not only way older than Ussher said it was — that’s a can of worms I’ll consign to a footnote this week — it had been chock-full of monsters!
That brings me to what an English geologist wrote about Lucifer and “Dragon Pterodactyles” and Noah and — I am not making this up:
“…’Adam,’ the Lucifer and Protagonist of Antiquity, doing mis-prision against Sovereignty, turns the weapons of Loyalty upon his Liege, and plunges them into the Bowels of his Mother Earth. Forsaken of Angels, groaning, she bringeth forth grim Monsters, which ravage her Garden, the Locusts that consume it away….
“…Then a Vision of Abysmal Waters, swarming with all wondrous creatures of Life, and gelid Swamps with amphibious things , and Dragon Pterodactyles flitting in the hot air with Vampire Wing….
“…Then a Vision of brute Savages haunting Eldritch Caves: of gaunt Lords of wassail, war, blood, and perdition: Blasted Continents, and withering pines, and briars and thorns: Rebellion, Violence, horrors manifold: Prometheus chained, the Vulture, the Liver: The World at the brink of Death.
“Apollo transfixing Python, The booming Flood, driving, rolling, roaring, wrenching, wrecking, whelming the accursed Titans in endless destruction.
“Righteous Noah saved….”
(“The Book of the Great Sea-Dragons, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri,” Thomas Hawkins, pp. 4, 5 (1840))
I suspect, strongly, that works such as “The Book of the Great Sea-Dragons…” inspired H. P. Lovecraft, but that’s a rabbit hole I’ve avoided so far. On the other hand, the full title of Thomas Hawkins’ tome is too weird to ignore:
“The book of the great sea-dragons, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, [gedolim taninim] gedolim taninim, of Moses. Extinct monsters of the ancient earth. With thirty plates, copied from skeletons in the author’s collection of fossil organic remains, (deposited in the British museum.)”
Thomas Hawkins (1840)
Getting back (finally!) to T. rex, “Tyrant King Lizards” — which weren’t lizards, and that’s yet again another topic — were around for a couple million years, right before about three quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth stopped living. Abruptly.
Odds are very good that the mass extinction happened because something slid out of the sky and blew a hole more than a hundred miles across in what’s now the Yucatan Peninsula. There’s also a pretty good chance that other factors were in play, including lava floods where Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra are now.
When the dust settled, all non-avian dinosaurs were extinct.8
Studying dinosaurs like T. rex would be easy, or easier at any rate, if researchers could camp along the shore of the Western Interior Seaway, and track the movements and growth of individual critters.
That’s not an option.
Back then, places like the Hell Creek Formation enjoyed a subtropical climate, and were oceanfront property.
That was then, this is now. What was a shallow inland sea is now the Great Plains. Flowering plants survived whatever happened about 66,000,000 years back, but non-avian dinosaurs didn’t.
I’ve noticed that maps of North America during the Maastrichtian age of the Late Cretaceous epoch — if I get started on how scientists divvy up geologic time I’ll never get this thing finished — show several different versions of the Great Western Seaway.
I figure that’s partly because Earth’s sea level was changing around that time. Maybe the ocean was sinking, or maybe the continents were all rising. Either way, the Great Western Seaway isn’t there any more.9
And neither is T. rex, so all scientist have to work with in their studies are fossils and an increasingly useful array of analytic tools.
This is where I was going to talk about the research paper that triggered those headlines.
It’s now Friday afternoon. And, although I found the paper’s published version —
— I haven’t had time to read it. Skim, yes. Read, no.
So I’ll pick a few points they made that I think make sense, and then see if I can wrap this thing up before Saturday.
Maybe the most important point is at the end of their Discussion > 4.6 Implications section:
“…It is remarkable that the systematics of an animal as famous, as well-known, and as intensively studied as Tyrannosaurus have remained so incompletely understood and controversial. This emphasizes how little we really know about past diversity. If we still do not understand T. rex, what else do we not understand? There is a great deal we do not know, and may never know, about the life of the past.“
(“Taxonomic status of Nanotyrannus lancensis…”, Nicholas R. Longrich et al, Fossil Studies (January 3, 2024)) [emphasis mine]
Acknowledging a lack of omniscience impresses me more that saying that others “don’t seem to have a solid grasp on growth variation in tyrannosaurs.”
Now, maybe what these researchers identify as Nanotyrannus lancensis actually is a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex.
Despite not resembling confirmed juvenile T. rex fossils, having an apparent growth pattern that suggests the N. l. specimens were young adults, and having distinctive jaws.
