the avatar movies are crazy bc "what if colonizers literally inhabited and puppeteered the bodies of indigenous peoples in order to exploit their homeland" sounds like the premise of some sort of anticolonial horror film, like specifically the kind of thing that would be commenting on self-indigenization among white settlers, but because it's James Cameron his whole takeaway from that premise is "it would be preddy cool"
Y’know, due to Neteyam’s funeral being only his, either the Metkayina aren’t burying their dead after the battle, are burying them individually at about one a day, or literally the only casualty on the Metkayina side was Neteyam
Back in 1939, fossil collector Louis Grauvogel discovered a couple of reptile fossils in Middle Triassic-aged deposits (~247 million years old) in eastern France. A large preserved structure was noted above the animal's back, but for many years it was interpreted as an unrelated fish fin, insect wing, or plant frond.
It was only when the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart acquired the specimens in 2019 that they were recognized as representing something very special: a long-sought-after relative of the bizarre and enigmatic Longisquama!
Mirasaura grauvogeli grew to around 30cm long (~1') and was, if anything, even stranger than its relative. It had humped shoulders, grasping limbs, and a bird-like head with large forward-facing eyes and a long pointed snout that was toothless at the front, probably used to probe for small invertebrates in cracks and crevices.
But most strikingly it had up to 20 tall structures overlapping along its back to form a sail-like crest. Although they were superficially feather-like in shape with preserved melanosomes that resemble those of birds, structurally they weren't feathers at all – but they also weren't modified scales. Instead these appear to have been an entirely novel type of skin appendage, made up of continuous sheets with a midline shaft and a corrugated texture.
The crest was probably used for visual display, and 80 additional fossils of isolated crest structures suggest they were regularly shed and regrown.
Along with Longisquama, Mirasaura appears to have been an early member of the drepanosaur lineage – a group of wonderfully weird tamandua-like reptiles whose evolutionary relationships are still disputed, with different studies currently recovering them as either a unique early offshoot of the diapsids or as archosauromorphs.
(Interestingly, a specimen of Drepanosaurus reportedly preserves some soft tissue on its back that may also be one of these strange new crest structures. Drepanosaurs just keep on getting weirder and weirder and I love them.)
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References:
Renesto, Silvo, et al. The taxonomy and paleobiology of the Late Triassic (Carnian-Norian: Adamanian-Apachean) drepnosaurs (Diapsida: Archosauromorpha: Drepanosauromorpha): Bulletin 46. Vol. 46. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, 2010. https://nmdigital.unm.edu/digital/collection/bulletins/id/1261/
Spiekman, Stephan NF, et al. "Triassic diapsid shows early diversification of skin appendages in reptiles." Nature (2025): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09167-9
Wikipedia contributors. “Mirasaura” Wikipedia, 27 Jul. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirasaura
I CANNOT wait for "rejects-Eywa" Varang and "literal-embodiment-of-Eywa" Kiri to meet. My girl Kiri is gonna shake that woman's entire world (and vice versa) and I am soo ready. I just know they’re gonna be an unstoppable duo eventually.
Okay, so the official clan names for the new clans of Avatar 3 are the Windtraders and the Mankwan (spelling up for debate), with the Windtraders being those guys with the airships and the Mankwan just like. Completely disavowing Eywa because their home got destroyed by a volcano an unknown amount of time ago
Wild. Very excited. Very curious if the Windtraders are going to introduce the Medusas to movie canon, and also why every Na’vi from the entire Mankwan clan decided to break so much tradition because of something this small, especially since we have the direct comparison of the Omaticaya losing Hometree
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