Check out these york photo images:
Ground Zero Redux
Image by nosha
Large, on Black
Again, the eyes of the World are focused on lower Manhattan. This shot gives a clear view down Wall Street (mouse over).
This photo was taken by femme_makita with my d300. It's not often we ride on helicopters to travel between Hopewell, NJ and Wallingford, CT, so it's quite unusual for both of us to travel within a two week period.
femme_makita had a very clear day to work with, had checked out the Wall Street sky scrapers on Google so she knew when to shoot, and had the Nikon 18-200mm at f8 to get a sharp result. I had set her up with aperture control, auto-iso (default 200), and a minimum 1/100 shutter speed to keep from getting a lot of blurry pictures - I think this worked well. I also think this photo is sharper than any of mine from the week before (see the Dark Coast set). If we ever get a chance to do this again, we may even bring some kind of shroud to limit reflections off the windows - this photo is free of them but many were not.
New York City
New York
USA
alternate view of my photostream (Flickr Hive Mind)
Giant ground sloths Megalocnus rodens and Megalonyx wheatleyi at the American Museum of Natural History
Image by Dallas Krentzel
Foreground: Megalocnus rodens (left) from the Pleistocene of Cuba and Megalonyx wheatleyi (right) from the Pleistocene of the central and eastern US.
Background: Scelidotherium cuvieri (left) and Glossotherium robustus (right) both from the Pleistocene of Argentina with Lestodon armatus behind it (you can see its ribcage), also from the Pleistocene of Argentina and a few surrounding nations.
In the The Hall of Primitive Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
I like this exhibit. It demonstrates the huge diversity of giant ground sloths in the Pleistocene (2.58 mya to ~11,000 years ago), with highly divergent morphologies and life styles all across the New World. At the end of the Pleistocene however, humans invaded North and South America and everything changed. Suddenly, all ground sloths went extinct. Except of course, Megalocnus rodens of Cuba in the Caribbean, where they remained at least until around ~4,000 years ago. The first known human arrivals onto the island were around 5,000 years ago, long after the colonization of the mainland continents.
For some reason these specimens were mounted in the Hall of Primitive Mammals (probably due to a lack of space in the Hall of Advanced Mammals, but it might also be due to the fact that they're xenarthrans, long thought of as basal placentals, although modern molecular data has challenged this view), but this is deceiving. If it were not for the environmental havoc and subsequent mass extinction at the end of the last ice age that humans almost certainly exacerbated, all of these massive beasts would be considered highly advanced megaherbivores of the modern realm.
Bye Bye Manhattan
Image by bestarns [www.spiritofdecay.com]
Bye Bye Manhattan , New York City , 21.04.2011
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