Another point is that the N. l. skulls ‘look grown-up’:
“…Nanotyrannus individuals show skeletal fusion and rugose facial bone, suggesting they were approaching maturity….”
(“Taxonomic status of Nanotyrannus lancensis…”, Nicholas R. Longrich et al, Fossil Studies (January 3, 2024)) [emphasis mine]
“Rugose” is science-speak for “wrinkled”, sort of,10 which may explain why Lovecraft used the word as much as he did:
“…I might call it gigantic—tentacled—proboscidian—octopus-eyed—semi-amorphous—plastic—partly squamous and partly rugose—ugh!…”
(“Out of the Aeons“, Lovecraft)
“…his body was like those of the others—rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion mainly insect-like….”
(“Through the Gates of the Silver Key” Lovecraft, E. Hoffmann Price)
“…It was all eyes—wolfish and mocking—and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist….”
(“The Shunned House“, Lovecraft)
(via The H. P. Lovecraft Archive)[emphasis mine]
Good grief. There’s a reason why I’m distracted this week, and that’s still another topic.
Wrenching myself back to the the latest turn in the Nanotyrannus matter —
Another point that impressed me was the assertion that there’s no overlap in size, between juvenile T. rex individuals and big Nanotyrannus individuals.
“…Although it is conceivable that young Tyrannosaurus sometimes showed slow growth rates due to sickness, lack of food, or other stresses, it is unlikely that all three individuals sectioned would exhibit similar growth anomalies; it is more likely that they exhibit typical growth rates for their taxon….
“…3.5. Existence of Juvenile Tyrannosaurus Refutes Identification of Nanotyrannus as Juvenile Tyrannosaurus
“The hypothesis that Nanotyrannus is a juvenile Tyrannosaurus predicts that the two forms should not overlap in size; that is, all Nanotyrannus will be small, and all Tyrannosaurus will be big. No small Tyrannosaurus should exist. Conversely, if Nanotyrannus is a distinct species, then small juveniles of Tyrannosaurus—approaching the size of Nanotyrannus or smaller—must exist. Juvenile dinosaurs tend to be extremely rare; however, potential juveniles of Tyrannosaurus are known, including a partial skull.
“The smallest unambiguous Tyrannosaurus skeleton known is LACM 28345. This specimen exhibits diagnostic features of T. rex, including broad, posteriorly tapering nasals, short nasal processes of the frontals, …
“…The skull of LACM 28345 is an estimated 800 mm long. This is 40% longer than the holotype of Nanotyrannus lancensis (CMNH 7541), …
“Although it is conceivable that the differences in morphology seen could rapidly develop as the animals mature at this size, it seems unlikely.…”
“Taxonomic status of Nanotyrannus lancensis (Dinosauria: Tyrannosauroidea) — a distinct taxon of small-bodied tyrannosaur“; Nicholas R. Longrich, Evan T. Saitta; Fossil Studies (Submission received: 4 November 2023 / Revised: December 18, 2023 / Accepted: December 21, 2023 / Published: January 3, 2024) via MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) [emphasis mine]
If there really is a gap between big Nanotyrannus lancensis fossils and small or juvenile T. rex fossils: I’m willing to think we’re looking at two different species.
Some of the ‘T. rex or not T. rex’ debate started me thinking about what scientists might make of today’s North American critters, if all they had were bones and tracks to study. Seeing foxes as immature wolves might make sense. At least at first.11
Good news: scientific papers now routinely include a “Funding” section, so readers can consider whether or not where the researchers were getting their money affected their conclusions.
Frustrating news: I tried double-checking something in the “Taxonomic status of Nanotyrannus lancensis…” paper, and now I get a “Bad Gateway” notice when I try accessing it.
That happens now and then. And sometimes I’m not allowed re-entry to a site that’s (apparently) reserved for members of a professional group. Or has some other reason for an ‘only us’ policy.
Not news at all: we live in a less-than-ideal world, so each of us can make decisions based on bad motives.
Probably-baseless speculation: A Smithsonian Magazine article mentioned that a T. rex fossil (“Chomper”, but not the toy) is for sale: for $20,000,000. That’s a fair chunk of change. So were the million-dollar amounts mentioned in a Wikipedia page listing of T. rex specimens.
I’d prefer thinking that scientists wouldn’t let finances affect their better judgment.
But if I was in the Paleontology Department of Wassamatta U., and I knew that Billy Bigbucks, the barrel and balance beam big shot, had recently purchased an (alleged) T. rex fossil for more than I’d make in my lifetime —
And that B. B. was Wassamatta U.’s biggest donor —
Well, maybe I’d be somewhat diffident about suggesting that B. B. hadn’t bought a piece of something that co-starred with King Kong.
