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Today at my school we had an assembly about internet predators and when I had said that most of my true friends are over the internet and they gave me a lecture about how “I don’t know who I’m talking to” blah blah. So please, if you aren’t a predator in any way, please reblog so i can prove a point.
If you don’t reblog this, then I am honestly very concerned.
everytime i see this im gonna reblog it and weed out my pedo followers
Let me introduce you to three of my friends: hallucigenia, opabinia, and wiwaxia. They’re all from the Cambrian explosion, the period of time around 500 million years ago when life was just starting and was still trying to figure out questions like “how should a mouth work?” and “legs?”
Hallucigenia was about an inch long (most life back then was tiny, they were only a few eras removed from being single celled after all) and it had sixteen clawed legs, hard spines coming out of its back, and a wicked tentacle neckbeard.
Opabinia was between two to three inches long and it had thirty fins along the side of its body, along with five mushroom shaped eyes on top of its head. By far though, its most interesting feature was its strange proboscis. Like a Dr. Moreau style mashup of an elephant and a lobster, the long nose terminated in a large claw that it used to grab prey and bring it to its backward facing mouth.
Finally, this is wiwaxia. This danger-artichoke was a two inch long armored slug-like creature with no head. In fact, its actual body was largely just its one massive foot.
I find these animals interesting for three main reasons. First, it’s incredibly fascinating to see all of the potential paths that life on earth could have taken. Imagine an ocean filled with elephant lobsters! Second, whenever I feel like my life is going nowhere and all my choices are the wrong ones, I like to think that I’m in in my phase where I’m still developing hallucigenias and wiwaxias, and not yet making awesome things like
butterflies or velociraptors. Finally – it serves as a stark reminder that if we ever find alien life, there is a fantastic chance it will look like nothing we’ve ever seen before – it might look more like one of these creatures than a human being.
The Cambrian explosion is my go to chill out meditative tool. Look at all this teeming monster life, just living their monster lives. It makes me feel so so small.
Okay, I love your comparison with Cambrian life and like, having issues getting started yourself. As a geology/biology double major, that speaks to me.
But how could you not mention my favorite one?
Meet anomalocaris:
Its name means “strange shrimp”. This is because it was first identified via its mandibles, which looked like a weird shrimp. Later, someone realized “oh wait no all these parts we thought were different animals were actually the same one”. The most beautiful origin story, in my opinion. Anomalocaris was one of the first predators ever, and is my beautiful strange son. Here’s what the mouthparts look like.
Yep. That’s definitely a strange shrimp.
Also, if you want other weird-ass things to look at, look up things from the Ediacaran (aka before the Cambrian). They’re so damn strange that they have their own phylum, Vendobionta. They have forms of symmetry that we literally have never seen in anything else. They look like plants but are animals. I love them and they are all my children.
Anyways. That’s my two cents.
I’m so glad other people share my spiritual connection to the Cambrian explosion
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People rarely think about the engineering of gala gowns, or of fashion at all. This is part of a larger problem of treating traditionally feminine interests as non-science-related. Baking is practical chemistry, knitting is manual programming, makeup is about crafting optical illusions, and adjusting pattern sizes relies on algebra.
But gala gowns never appear alongside the ubiquitous thrown baseball in physics books, or pop up as exam questions. As copyright library Nancy Sims pointed out to me on Twitter, while plenty of spacial reasoning tests ask which pieces fold into a cube, none ask which set of pattern pieces would fit together into a pair of pants.
Wanderings and Perigrinations 