Fresh off the press: a new Visitor's Guide to Castillo de San Severino is now available

It is with great satisfaction that I announce the first publication, and hopefully, the first of many to come, organized, compiled and edited by researchers at our Progressus Heritage and Community Foundation.

This Guide offers a brief history of the Spanish colonial fort of San Severino, localized in the bay of Matanzas, northern coast of Cuba. We designed it with the visitor in mind. It is organized by chapters, each providing a very brief account of the most prominent locations of the fort. Describing the areas as the visitor will reach them along the modern tourist paths. Many of the chapters include new information gleaned from our current research on the history and archaeology of the Castillo.

Our main wish was to inform and guide the potential visitors, off and on the island. In addition, to provide the townspeople of Matanzas and the Slave Route’s Museum-today part of the Castillo de San Severino-with a freely available Guide for all interested. The new Visitor’s Guide is available for free download here.

It is our great hope that this Castillo can become a point of interest for tourists interested in Cuba’s colonial past. Moreover, that its visits can help provide for its maintenance and permanence, wishfully, for more centuries to come. Feel free to peruse my other posts on this magical spot on Matanzas, either here, on San Carlos de Matanzas blog, or our Progressus blog page, on where we will be publishing parts of the Guide.

Next year, the Castillo will celebrate its 325 years!

The Cuban Pallid bat Antrozous koopmani

Cuba has an endemic Pallid bat:  Antrozous koopmani, a species named in honor of the great bat zoologist, the late Karl Koopman. I posted a similar post on the Cubabat Facebook page, and the post was so successful, that I thought may be interesting in reposting an edited version here.

There are currently two species of Pallid bats, Antrozous pallidus and Antrozous koopmani, of the Vespertilionidae family. Antrozous pallidus has a range that extends from southern British Columbia, south to the coastal states east of Kansas, and down to Queretaro, Mexico with an insular population on Maria Magdalena Island, Nayarit. And A. koopmani an endemic species to the island of Cuba.

Drawing of one of Ramsden's Oriente specimens figured in Dr. G. Silva's
masterpiece Los Murcielagos de Cuba (1979). 

This insular and distinct population of Antrozous was not detected until 1920 when C. T. Ramsden acquires two specimens in Oriente province, eastern Cuba. One was caught at Caney, another from Guantanamo. This feat was not again repeated until the Drs. Gilberto Silva-Taboada and Karl Koopman captured another living specimen in 1956, on the foothill forests of Pan de Guajaibon in Pinar del Rio, western Cuba. The Ramsden specimens are the only known skin-preserved-specimens known to date.

Antrozous skull and dentary: Antrozous koopmani on the left, and
Antrozous pallidus (AMNH 2125) on the right.
The A. koopmani is from fossil site at Palenque Hill, Mayabeqye, Cuba.

In the upcoming years, however, several skeletal remains were recovered from fresh owl pellets in several caves in western Cuba. Robert T. Orr and Gilberto Silva used this material in the official description of the Cuban pallid bat Antrozous koopmani as an endemic species of the island of Cuba in 1960.

Today, the species has been reported from several fossil deposits in most provinces of western Cuba: Pinar del Rio, Mayabeque, Matanzas, and Sancti Spiritus. Which suggests that the species had a much wider distribution on the island during the Recent past, that could have lasted until several hundred years ago.

Antrozous koopmani is today Cuba’s rarest bat. It has not been captured alive again, at least with certainty, since 1956, and is now presumed extinct.

Please  visit Proyecto Cubabat's page to see the original post and many others there. 

Antoine Lavoisier and the Law of Conservation of Mass

We have been taught in science courses that “matter cannot be created or destroyed”. In many occasions, I have heard this important scientific theory erroneously attributed to either Newton or Einstein. I will dedicate this post to the man behind such important paradigm, in hopes that it may divulge a bit more about his scientific achievements. That man was Antoine Lavoisier.

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife painted by the French painter Jacques-Louis David.
This majestic portrait is exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, in New York. 

Lavoisier was a French nobleman of the Era of Enlightenment (XVIII century) and is considered today the father of modern chemistry for his scientific discoveries.

Among them is the widely known scientific Law of Conservation of Mass or Conservation of Mass-Energy, which states, “matter is neither created nor destroyed”, which he proposed in 1785. This law simply postulates that the total mass of the reactants or starting materials must be equal to that of the product or end result of any chemical, nuclear or radioactive decay reaction. That mass cannot be destroyed, but only modified or rearranged in space. It also implies that it could change form, but could not exist from anything.

It is not until the work of Julius Robert Mayer, who proposed the Law of Conservation of Energy, that Lavoisier’s main postulation takes hold, as this new law becomes the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Einstein knew, like Newton, that if he saw further into the scientific horizon, it was no doubt because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Those giants like Lavoisier and Mayer, who came before him, and laid the foundation for him to state, in 1907, that “the total amount of mass and energy in the universe is constant”. This allowed for his own Theory of Special Relativity.

So there. It was largely in part of Lavoisier’s discoveries, in a special sense that of Conservation of Mass, which paved the way for other important discoveries on the functioning of our Universe, and from them branched other more important theorems, laws, and theories, which today provide us with a myriad of applications. Knowledge, thus, stems upwards. Sort of in a spiral: the uppermost loops are the widest and deepest. Built on preexisting knowledge.

Antoine Lavoisier was guillotined on May 8th, 1794, at the height of the French Revolution.

I extend my sincere thanks to Enrique Sara for reminding me of Lavoisier's importance. Specially on gas laws. 

Answer to Fossil Trivia III: The Fossil Bat in the Stone

Well, that was a tough one. Not many saw the fossil right away, but one learns in paleontology, as in any other field, with experience. It is with time and some getting use to, that one can beging to make out shapes and structures in rocks, that normally, would not be obvious to the observer.

In our last case, that was, I guess, a bit unfair. The fossil visible on the rock is that of a bat, a 30 million year old specimen from the Green River formation, and presently on the Vertebrate Paleontology collection of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH, in NY).

The Green River is known for its superbly preserved fossils, among which figure bats. The low oxygen conditions, of what seemed to be a shallow lagoon, lake or estuary environment promoted preservation of any organism that fell in its waters, and settled at the muddy bottom. This bat represents one of those such events.

Archaeopterix specimen (cast) on exhibit at the AMNH.
Note the tail feather impressions. 

Other similar deposits exist at the Messel Pit fossil site, in Germany, where 40 million year old animals are remarcably preserved, along with embrios, stomach content, hair, and sometimes even color. The Solnhofen limestone deposits, also in Germany is another remarkable example. The first Archaeopteryx, the first feathered dinosaur discovered, A. lithographica, was found in the fine-grained limestones of Solnhofen's quarries in 1861. It was called lithographica, because, originally, the fine limestone extrated at those quarries were coveted for the printing industry. The fine-grained feature of Solnhofen's limestone allowed a high degree of detail of the engravings marked upon its printing blocks.

Lithographic limestone block used for printing. Taken from Pintrest. 

Fossil Matter Trivia II: Can you identify this fossil?

In our previous trivia, I posted the image of an ammonite. This was a group of cephalopod mollusks that went extinct in the late Cretaceous along with the dinosaurs. These were marine predators, some of them growing a few meters in diameter.

The specimen from the previous post is a Perisphinctes cubensis from the middle Jurassic black limestones and shales of Pinar del Rio, western Cuba. These fossils can be found on river rocks and rock walls.

But this post will be harder. Can you identify this fossil?