Then there’s the aura of coolness surrounding Tyrannosaurus rex. Which, in a way, does matter: scientists are human. Just look at what happened when Pluto’s status changed.12
Finally, the reason I’ve been distracted this week is something that I may discuss.
Later, when I have enough information to make it worthwhile.
I was going to talk about H. F. Osborn’s concerns regarding Anglo-Saxon/Nordic purity, and why that doesn’t make me ignore his contribution to paleontology. But that’s something that would take more time than I have.
Instead, I’ll touch on why I’m okay with learning about God’s universe.
I’m human, so I’m a rational animal. Make that optionally rational. I have free will, so using my brain is a choice, not a hardwired response. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1730, 1778, 1804, 1951, 2339)
Like every other human, I’m made from the stuff of this world.
“then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
(Genesis 2:7)
We’ve known that for a long time. What’s changed during the last few generations is how much we know about the “dust of the ground” we’re made from.
I could let that bother me. But it didn’t before I became a Catholic, and it sure doesn’t now.
As for science and religion, faith and reason, I think faith and reason get along fine. God makes everything, so nothing we learn can threaten an informed faith. (Catechism, 159)
Truth matters, in science and in faith. (Catechism, 31, 159)
None of this is new, and neither are the following excerpts. I’ve used them before:
“…if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God. … we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed.…”
(“Gaudium et Spes,” Pope St. Paul VI (December 7, 1965)) [emphasis mine]“…God, the Creator and Ruler of all things, is also the Author of the Scriptures — and that therefore nothing can be proved either by physical science or archaeology which can really contradict the Scriptures. … Even if the difficulty is after all not cleared up and the discrepancy seems to remain, the contest must not be abandoned; truth cannot contradict truth….”
(“Providentissimus Deus,” Pope Leo XIII (November 18, 1893) [emphasis mine]“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air…. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look; we’re beautiful.’…
“…So in this way they arrived at a knowledge of the god who made things, through the things which he made.”
(Sermon 241, St. Augustine of Hippo (ca. 411))
Basically, I see what we’re learning about this wonder-packed universe as opportunities for “even greater admiration” of God:
“…These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator….”
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, 283)
Even if — no, make that particularly since — that means thinking about how all this fits in to what we’ve already learned.
And that’s — oh, my — a great many more topics.
Some of which I’ve talked about before:
3 Critters, and how we study them:
4 Presenting Tyrannosaurus rex:
5 More than you need, or may want, to know about:
6 Taxonomy and Tyrannosaurus trivia:
7 T. rex, binomial movie star; dinosaurs with nicknames; and a special effects inventor:
8 Death from the sky, an old chronology, and two profoundly prolix authors:
9 Remembering a long-gone seaway:
11 Foxes, Wolves, and a dinosaurian family I didn’t get around to discussing:
12 Odds, ends, and a dwarf planet:
They were looking for supernovae.
What they found may become a double planet, like the Earth-Moon system, once it cools down. Or a planet with a giant moon, again like the Earth-Moon system.
Then again, an oddly-uneven dusty disk may be orbiting this young, very “Sun-like” star. Either way, ASASSN-2qj is much more interesting than it was a few years back.
I suspect one reason scientists generally call Earth and Earth’s moon a planet and its satellite is that we live on Earth and have been thinking of the Moon as — well, as the moon — since long before we started thinking about the planētai, planets, as other worlds.
Another reason may be that the center of mass for the Earth-Moon system is about a thousand miles below Earth’s surface.
“Barycenter” is a fancy word for center of mass. It’s the point that two objects, like Earth and Moon or Jupiter and our Sun, orbit around.
The Jupiter-Sun barycenter is a little more than 28,000 miles above the Sun’s surface. But we don’t call the Sun-Jupiter system a binary star. Mostly because Jupiter isn’t a star: although if it was thirteen times more massive, it would be: a brown dwarf.1
(“A planetary collision: ASASSN-21qj“, Las Cumbres Observatory, YouTube (October 2023)
An advantage and disadvantage of being my own editor is that I can go chasing after information, even if there’s a looming deadline.
I’d noticed a piece in the Sky and Telescope February 2024 issue’s News Notes section. That’s right: February 2024, it’s only the first week of January, and that’s another topic.
Anyway, the short article mentioned a “young, sun-like star” and colliding exoplanets. The situation sounded a great deal like a recent explanation for how the Earth-Moon system formed, which caught my attention.
The article didn’t mention the star’s designation, but did include several names. That’s more than I sometimes have to start with. So by Tuesday, I’d learned that the star’s designation was, for the scientists who’d noticed its odd behavior, ASASSN-21qj.
