The last spring

 

This is a scientific paper, so I frankly only skimmed it, but it´s still fascinating. I didn´t even know you *could* make research like this! As in: did the meteorite impact that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs happen in spring, summer or what? The answer, apparently based on a thorough analysis of fish fossils showing their life cycle, is...spring. Or "boreal spring", as the paper puts it. As in March to May. 

What a pity we can´t narrow it down even further, I mean, I would love to know the weekday! Don´t tell me, Monday?   

The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring

Three men in a boat

 

So I re-watched “Jaws”. I never grokked this production the first couple of times I saw it. It hardly scared me and I found it boring! Today, I rather consider it very, very strange. Indeed, it comes across as two entirely different films. The first half is a rather (stereo)typical horror flick with all the usual ingredients. The monster attacks a wholesome all-American resort, munching on stoned hippies, children and stupid hillbillies. There is an idiot mayor, a scientific genius and a stable police officer just trying to do his job. OK, maybe it´s a *bit* original. Like the tiger shark who turns out to be a rare guest from Louisiana!

The second half is the real “Jaws”. The three main characters Brody, Hooper and Quint confront the super-sized shark in a boat that´s obviously too small and fragile (rather than calling the coast guard or navy). Quint turns out to be half-mad and personally obsessed with killing great white sharks. He is the “Captain Ahab” of the story. The whole thing makes zero sense, except as a bizarre male rite of passage. The shark is too large and too intelligent to be a normal animal. Indeed, it seems to be intrinsically *evil*.

Speculations about allegorical meaning are difficult to fend off. The three men on the worthless barge represent different kinds of Americans, perhaps different generations: the old and crazy war veteran Quint (who is presumably working class), the middle-aged and middle-class police officer, and the young well-educated scientist (implied to be upper class). Is this a vision of an America united against its external enemies? (“Jaws” was released in 1975.) Or is the shark a symbol of Nature showing its fangs? 

It´s intriguing to note that the irrational sailor Quint and the “rational” scientist Hooper turn out to be equally crazy (at least after a fashion). It´s also interesting that the person who eventually kills the shark is Brody, the stable White middle-class guy with an official police badge. He does so in the old fashioned way – with a rifle and some explosives – while Quint and Hooper tried various alternative techniques which completely failed. Order has been restored on Amity Island (note the 4^th July parade – Amity is of course a symbol for America and its proverbial way of life). At least it´s been temporarily restored until the sequels, but Steven Spielberg had nothing to do with those.

So I suppose “Jaws” is at least somewhat interesting…

Fake and...fish?!

 

Fake "scientists" are flooding the internet with fake AI-generated "research papers". Ichtyologists in particular better beware! Sabine Hossenfelder has the reciepts... 

Our cryptid cousins

 

OK, this was funny. Who would have thought that there are *cryptid* coelecanths? If an unknown animal is discovered, guess what, people suddenly see it everywhere and at all times...including half a planet away from where it was discovered?! But sure, the idea that people at Mallorca were catching and eating primordial lobe-finned fish until fairly recently does have a certain romantic appeal. 

Besides, two species of coelecanth has been discovered - not just one - the second one as late as 1998 (in Indonesia). So I suppose it´s possible that a few new species of this strange and wonderful fish (a *very* distant evolutionary cousin of...ourselves) might still be lurking out there...

Well, actually

 

AI´s fantasy picture of a basking shark 

"Sveriges hav - Nordsjöns giganter" is a somewhat peculiar nature documentary, probably German in provenance, but I haven´t been able to locate the original version. The Swedish title means "The Seas of Sweden - Giants of the North Sea".

Ahem, the North Sea is *not* Swedish...

Indeed, most of the docu seems to be taped on or around the Shetland Islands, which are (of course) British?! Not sure who came up with the idea to call this a "Swedish" documentary. Some old Viking romantic? Dude!

But sure, if you like dramatic vistas, this might be for you. Killer whales, basking sharks, grey seals, sea otters, dolphins, skuas attacking and eating puffins, the invasive red king crab...you get the picture. Shetland sure looks pretty dangerous, LOL. 

  

The Goblin Shark feat. Marvin

 

"The best cryptid evidence" doesn´t strike me as very "cryptid". Note that the Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot fame isn´t included in this survey. All animals featured (except maybe Marvin) seem to belong to known and currently extant taxa. So-called cryptozoologists don´t really care - they want to find a giant ape-man, a surviving dinosaur, or something to that effect. 

So it seems the Patterson-Gimlin film is unique, being the only good footage of an *actual* cryptid (i.e. a monster). But it´s precisely it´s singular character that makes it so hard to believe...   

The land of desolation

 

So I just watched the nature documentary "Wild Ireland: Kingdom of Stone", about the apparently world famous karst landscape between County Clare and County Galway known as the Burren. I admit I never heard about it before! Or maybe I did, since parts of this docu reminds me of - surprise - other documentaries about western Ireland.

Animals shown include the pine marten, Daubenton´s bat, whooper swans and the butterfly known as the marsh fritillary. In the Atlantic Ocean we also find the finback whale (the world´s second largest animal) and the basking shark (the world´s second largest fish). The basking sharks occasionally gather in one place and swim in a large circle, nobody really knows why. But yes, it does look majestic.

