Palaeontologists solve mystery of 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore

Palaeontologists solve mystery of 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore

Dear Ruby

Ruby, I am glad I taught you to turn over rocks in the garden looking for creepy crawlies. We have found amazing things together, already. Ants. I cannot comprehend the damage we are doing to their colonies by our frequent intrusion, but the way I see it, I have gone far out of my way to create an ideal landscape for them, and they owe me some entertainment for my daughter. Ants are familiar with the give and take of mutualism, and now I am doing the taking. We have seen beautiful rove beetles in your colonies, two types so dissimilar in appearance that it is only because of years of booklearning that I recognized them. Ruby, I never bothered ants to look for rove beetles before you came along.

We also have an amazing density of millipedes. Curiously, the star performer of our garden fauna, the European earwig, is scarcely extinct locally, after reaching such incredible densities that I was beginning to wonder how this creature came to be so invincible. Much less abundant, but strange and beautiful, are the beetles. I saw a patent leather beetle, in the wild, and alone, looking under a rock, some strange carabids, and a number of beautiful iridescent beetles I cannot currently name.

Soon, Ruby. Scarabs. Soon, fireflies as well. Soon crickets and cicada calls. Soon.

an old poem from the 1990's found and resurrected

the dark room

it is a field of black lilies

a burned out sun, an enormous dark pupil

and i

am an inverted miniature

caught under its gaze

a perfect shadow of myself, a cipher

waiting to be exposed on a plate of silver film

once in my life

if i could only capture a moment so perfectly as this photograph

feel pain without guilt or

peace without boredom,

find my way into the light outside the cave

Another Victory

The night was cloak-black. I could scarcely see anywhere without my special goggles. Its cranium was shining flame-yellow though, blinding my vision of anything but a cerebral cortex, outlined in greenish black, pulsing through a translucent humanoid skull.

I use the term "humanoid" loosely here. The beast had tentacled arms, but a recognizably human face with a gaping, idiot's jaw.

I circled round it with my energy sword drawn. It would fall before me like the others. It would not kill me with its death ray vision, because i was neither living nor dead, a robot. My silver skin glistened in its reflections, and I moved in for the kill. Under its quickly-moving right tentacle I went, but the second tentacle writhed around my foot just in time for me to cut it off at the shoulder. A foot kicked me then, and I went down with a shudder. Rolling in its direction, I cleaved both feet off of the thing, and then crawling to my robot knees as it cried, I beheaded it.

Glowing cranium pulsed at increasingly longer and longer intervals as the thing's head died in the black night.

Dear Ruby

it is probably worth mentioning, at this exact moment in time, because such a dispatch as this is really limited to a particular instant in cosmic time, that things are pretty good at this time. the homemade lager has all the fruitiness of a beer that was fermented at the wrong temperature, and i love it. it feels like my invention. the weather is perfect, and the happy little baby is sleeping next to a rubber duck the size of a real duck, a few feet away. true, there is no meteor shower, but there are also no impact craters, and for that, i am eternally grateful, or at least, until an impact occurs. there is rock out there. that is to say, rock, and heavy metal exist. i like this. i like that the world harbors so many species of insects, also. i watched one bee intimidate and harass another today, separate species and both solitary, and i approved. these things go on happening even in urban gardens, evolutionary events such as the transport of strange fish across great oceans.

i have never felt truly like a member of the human race. this may result from an upbringing spent with my face pushed between colored illustrations of ants, or it may result from abnormalities in some prefrontal gyrus of mine, but every glance in the mirror is a surprise, no matter how old i get, because i do not generally expect to see a primate there. seriously, i find its hands beautiful, its eyes and lips interesting, and its sheer bulk paradoxical. it seems curiously degenerate, lacking so many of the features that should have made it a chordate to begin with, and its immune system waging war on the last remnant of notochord. its societies are so complicated, and so much of its energy is devoted to activities which, if anything, negatively impact its Darwinian fitness. that said, i never expected to have any Darwinian fitness at all, and that strange creature i spent the day with has a similar, odd, interest in its own status as a human being. such things as nostrils need to be accounted for. a continuous digestive tract, and heterotrophy, were not forgone conclusions, and the existence of something like the ocean is a like some weird homecoming. i do not know what strange galactic cluster you were at lately, nugget, but welcome to earth and, when you get old enough, enjoy the beer.