And from that point on, every time I saw the star’s designation, I read it as “Assassin-Twenty-One-Que-Jay”. Why, I don’t know. Although my reading has included a fair fraction of pulp fiction, most of it was of the science fiction variety.
Getting back to ASASSN-21qj and a probable planetary pileup.
Before it was labeled ASASSN-21qj, it’d been 2MASS J08152329-3859234: and still is, for that matter. Its ASSASSN designation is (probably) mostly for folks working in and with the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) network.
The ASAS-SN network collects and organizes data from 20 robotic telescopes,2 and if I go off on that tangent I’ll never get this ready by Saturday.
After I learned that I was looking for ASASSN-21qj, I found a NASA article that told how professional scientists, amateur researchers, and social media, went from speculation about something “weird” in a database to — oh, never mind.
Sharing an excerpt will be easier than paraphrasing the article.
But first, about that animation with what I assume are years and months displayed at the top.
It’s from the NASA Science Editorial Team article, and I suspect it’s a series of images taken between 2010 and 2021. If that’s so, the black blotch in the middle is very probably ASASSN-21qj.
And although the animated GIF’s caption says who made it, —
“NASA Volunteer Arttu Sainio saw the star Asassn-21qj brightening, possibly due to crashing planets.
“Credit: Dan Caselden, NASA”
— I’ve yet to learn when it was made, or where the data came from. Thursday afternoon I finally decided that its origins would remain a mystery.
Here’s an overly-long excerpt from that NASA article. I’ve highlighted a few bits:
“Amateur Astronomers Help Discover Cosmic Crash“
NASA Science Editorial Team, Citizen Science, Get Involved With NASA, NASA (December 8, 2023)“…A recent paper in Nature describes how an international group of professional and amateur astronomers teamed up to measure the heat glow of two ice giant planets colliding and see the resultant dust cloud moving in front of the parent star several years later.
“The story began back in 2021, when the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) network noticed that a Sun-like star 1800 light years away was rapidly fading. Some 30 days later, NASA volunteer Arttu Sainio was reading X (formerly Twitter), and caught professional astronomers Dr. Matthew Kenworthy and Dr. Eric Mamajek speculating about this weird event. Arttu decided to further investigate this star, called Asassn-21qj, on his own, using data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission. Arttu was surprised to find that the star had demonstrated an unexpected brightening in infrared light two years before the optical dimming event. So he joined the talk on social media and shared his finding with the two astronomers.
“‘Out of the blue, amateur astronomer Arttu Sainio on social media pointed out that the star brightened up in the infrared over a thousand days before the optical fading,’ said Kenworthy. ‘I knew then that this was an unusual event.’
“More contributions from amateurs helped determine the nature of the star. Amateur spectroscopist Hamish Barker tried to capture a spectrum of Asassn-21qj in late July, 2022. A spectrum spreads out the colors of the starlight, revealing the star’s temperature. However, the star turned out to be too dim, so Hamish asked Olivier Garde from a French amateur astronomy team if they could add ASASSN-21q to their target list. The team, called the Southern Spectroscopic project Observatory Team (or ‘2SPOT’), succeeded in collecting the needed spectrum in early September, 2022 and forwarded it Kenworthy. The 2SPOT team members are Stéphane Charbonnel, Pascal Le Dû, Olivier Garde, Lionel Mulato and Thomas Petit.
“Two more amateur astronomers also independently observed the star and contributed their data to the study….”
[emphasis mine]
The point, one point at any rate, is that today’s information technology lets folks living on different continents share data and ideas as easily as folks living in the same neighborhood could, a generation or so back.
I see that as a good thing.
I would have saved myself a lot of time, if I’d thought to check Sky and Telescope’s website. There’s another version of the “February 2024” article there, posted in October of last year: with a link to one of the scientists’ Twitter/X posts.3
Since Matthew Kenworthy’s Twitter/X post included the star’s designation (ASASSN-21qj), if I’d gone there first, I’d have saved most of a day’s search.
As an old Norwegian-American said, “I get so quick old, and so slow smart”.
After I had one of the star’s designations, ASASSN-21qj, I could start checking out just what various discussions of it meant by ‘sun-like’.
Along the way, I learned that ASASSN-21qj is Gaia DR3 5539970601632026752 in the Gaia Data Data Release 3, and I’m drifting off-topic again.
Previous experience told me that ‘sun-like’ could mean anything from a G2V star that’s about four and a half billion years old, to simply a star that’s on the main sequence.