The Burren also has an interesting human history. Here we find Neolithic grave monuments, abandoned churches and monasteries, and a mysterious tower once inhabited by none other than W B Yeats (who apparently saw whooper swans as near-divine). Indeed, the landscape is man-made in the sense that Neolithic farmers cut down all the trees, presumably to give room for agriculture and cattle. 

"The Kingdom of Stone" has a romantic (or Romantic) undertone, and frequently shows ravens (?) flying across the bizarre landscape of karst and ruins. Ahem, Ireland is a modern, globalized territory these days...

Still, could be interesting on a boring Wednesday evening. 

It´s still a tuatara, dude

 

Dude, moths and plants aren´t vertebrates. I mean, plants aren´t even Animalia. Still, it´s interesting to note that the tuatara is the fastest evolving vertebrate (chordate?) in terms of its genotype, while its physical appearence has apparently remained pretty much the same since time freakin´ immemorial. In other words: it still looks like a lizard, despite not being one!

Which animals are evolving faster?

God loves split gill mushrooms (and, I suppose, beetles) but hates the Iberian lynx. Or something.

What is the genetically most diverse species?

Don´t tell the creationists, I´m sure they can do *something* with this factoid...

The Moon might still have active volcanoes

Posted here for no good reason whatsoever...

Ray-finned body

 

So I searched Academia.edu for scholarly papers on "the rainbow body", a concept within Tibetan Buddhism. I got 5,800 hits! Which sounded kind of fantastic. 

But...

It turns out that most of them are fairly technical papers on - wait for it - rainbow trout?! But yeah, I suppose this particular bony fish may have an, ahem, rainbow body...

One of the papers about the fish does have a title that sounds almost Tantric: "The Kármán gait: novel body kinematics of rainbow trout swimming in a vortex street". 

But no, I haven´t read it.  

Feral GOLDFISH

 

Feral *goldfish* are lose in Lake Ontario, growing extremely large (at least for goldfish) and being generally annoying (and, I suppose, invasive). Note also that the pest goldfish aren´t orange anymore, but rather turn grey! Another absurd fact: goldfish are "adapted" to the bad environment of goldfish tanks, and therefore thrive in environmentally degraded parts of the Great Lakes?!  

Speculation, speculation...

 

A lot of speculation in this one. Or rather in the list the content-creator is commenting, a list of the ten most likely cryptids to be discovered during the 21st century. 

The list sounds like wish-fulfillment. 

From the top of my head (which is considerable - both the top and the head), the thylacine, the giant eel and the giant octopus seem to be the three most likely candidates. Since the other cryptids might not exist at all, their discovery - this century or the next - is *highly* unlikely...

Here´s a more certain prediction: there will still be enthusiasts in 2100 hunting the Gugu, the Megalenia or whatever cryptids will be on the top ten!

The body found

 

It´s actually quite funny that the media creates a panic (or is it a silly season) everytime some carcass of a sea animal washes ashore. The term "globster" for seemingly mysterious carcasses was apparently coined by notorious sensationalist Ivan T Sanderson. I assumed it was Charles Hoy Fort (who was definitely on the same wave length, LOL). 

This week, the unidentified fishy object is a "mermaid globster" (no less) from Papua New Guinea. Or strictly speaking the small Simberi Island a bit north of the PNG mainland. The experts are *baffled*, baffled I say, except of course they really aren´t, with guesses ranging from a whale of a tale to the pudgy dugong, but alas, nobody guessed a plump mermaid on a suicide mission.

The natives of the volcanic island, who presumably have better things to do, didn´t take any DNA samples and promptly buried the rottening mass of ectoplasm at an undisclosed location. Well, at least the media spared us the details!

So it seems we have to wait a few months until the next globster comes onland, hopefully with its monstrous mer-squid-megalodon DNA intact...  

Mermaid globster found in New Guinea

Guldfiskapokalypsen

 

Av någon anledning skrattade jag faktiskt när jag läste detta. Am I losing it, or what? Ekosystem världen över hotas av guldfiskar stora som gäddor!  

Jätteguldfiskar hotar ekosystemen - i hela världen

The wrong cryptids

 

This may or may not tell us something about American TV production. Imagine seeing and taping a possible lake monster while making a TV show, but the footage is never shown (or even mentioned) since the show is about...monsters in the woods?! Specifically Bigfoot. Yes, it´s an interview with James "Bobo" Fay from "Finding Bigfoot". 

:D

Also some speculations about black mountain lions in the United States and "the Eastern cougar".      

The death of Megalodon nerds

 

One of the more tiresome alternative "theories" is that our oceans are stalked by a mega-sized primordial shark, Megalodon (no apparent relation to Meghan Markle). 

A "fucking nerd" on Twitter nicknamed Lana explains why Meg is most certainly dead and gone. And if you don´t have access to Elon Musk´s private blog, the second link goes to a curious docu prepared by the very same Lana on pretty much the very same topic! 

