Although the Jurupa Oak, at age 13,000 years, is frequently cited as an old clonal colony, the King’s Lomatia of Tasmania is a sterile species that has been cloning itself for at least 43,000 years.
There are plenty of Royal Oak pubs in Australia too!
Up until the mid 1800s, shipbuilding was a great consumer of oak timber in Britain. It took 1,000 oaks to build a ship the size of Nelson’s Victory.
“timbre” (sometimes mis-spelt “timber” by anglos) is the French word for a postal stamp. In the regional accent around Quebec City, the “i” is pronounced almost like a long “a”: “taambre”.
Quebec City was founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, the “Father of Acadia.” Quebec comes from the Algonquin word kebec which means where the river narrows. The St. Lawrence River narrows at Quebec City.
Quebec City was serving as the peripatetic capital of the Province of Canada in 1864, when the Quebec Conference was held there. The general outline of the Canadian constitution was worked out at the Quebec Parliament building.
The Seven Year’s War (whose American manifestation was the French and Indian War) was a sort of World War, with all the major European powers involved and fighting on several continents. Much territory changed hands during the war, but most was returned to its pre-war owners by the 1763 Treaty of Paris. An exception was French Canada, which passed to Britain and became known as the Province of Quebec.
[oog] Do others risk repeating themselves? I responded to Quebec 3 years ago in this thread :smack: :
The Manicouagan crater is the largest impact crater on the earth. It is visible from space. If you were to open a map of New York State and Quebec Province you would easily see the crater - today it is a lake and reservoir, Lac Manicouagan. It is also known as the “Eye of Quebec.”
Missed the edit window to add this:
Here it is on the map, just north of Maine. And then if you zoom out to see the entire CONUS, you can still see it, here - and as in my post, it is visible from space.
[OOG]I’m pretty sure I have played The Eye of Quebec before.[/OOG]
It’s been hypothesized that the Manicouagan crater was part of a multiple impact event, perhaps the result of a comet breakup similar to Shoemaker-Levy striking Jupiter, involving four other known craters – the Rochechouart crater in France, Saint Martin crater in Manitoba, Obolon’ crater in Ukraine, and Red Wing crater in North Dakota. All five are nearly the same age (200-225MY old) and, after accounting for continental drift, all five craters lie at nearly the same latitude. The chance of this happening by chance are virtually zero.
The red-winged blackbird is widely thought to be the most numerous species in North America. Bird-counting censuses of wintering red-winged blackbirds sometimes show that loose flocks can number in an excess of a million birds per flock and the full number of breeding pairs across North and Central America may exceed 250 million in peak years. The red-winged blackbird is sexually dimorphic; the male is all black with a red shoulder and yellow wing bar, while the female is a nondescript dark brown.
The extinct huia of New Zealand was remarkable for having the most sexually dimorphic bill shape of any bird species in the world. The female’s beak was long, thin and arched downward, while the male’s was short and stout, like that of a crow.
According to Popular Mechanics(!) the only species to become extinct in the last 40 years is the golden toad - pic here. The golden toad became extinct in 1989.
The article is a slideshow, so there are others.
There is no intact specimen of the dodo, which went extinct in the 17th century. Various museums have parts of the head, feet, and skulls, but there are no stuffed versions available, even though they are known to have existed.
Although it was once possibly the most numerous bird species in the world, the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Her body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was skinned, dissected, photographed and mounted. Currently, Martha is on display through September 2015 as part of the Once There Were Billions exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Hey Schenectady, incorrect, you misread.
Regards,
A Latham Hometown Guy 
Passenger pigeons were once, as recently as the 19th century, the most abundant bird in North America. By 1914 they were all gone (as Elvis told us), in large part because they were cheap meat to feed slaves and the poor. Their decline in population was slow between 1800 and 1870, and then was catastrophic between 1870 an 1890.
Carrier pigeons were used as high-speed post by ancient Greeks and Romans, parts of the Islamic Empire, Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire, the French in the Franco-Prussian War and both World Wars, and the Rothschild family.
The legend that the Rothschilds profited hugely by learning the outcome of Waterloo two days before other Londoners was an exaggeration created by Nazi anti-Semitic propagando. In fact, Waterloo was bad for the family, which would have been enriched by a longer war. Nevertheless, Nathan Rothschild’s huge purchases of British bonds in the months after Waterloo, against the advice of his brothers, led eventually to a profit of the then-equivalent of $1 billion U.S. today.
The Reuters news agency began in 1849 when Paul Reuter pioneered the use of carrier pigeons to carry breaking news home to his London bureau. Reuters was later the first outlet to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
A reporter from Reuters appears in the play and movie Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized version of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
(I know, because I played the reporter in a high school production of the play).