A poetic digression from Bert L. Taylor

One of the most entertaining books on my train commute lately has been the tiny but wonderful 'Dinosaurs', by W. E. Swinton, a revised edition from 1974. I'm a big fan of vintage palaeoart, mostly thanks to the people at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs (https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/up-from-depths.html), and this did not disappoint, but an unexpected highlight was a poem.

I'm not sure how copyright works for it, but here is a reckless retyping on 'The Dinosaur', from Bert L. Taylor in 1912. He talks about Stegosaurus and its then-apocryphal second brain.

THE DINOSAUR
Behold the mighty dinosaur
Famous in prehistoric lore
Not only for his power and strength
But for his intellectual length.
You will observe by these remains
The creature had two sets of brains-
One in his head (the usual place),
The other at his spinal base.
Thus he could reason "A priori"
As well as "A posteriori".
No problem bothered him a bit
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise was he, so wise and solemn,
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong
It passed a few ideas along.
If something slipped his forward mind
'Twas rescued by the one behind.
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving afterthought.
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgement to revoke.
Thus he could think without congestion
Upon both sides of every question.
Oh gaze upon this model beast,
Defunct ten million years at least.

The poo results: duck all?

Ouch, what a title.

 I had some wonderful news yesterday. Remember that I forgot to put my tubes extracted DNA in the freezer on Friday. After a very tense night, I sent an email to Supervisor first thing on Saturday explaining what had happened, and it turns out that he knew someone who would be in the lab. She, the hero, found my tubes and froze them.

So, we got all of the tubes out yesterday morning to measure them. The thing is, we don't actually know that there's DNA in there at the end of the process: it's just a drop of clear liquid. We use a clever little machine called a Qubit to see if any DNA is actually present, and estimate its concentration. We ran all of the samples through. Here are the results (samples of the same letter are from ducks of the same species from the same location):

Sample	Preparator	Left out overnight	DNA (ng/µl)
A1	Me	N	-
A2	Me	Y	-
A3	Me	Y	-
A4	Me	Y	-
A5	Me	Y	-
B1	Me	Y	-
C1	S	N	22.00
C2	S	N	4.77
C3	S	N	5.52
C4	S	N	16.20
C5	S	N	3.49
C6	S	N	4.98
C7	Me	N	6.90
C8	Me	N	5.58
C9	Me	N	-
C10	Me	N	10.40
D1	Me	Y	-
D2	Me	Y	-
D3	Me	Y	-

 

Only 3/13 of my samples had any DNA in them. Most of mine were left out, which could have degraded any DNA into uselessness, and all of those left out failed. Unfortunately, of the five I did the day before, under supervision and that definitely did go in the freezer, two failed. And they were from different types of duck. So it looks like I need more practice at this!

I ran two more samples yesterday. We shall see how they come out this morning...