Happily, I found what I needed in a pre-publication copy of that Nature paper. The “2SPOT” researchers, mentioned in that NASA article, found that light from ASASSN-21qj “is consistent with being a G2 type dwarf star”.
Normally, I’d go off on a tangent about stellar evolution: but it’s now Friday afternoon. Long story short, looks like ASASSN-21qj is very much like our Sun, but much younger: 300,000,000 years old. Give or take 92,000,000.
That makes ASASSN-21qj and its probable planets about as old as the Solar System was; when our Sun had settled onto the main sequence, but the planets were still playing bumper cars.4
What had caught my attention about discussions of this “young, sun-like star” was the probable planetary collision: which sounded like giant-impact hypothesis for how the Earth-Moon system began.
Turns out, ASASSN-21qj might have a terrestrial planet, orbiting in its habitable zone. It might even have a churning filled doughnut of planet-stuff that’ll become Earth-Moon 2.0.
But that’s not what the scientists have been studying.
What’s been making ASASSN-21qj flare in the infrared and dim in visible light may have been two “two ice-giant type exoplanets of several to tens of Earth masses”, as a Wikipedia page says.
What the scientists said was that the two probable planets were massive enough to be ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.
“…an infrared brightening consistent with a blackbody temperature of 1000 K and a luminosity of 4% of that of the star lasting for about 1000 days, partially overlapping in time with a complex and deep wavelength-dependent optical eclipse that lasted for about 500 days. These observations are consistent with a collision between two exoplanets of several to tens of Earth masses at 2-16 au from the central star….”
(“A planetary collision afterglow and transit of the resultant debris cloud“, Summary paragraph; Matthew Kenworthy et al. (2023) via arXiv)
That distance from ASASSN-21qj is two to 16 astronomical units. One au (or AU — capitalization varies) is how far Earth is from our Sun – roughly. It’s complicated, it’s now mid-afternoon Friday, so I’ll move along.
Mars is very roughly one and a half AU out and the asteroid belt goes from 2.3 to 3.3 AU, so even if ASASSN-21qj’s probable planetary collision involved something like what became the Earth-Moon system, habitable it won’t become.5
If it’s 16 AU out, that’d make it only slightly less distant from ASASSN-21qj than Uranus is from the Sun. So “ice giants” isn’t an unreasonable term for the planets. Probably.
I’ve said “probably” a lot, and you’ll find phrases like “observations are consistent with” in a great many scientific papers.
That’s because, however sure they are about their data and analysis, scientists generally acknowledge they don’t know everything. That’s been my experience, at any rate, reading what they’ve written, and looking through their research.
As for me? Well, I enjoy knowing stuff, and like getting my facts straight. But I figure that “observations are consistent with” means that something may be so. But that the “something”, whatever it is, may not be so.
My guess is that scientists will be taking closer looks at ASASSN-21qj for years. Centuries, very likely, given how long conditions in the star’s vicinity may be changing:
“…The team acknowledges that it’s possible the infrared brightening and the starlight blockage were in fact two separate events, but they make the case that two such events would be even more rare than a planetary-scale collision.
“Their calculations show that such a collision would vaporize both worlds, with a relatively small amount escaping to orbit the star. ‘Over the next few orbits (around a few hundred years), the dust will smear into a ring around the star,’ Kenworthy explains. For now, the debris is in a long, giant cloud a quarter of an a.u. in size, and the dust is thick enough to block much of the star’s light as the cloud passes in front of it.
“Most of the mass, though, has remained gravitationally bound, albeit in vaporized form. Team member Simon Lock (University of Bristol, UK) has previously proposed that such remnants might take the shape of a synestia, a donut-shape cloud with a bit of material straddling the middle (perhaps more akin to an extremely puffy Danish). This collision gives the researchers an opportunity to test that idea.…
“…Another team, led by Jonathan Marshall (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan), has published a different explanation in the Astrophysical Journal, suggesting instead that an uneven dusty disk surrounds the star, perhaps originating in the breakup of comets. That team notes a marked similarity between this system and the curious Boyajian’s Star….”
“Two Worlds Have Ended in a Planetary Collision — and a New One Has Begun“
Monica Young, Sky and Telescope (October 12, 2023)
[emphasis mine]
Boyajian’s Star, by the way, is KIC 8462852, informally called Tabby’s Star, and that’s something I talked about back in 2016.6
Light from ASASSN-21qj traveled 1,850 years before reaching Earth.
The star isn’t the only more-or-less-Sun-like star orbited by unexpectedly-warm dust, but it’s the only one I know of where scientists have ‘before and after’ observations from what’s probably a planetary collision.
No wonder at least two teams have crunched data and published papers. Despite ASASSN-21qj being so far away.
