Author Archives: Roger Gosden
Mastodon in Our Town
Not Mastodon the heavy metal band from Atlanta, but a heavy, leathery mastodon from Virginia. It is the first found east of the Blue Ridge. A local bricklayer was hunting on private land one day in 1983 when he found … Continue reading
Posted in Animalia, Nature
Tagged College of William & Mary, elephant, extinction, fossil, George Cuvier, mammoth, Mammut americanum, mastodon
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SNPs are Us
It won’t be long before snp is added to the pantheon of approved English words in the OED. It will sit among those rarest of words, those that lack a vowel like the crafty Welsh invented—cwm (a mountain hollow), crwth … Continue reading
Posted in Biomedical, Health
Tagged 23andme, DNA ancestry, DNA testing, genetic disease, promethease, single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs
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From DNA to New Cousins & Ancestry
The back of a Cornflakes box is a good deal more absorbing than another person’s family tree. Genealogy is a rather personal game of history. Our interest seems to gain momentum with age, which may unfortunately mean we are too … Continue reading
Posted in Biomedical, Health
Tagged 23andme, ancestry, ancestry.com, DNA ancestry, Family Tree DNA, Finding Your Roots, genealogy, King Richard III, Queen Victoria, Who Do you Think You Are?
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Peace in 2016
Posted in Memoir, Other, Seasons in Virginia
Tagged Alfred, Isle of Rhum, Lord Tennyson
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Time Long Past
“Christmas comes round faster every time, Roger, and the years go by more quickly when you get to my age.” Grandma’s warning was also the annual refrain we heard from a lot of older folk as we grew up, and … Continue reading
Posted in Memoir
Tagged Aging, Christmas, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Time, William Butler Yeats
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Roger musing about Peace with Nature 