Danielle Stamp's List: Argumenative

• they collect various objects and bits of material to deposit in, or use in the construction of, their nests.
• Wood rats are commonly called Pack Rats or Trade Rats
• fond of small, bright, shiny objects which they will readily confiscate.
• The structures that Neotoma build are called "Middens" in the vernacular.
• built upon by generations of rats.
• valuable as a resource
• the valuable plant and animal material is left behind for future analysis
• "paleoneotomology"
• results out of analyzing the contents of the middens. Some of them go back to Pleistocene times!

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• if you try to be a good person and do the right thing, then you should be saving the evidence so when someone tries to paint you as a bad person, you can pull out the email or document and wave it in their face and remind them who did what to whom
• Surely the CDs represent proof of ownership.
  If the RIAA comes calling, you can produce them in the same way as the documents mentioned in the blog post. :)
• but I only end up using any of the stuff I save about 10% of the time... I just never know which 10% I'm going to need.
• I hate to encourage a packrat habit (my wife has one :) but you should check out pixily.com. It's a great doc management system for personal and SOHO use and allows you to digitally upload as well as send in docs via special envelopes USPS.

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• Thanks to pack rats, however, these voles have not been forgotten.
• 600,000 and a million years ago
• "This is the first study where we've actually taken a living species and looked back almost a million years at the population level to see how it changes through time,"
• "We've got a snapshot very early in the history of the species, around 750,000 years ago in the middle Pleistocene, in which we can trace details of what happens in time, plus a snapshot at 10,000 years and a modern snapshot."
• the cave's history has been reconstructed from the sediments and the bones
• collections at the Carnegie Museum, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology and the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.
• starting slightly less than a million years ago, in the middle Pleistocene, an era known for its ice ages. During this period, wood rats, colloquially known as pack rats, scavenged nearby owl pellets and scat from coyotes and other mammalian carnivores to decorate their elaborate nests.

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• People are sometimes called pack rats because of a tendency to save seemingly worthless or useless objects. The name pack rat is commonly applied to all woodrats, which share a habit of collecting odds and ends, often incorporating them into their house. Another nickname is trade rat, because of the woodrat’s tendency to drop or trade the item it carries for a new treasure.
• Within the house are tunnels, passages, and chambers. One of the chambers contains two or more nests made of woven grass, fur, feathers, and shredded bark. Other chambers are used for feeding and food storage. An individual may spend its lifetime associated with one house, to which it regularly adds fresh materials.
• Another sign of long-term bushy-tailed woodrat presence is a black, tarlike varnish resulting from continued use of its latrine area.
• Woodrats are interesting and harmless creatures, unless they happen to "trade" for your car keys or another important possession with something of value in the woodrat’s world. These species help us broaden our understanding of nature by demonstrating that the name "rat" means much more than we may have thought.

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• Researchers say they've found an area of the brain that seems to govern the urge to collect.
• Abnormal hoarding behavior following brain injury was recently studied at the University of Iowa's medical school by researchers including Steven Anderson, PhD.
• A total of 13 people were classified as "abnormal collectors." They had excessive collections of useless items that began after the brain injury occurred, and they resisted changing their hoarding habits.
• "A pretty clear finding jumped out at us," says Anderson, in a news release. "Damage to a part of the frontal lobes of the [brain's] cortex, particularly on the right side, was shared by the individuals with abnormal behavior."

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• However, as is often the case with pack rats, many treasures were discovered among her things.
• "Collector" is used by many pack rats who don't want the stigma

• this midden from the Garrison site in western Utah contains objects gathered by a packrat some 13,480 14C years ago, including plants and animals that no longer exist at this site.
• The plant material found in the midden indicates that the vegetation at this site was once an open limber pine (Pinus flexilis) woodland.
• From a modern perspective of the Great Salt Lake area, it may be hard to envision a menagerie of now-extinct herbivores, including giant camels, moving across the wooded shores of a huge, "interstate" lake.

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• Each midden sample may contain tens of thousands of plant parts,
• The sorted materials are archived and then mined for special studies, which include the extraction and sequencing of ancient DNA.

• Men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job
• women consider a visual object they link it to language while men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object
• For both sexes the most active region was the parietal lobe that deals with visual perception, spatial orientation and information processing, but it was focused on the right side of the brain in men while both sides participated in women.

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