ASASSN-21qj is in the general direction of Zeta Puppis, Naos, a whacking great overly-hot star that’s been studied a great deal more that the ‘assassin star’ — and that’s yet another topic.
Both stars are in the southern constellation Puppis, which we got when de Lacaille split up the ancient Argo Navis: which may go back to Sumerian times.7 Or may not. Scientists aren’t the only ones who don’t know everything. 😉
And that’s yet again another topic: also my cue to stop writing, start proofing this thing, and add the usual links:
1 More than you need, or may want, to know about:
2 Dust from a probable planetary collision:
3 ASASSN-21q, also known as 2MASS J08152329-3859234; a quick look at star names and designations:
4 A distant star’s light, and Earth’s early days:
5 Distances and other details:
Whether they’re called the Swiss Guard, Papal Swiss Guard, or Pontificia Cohors Helvetica, those 135 men wear what may be today’s most colorful full dress uniforms.
Although they look like something straight out of the Renaissance, the uniform’s not much over a century old.
Up until 1914, when Pope St. Pius X died, each pope had tweaked the design a bit. Maybe because our next Pope, Benedict XV, came on duty about the same time that World War I started, the Swiss Guard’s then-commander, Jules Repond, did the uniform redesign. Or authorized it, at any rate.
I gather that the blue, red, and yellow stripes are Medici family colors. The Basque hat reflects Swiss Guard uniforms painted by Raphael.1 And none of that’s what I was going to be talking about today.
Folks in my part of the world, when they talk about such things at all, say “the Vatican”, “Vatican City”, and “the Holy See”, as if they’re all one thing. They’re not.
The Holy See has been around for two millennia. It’s our organizational structure, going back to when being Christian was a criminal offense.
Before the Roman Republic trashed its reputation and usefulness, “the Vatican” was a marshy tract of land and a hill on the west bank of the Tiber, across from Rome.
During imperial times, it was an upscale residential district. The land is now a few miles inside Rome’s city limits, and if I go through the whole story, I’ll never finish this in time.
Long story short, part of the Vatican was a cemetery. A notorious criminal and enemy of the state was buried there. We know him as St. Peter. We kept track of his gravesite until, a few centuries later, Christianity was decriminalized.
The current St. Peter’s basilica was built over St. Peter’s tomb — allegedly, since the last I checked, some academics say that this mustn’t be so.
This is the same lot who said Troy didn’t really exist, that the Trojan War never happened, and that’s almost another topic.
Anyway, Vatican City didn’t exist (no, really, it didn’t) until 1929. That’s when the Lateran Treaty sorted out some some long-standing SNAFUs.
How long Vatican City will exist, that I don’t know. It’s a political entity as well as being the Holy See’s headquarters. But the Holy See was around long before Italy was a kingdom,2 and I’m wandering off-topic again.
I’ve read that the Swiss Guard is one of the oldest military units in continuous operation; and that it dates back to 1506 and 1814. Like pretty much else involving humans, the situation’s complicated.
Oversimplifying things something fierce, Pope Julius II organized the original Swiss Guard in 1506.
This was back when the Holy See and secular leaders had very close working relationships.
Constantine the Great’s decriminalizing Christianity was arguably a good idea: but carrying ancient habits and attitudes into the post-Roman world caused problems we’re still sorting out.
On the ‘up’ side, I think Europeans have finally stopped trying to reanimate the Roman Empire, and that is another topic.
Where was I? Swiss Guard. Pope Julius II. European 16th century politics. Right.
Julius II’s Swiss Guard were, I gather, a personal bodyguard for the pope.
The Hundred Year’s War was over by 1506, and the Thirty Year’s War hadn’t started yet. But European warlords were either supporting the Holy Roman Empire, fighting it, or simply at war with their neighbors.
And Julius II had both feet planted firmly in the middle of that mess. Small wonder he wanted a bodyguard.
Fast-forward to 1527. Clement VII was Pope.
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, sent some muscle down to lean on Clement VII. Or was plagued with mutinous soldiers who besmirched his fair name. Take your pick.
Either way, an armed force was inside Rome: looting, pillaging, and not being at all polite. This was the eighth “Sack of Rome”, and — so far — the last.
This was in the spring of 1527. There was massive property damage, and an appallingly large number of people were killed, but I’m focusing on what happened in the general vicinity of St. Peter’s Square.3
I’ve talked about the Holy Roman Empire before and probably will again. Today I’ll quote what Voltaire said, about two and a quarter centuries after the 1527 sack of Rome, and (pretty much) leave it at that.
“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire.
