​Da Vinci’s mother was a slave from the Black Sea ● We don’t know where water on Earth comes from, but we do know where it does NOT come from ● Size really did matter for sauropods

Da Vinci’s mother was a slave from the Black Sea

Leonardo da Vinci, a famous 15th century Florentine scholar, is said to have been the son of a teenage girl kidnapped from the Caucasus and sold to Byzantium, Venice and Florence. At least this is what the Italian historian Carlo Vecche, quoted by El Pais, claims.

The fact that nothing more is known about Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, except that her name was Catherine, has caused a lot of speculation over time. The only thing that could be established with certainty was the paternal line, da Vinci’s father was a notary named Piero da Vinci, and the fact that he was not married to the Catherine who would have given birth to Leonardo.

Carlo Vecce claims he was able to identify who Catherine was by following a line of 600-year-old documents. Thus, Kateryna would be the only 15-year-old daughter of a prince named Yakov from the territory of modern Georgia. She would have been kidnapped by a group of Tatars and then sold to a Byzantine slave trader.

It was sold and resold several times in Constantinople until it came into the possession of a Venetian, to be bought in Venice by one Donato di Filippo di Salvestro Nati, a Florentine knight whose wife, Mona Ginevra, is said to have owned slaves from “the Near East and the Black Sea”.

Donato had connections with Piero da Vinci, the latter being the notary who signed his documents. That’s how da Vinci would have found out about Katerina and that’s how she would have gotten pregnant. Later he bought her and restored her freedom.

Obviously, there are voices that deny such a hypothesis. For example, Catherine was a common name for freed slaves. So, the freed da Vinci Catherine could have been anyone, although in this case the coincidence is at least strange.

We don’t know where water on Earth comes from, but we do know where it does NOT come from

71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. More than two thirds. And no one can say exactly where it came from. The fact that it was brought by comets or asteroids is the most used hypothesis for its origin. But a hypothesis must also be proven to become a theory.

At the moment, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland, USA, claims to have managed to eliminate some potential candidates for the source of Earth’s water, achondrites or achondritic meteorites. (What this is, physicist Claudio Teneselia explains here).

American researchers, whose study was published in Nature, claim to have analyzed seven achondrites that flew through our solar system over a period of approximately 4.5 billion years. They come from planetesimals (primordial celestial bodies that collided with each other to form planets). The problem is that such achondrites have an extremely low water content. At least this is one of the observations of the authors of the study.

The fact that the meteorites in question fell to Earth relatively recently means that this is the first time that anyone has been able to conduct such tests on such celestial bodies. In general, it turned out that water is about 1/2,000,000 of the total mass of the studied objects.

Thus, according to experts, there are only two candidates that could have brought water to Earth: comets or chondrite meteorites. Whether they come from within our solar system or from beyond it is another very interesting question waiting to be clarified, especially since water is a key element without which life as we know it would not exist .

Size really did matter for sauropods

It is not the first time that we report that not a month goes by without Chinese paleontologists announcing a new discovery. This time we are talking about a completely new species of sauropod, which has been named Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum (don’t try the pronunciation). In fact, the discovery dates back to 1987, but only now have the results of the analysis arrived in a study in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

This specimen lived about 160 million years ago, and while it was far from the largest sauropod on Earth, it still had the longest neck. One is about 15 meters.

Looking at this unsurpassed record, experts are trying to find out exactly what his role was. The simplest explanation would be that it gave him an advantage in the competition for food. In this way, it would have reached branches and leaves that other herbivorous dinosaurs could not reach. However, the role of such a pointed neck could be much more complex.

Perhaps he played an important role in sexual selection. As they say, size really did matter in sauropods. Or another explanation, which does not exclude the previous one, would be that the neck was used in fights between males, following the model suggested by today’s giraffes. But, as the researchers also admit, this is only an assumption at the moment.

Why did the results come so late, after more than 20 years? Well, because only one vertebra from the neck region of M. Sinocanadorum has ever been discovered, along with several ribs and skull fragments. And this is not enough to calculate who knows what. In 2012, it took another discovery of another species of Chinese sauropods, one of them was named Xinjiangtitan. This time the neck of the specimen was ready.

And because there were similarities between the two species, paleontologists were able to compare the fossils and estimate the length of the neck of M. Sinocanadorum. And one more interesting thing, the territory of China in the Jurassic period was part of an isolated island. Therefore, the fauna here is unique and the evolution of species here was somewhat different from the rest of the world.

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