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