Not sure if the denizens of these cyber-haunts believe in Meg´s flesh-blood-and-cartilage existence, but if you do, plz study the material linked below, LOL. 

"Fucking nerd" Lana on why Megalodon´s most certainly dead

Megalodon - Lack of Plausibility for Survival

I learned a new word today

 

Or rather term, the term in question being "Zuiyo-maru truther", a person who still insists that the carcass found by the Japanese fishing boat Zuiyo-maru in 1977 actually was a plesiosaur...

Twitter thread on the topic

The mother of all eels

 

“Monster: The Mystery of Loch Ness” is a 2022 Scottish documentary in three parts about the elusive cryptid supposedly living in the dark waters of Loch Ness.

The two first episodes looks promising, but the third reveals that most of the sensational “evidence” for Nessie is fake. The iconic “surgeon´s photo” from 1934 is now widely recognized as a hoax, possibly masterminded by media personality Marmaduke Wetherell (who had already been publicly disgraced when attempting an earlier Loch Ness monster hoax). The photos taken by American investigator Robert Rines were so convincing that they were published by the prestigious journal Nature in 1975, the article in question being co-written by prominent British naturalist Peter Scott. Unfortunately, they too were hoaxes. The “flipper photo” has been manipulated, while another pic shows a tree stump at the bottom of the loch! It also turns out that Rines had been directed to the locations where the photos were taken by some crazy old lady with a pendulum…

Operation Deepscan (1987), organized by the venerably bearded Adrian Shine (who looks almost like Charles Darwin), did pick up echoes of an object “larger than a shark but smaller than a whale”, somewhat ironically given Shine´s skepticism, but a later expedition showed that the loch simply doesn´t contain enough food for a monstrous animal. Interestingly, an analysis of DNA traces from Loch Ness samples show that there must be a lot of eels in the lake. In the end, there is therefore a certain possibility that at least some eye-witnesses are seeing real creatures: over-sized eels very far away from their Sargasso spawning grounds. According to all-knowing Wikipedia, a European eel can become 1.5 meter long and live for circa 80 years.

Still, something tells me the grandmama of all Anguilla isn´t exactly what the cryptozoologists and monster-hunters had in mind when they started looking into this particular mystery! A plesiosaur or dinosaur would be more fitting for the format. Still, I suppose it´s a good thing that our collective food supply has been secured…

The epic of the Greenland shark

 

Credit: Panda Planet(?)

The epic of evolution and all that stuff was fun as long as it lasted. I mean, it really *was* our "religion", wasn´t it? The epic ended with humanity leaving a scorched Earth billions of years into the future in highly advanced space ships to colonize new worlds in the galaxy...

We have been religious all our lives, without even realizing it. Where does the religion of evolutionary Progress originally come from? Oetinger? Hegel? Some obscure Jewish heresy that immanentized Lurianic Kabbala? 

In reality, the zenith of cosmic evolution was just a blip of about 300 years. Which is nothing. There is a species of fish, the Greenland shark, that can live longer! And, of course, trees. Crazy hubris, if you think about it! So the zenith of our civilization, which was supposedly also the zenith of *cosmic* evolution (and the fulcrum of the entire universe) lasted *less* than some freaky cartilaginous fish in the high Arctic, wtf. 

HA HA HA. I´m laughing at myself for un-ironically believing in it for so long...

Look at us, we can´t even cope with a bloody COVID pandemic. The crown of creation! 

But sure, I suppose we could still turn this tiny little planet into a desolate wasteland by nuclear war and/or anthropogenic climate change, just to make a point about our fantastic cosmic importance. There, Mr Universe, there, look who´s boss now!!! If we can´t create a perfect utopia, maybe we can at least trigger the perfect storm? Then we can go under in flame and fire, convinced that we have thereby demonstrated our UNIQUENESS and SUPERIORITY.

After all, the Greenland shark can´t do that, so there, Western modern civ just proved its superiority. Secret king wins again!

The Western myth of progress and the epic of evolution is just the latest (and strangest) Judeo-Christian heresy. Or cluster of heresies. Amen.

Dead as a paddlefish

 

Or dead as a dodo named Mao? The Chinese paddlefish is officially declared extinct by the IUCN. 

So that was that, then. 

But apparently the paddlefishes as a group have been around for 120 million years, and there is still an (ugly) American species, so even 5,000-year old Chinese civilization has existed for only an instant compared to these peculiar creatures!  

A new theory of evolution

A very interesting article from The Guardian...

From the article: 

>>>Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are “much more content” living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. “They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land,” Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”. He sounded almost proud of the fish.

>>>Moczek’s own area of expertise is dung beetles, another remarkably plastic species. With future climate change in mind, he and his colleagues tested the beetles’ response to different temperatures. Colder weather makes it harder for the beetles to take off. But the researchers found that they responded to these conditions by growing larger wings. The crucial thing about such observations, which challenge the traditional understanding of evolution, is that these sudden developments all come from the same underlying genes. The species’s genes aren’t being slowly honed, generation by generation. Rather, during its early development it has the potential to grow in a variety of ways, allowing it to survive in different situations. “We believe this is ubiquitous across species,” says David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Do we need a new theory of evolution?