“This body which called itself and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
(“Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations“, Chapter 70; Voltaire (1756) via Wikiquote)
The soldiers who had been looting, pillaging, and committing human rights violations in Rome were mostly Landsknecht. Probably.
Landsknecht were mercenaries, mostly German, and — from the late 1400s to the early 1600s — formed the bulk of Holy Roman Empire’s army. Some of them said they were Catholic, some said they were Protestant.
Let’s see. What else? The Reformation was in progress, and had been for a decade.
It inspired allegedly-holy zeal and made for generations of propaganda. We’ll be cleaning up the mess for centuries.
I figure that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had reasons for sending muscle to Rome. Apparently what he had in mind was leaning on Pope Clement VII, who’d been insufficiently cooperative.
Versions of events I’ve found say that the emperor hadn’t said ‘sack Rome’, and that Martin Luther didn’t approve, either.
So, what happened?
Apparently, it boiled down to a labor dispute.
Georg von Frundsberg, who’d been leading the imperial troops, hadn’t paid them for entirely too long. Mainly because funds had run out.
His troops, therefore, insisted on plundering Rome as an alternative. They eventually ran out of Romans to kill or ransom, buildings to pillage and/or burn, and food. That, plague, and troops who weren’t on the guest list, stopped the party in February of 1528.4
I think the emperor’s game plan probably didn’t included a lethal frat party that lasted about eight months. From a public relations perspective, at that time, it wasn’t a good look for the Holy Roman Emperor.
When I started ferreting out information about what happened on May 6, 1527, I figured the “secret passage” the Swiss Guard used to evacuate Pope Clement VII would really be something like a back door or service entrance.
Turns out, it really was a “secret” passage. Or at least one that was somewhat screened from view.
The Passetto (“small passage”) is a corridor at the top of an old fortification wall between St. Peter’s Square and the Castel Sant’Angelo.
If there’s a detailed account of what happened in and near St. Peter’s Square on May 6, 1527, I haven’t found it.
What I have gathered is that, as around 20,000 of Holy Emperor Charles V’s troops approached St. Peter’s Basilica, 42 men of the Swiss Guard hustled Pope Clement VII up to the Passetto and over to Castel Sant’Angelo.
The latter started out as Hadrian’s tomb and that’s yet another topic.
Make that probably 42. One source said 40, but that might have been a rounded number or a typo.
The rest of the Swiss Guard, (probably) 147 in number, stayed behind. They took positions in or near the Teutonic Cemetery and the steps of St. Peters.
Their orders may have been to cover the pope’s retreat. Or maybe their job was keeping imperial troops out of St. Peter’s. Maybe both.
My guess is that they were a rearguard. St. Peter’s is a magnificent, massive structure: but it’s designed to let people in, not keep them out. Expecting 147 men to hold off 20,000 at a public venue does not strike me as reasonable.
All 147 fought valiantly, and were killed.
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s troops treated St. Peter’s pretty much the way they’d treated the rest of Rome.
Pope Clement VII stayed at the Castel Sant’Angelo for a while, then escaped and/or paid his way out. Maybe there’s truth to both versions of the story.
Today’s Swiss Guard hold their induction ceremony on May 6, honoring the day in 1527 when they saved a pope’s life.5
May 6, 1527, may have been what’s been called “their darkest hour”. But I think it is arguably also their finest. And I hope that it remains so. That was not a pleasant time.
It’s now four years shy of five centuries after 147 men of the Swiss Guard fell in and near St Peter’s. Giving a coherent account of their stand against imperial troops is more than I can manage this week.
Finding descriptions of the pope whose life they saved, that was fairly easy. Bear in mind that my native language is English, and that search results seem to favor ‘what everybody knows’ resources.
I’ve read that Pope Clement VII was a Renaissance man whose ready acceptance of new ideas was a stark contrast to the narrow-minded reactionaries who followed him.
That fits my native culture’s ‘Galileo, champion of truth and science against the fell forces of ignorance, oppression, and superstition’ mythic narrative.
Oh, right. Galileo’s abrasive personality chafed already-frazzled nerves about 83 years after 1527: and, again, the situation wasn’t simple.
Seeing Pope Clement VII as last of the enlightened popes isn’t entirely wrong.
Every half-millennium or so, we — I’m an American, but just now I’m speaking as a Catholic — go through a rough patch.
Maybe we let problems pile up until something snaps. Maybe it’s a socio-cultural cycle that scholars haven’t defined yet. Either way, we hit one rough patch as the Roman Empire was crumbling, and another — a bad one — about a thousand years back.