Extincton

there is a comet coming. i can feel it like an itch at the back of my neck as we descend back into the plane of the spiral galaxy. those arms pose serious dilemmas. when the doomsday asteroid arrives, it will find a planet already recovering from a mass extinction event, and the two will get blurred together for future paleontologists to sort out. the Permian mass extinction was obviously set off by a bolide of some sort that hit the Earth square in the ocean, releasing ancient trapped gasses that were already present at dangerous levels.

sometimes i wonder how it is that we are doing the work of evolution, letting one species of African drosophiliid wander the continents while driving extinct a thousand in Hawaii, encouraging rock doves on every continent, procuring species from one continent and dropping them on another, erasing sixty million year old biogeographic signatures, beavers in the Amazon, rabbits in Australia, boa constrictors in the Everglades and, nearly everywhere, houseflies.

Jurassic fast food was a key to giant dinosaurs

Jurassic fast food was a key to giant dinosaurs

Anthropocentric principal now

Dude, how the hell can it be that, of all the potential people in this world, i mean, just this particular era, not counting all those other times in history when Celts grew barley or women in the Indus River Valley said little prayers to phallic deities in hopes of bearing children, i am exactly the person i turned out to be. How unlikely is it that i ended up being me? and yet how absolutely impossible is it for me to really know what it means to be otherwise? Even those other incarnations of this absolute consciousness out there, because my scientific training does nothing to refute or support the intuitive notion that we all support aspects of a single, divine mind the belief in which is aesthetic and intuitive, could not be asking the exact question as me except in such exceptional circumstances as perhaps, a clay pipe smoked after a successful wheat harvest, or a few dozen bright red mushrooms into a ceremonial divination, and yet i am like them in asking, and like others no doubt reading this and remembering their own encounters with the subject. it is an inescapable conclusion that every scrap of time i experience, every reverie i slip into between stops of the Green Line, brings another aspect of this consciousness to the surface, buries an old version of me and unwraps a new one, and that twenty four year old version of myself who made the first attempts at connecting to the larger scaffolding of it all, or that thirty nine year old version of myself who succeeded for a moment or two but could not have survived the experience for any longer, grows farther and farther away in some perpendicular but otherwise analogous direction. if something does indeed connect us all, are there not enough neurons firing at any given time for the network to be getting a hazy picture of its own self, a guess at its true nature only possible given the evolution of life on this planet. Dude, it sounds like a plan. it sounds as if such a being is inevitable, a product of the universe that created it replicating itself so many millions of times as to lead to this series of moments in time, just often enough and on just enough planets simultaneously, amid the vast star clusters and gigantic elliptical galaxies, actually is gazing in upon itself and i am a neuron in it unlike any of the others, but suddenly aware of their existence for a moment.

Two Studies On Bee Evolution Reveal Surprises

Two Studies On Bee Evolution Reveal Surprises

homesickness

let me try to get this one straight. in the Amazon, there are legless amphibians called caecilians, so obscure that zoology textbooks neglect to mention them, which most people mistake for worms, because of their uncanny external resemblance to worms, but let us be abundantly clear here that they are vertebrates with a great ancestry, the sole surviving remnants of those early explorers of the land, the microsaurs.

true, it is possible that our own carboniferous ancestor would be called a microsaur as well, such are these catch all groupings that contain an abundance of small and versatile creatures able to go about doing the business of the planet without being bothered by cumbersome titles such as rulers of the cosmos or executive chairman. eating fossorial invertebrates is not like that at all, and yet they are our long lost brothers and our species breeds a fair amount of executive chairmen.

such a perilous and long evolutionary path to bring them underground and underfoot, the same way we have evolved into one great beast after another, a series of monstrous quadrupeds followed by an even longer series of furry ones, all the time our long lost nieces and nephews underground perfect burrowing.

it is an open question which was a better course of action though my heart aches to think we might be the doom of them sometime soon. all the same i long for those ancient swamps, and trees scuttling with insects and abundant food, and no winter for millions of years on end. i burn the oil of that age and i find myself longing for home.