The last one, that my culture calls the Renaissance, was complicated by Europe’s northern rulers using grass-roots movements — and that’s yet again another topic.6
I’m about as sure as I can be, that what we call the Counter-Reformation would have happened even if what we call the Reformation hadn’t. And that it would have been called something else.
I think we’re in another rough patch now. And, compared to ones we’ve been through — this one isn’t all that bad, actually. Compared to the others, that is. My opinion.
It’s late Friday as I write this. I spent more time than maybe I should have, trying to find and verify accounts of what happened on May 6, 1527. That may be good news, since this post isn’t as long-winded as it might have been.
On the other hand, I’ve got material that probably won’t fit into another post. Not for quite a while, anyway.
So I’ll drop excerpts from the Polish Wikipedia and two other sources, and wrap things up for this week.
First, about a Raphael fresco that escaped with no more than a little graffiti.
Sacco di Roma, Szczegóły; Wikipedii (Wikipedia, Polish)
Wikipedia”…Gwałtowność i okrucieństwo działań można częściowo wytłumaczyć zapałem protestanckich – głównie niemieckich – landsknechtów Frundsberga, aby zniszczyć centrum duchowe Kościoła katolickiego. Naprzeciw twierdzy, gdzie schronił się papież urządzano parodie procesji katolickich, podczas których żołnierze krzyczeli ‘Vivat Lutherus pontifex!’. Imię Lutra zostało wyryte mieczem na słynnym fresku Rafaela Dysputa o Najświętszym Sakramencie, a w innych miejscach wyryto teksty wychwalające cesarza Karola V. W zwięzły i dosadny sposób opisał te wydarzenia przeor klasztoru św. Augustyna: ‘Mali fuere Germani, pejores Itali, Hispani vero pessimi’ (Niemcy byli źli, Włosi jeszcze gorsi, a Hiszpanie najgorsi)….”Sack of Rome, Details; Wikipedia, (trans. by Google Translate into English)
“…The violence and cruelty of the actions can be partly explained by the zeal of Frundsberg’s Protestant – mainly German – Landsknechts to destroy the spiritual center of the Catholic Church. Opposite the fortress, where the pope took refuge, parodies of Catholic processions were organized, during which soldiers shouted ‘Vivat Lutherus pontifex!’ Luther’s name was carved with a sword on Raphael’s famous fresco Disputation on the Blessed Sacrament, and in other places texts praising Emperor Charles V were engraved. These events were described in a concise and blunt way by the prior of the monastery of St. Augustine: ‘Mali fuere Germani, pejores Itali, Hispani vero pessimi’ (The Germans were bad, the Italians even worse, and the Spaniards the worst)….”
[emphasis mine]
Next, one of the few specific descriptions of shenanigans in Rome during the 1527 sack. One of the few in English, that is:
“The Mastery of Space in Early Modern Political Thought“, p. 60
Giovanni Botero, the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican and the fusion of the civitas and urbs in sixteenth-century Italy.
Joshua Favaloro (2017)
Dedicated to my Nonna Santa Maria Favaloro who taught herself to read and write.
(A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment [sic] of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History, University of Sydney.)“…Over the next year, the city was violently plundered and its people murdered. In perhaps the lowest moment in papal history, Lutheran German Landsknecht soldiers taunted him from the outside. According to reports they ran around donning pontifical robes looted from the papal palace shouting: ‘Vivat Lutherus Pontifex!’… 239
[emphasis mine]Footnotes
239 Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p.322
Third and last excerpt:
“…Forty-two Swiss Guards brought the Pope to safety, while the remaining 147 men took up position on St. Peter’s Square to protect St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican. Alone against the 20,000 attackers, the guards were completely overwhelmed and every single one was massacred. The next day, the rest of the city fell into the hands of the mercenaries and the months-long sack spiralled completely out of control. Without a leader and on the rampage, the mercenaries roamed the streets, pillaging, raping and murdering. The Vatican, churches and palaces were looted, noblemen were forced to pay huge ransoms, and citizens were tortured into handing over their valuables. Even the papal tombs in St. Peter’s Basilica were forced open.…”
(“The darkest day in the history of the Swiss Guard“, Thomas Weibel, Blog (English), Swiss National Museum (May 4, 2023) [emphasis mine]
Maybe someday I’ll find and verify more details. And, on a related note, talk about cartoons/sketches by Raphael that apparently still haven’t been returned to Vatican City.
A mixed bag, talking about Christmas, science, and living in a less-than-ideal world:
1 A little history, a little culture:
2 An organization, territories and a treaty:
6 Wrapping up this week’s post:
Norski's Shop
Brian H. Gill's online art store: Opening when I get my ducks in a row. ;)
Posters, prints
