One Nice Bug Per Day
Discoholic 🪩
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Not today Justin
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izzy's playlists!
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Stranger Things
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@extrinsicalmadness
make a bunch of wheels with bread/cheese/meat/vegetables/sauce/extra so that you can Spin for Sandwich
you're making a sandwich!! Spin THIS wheel 3-5 times for the toppings!
How is it!
good!!
it's alright
ew
EW
inedible
Results
op note: I GOT JAM, JAM AND HOT SAUCE. IM DEAD.
Ok, lets have a look at this: Over the last few days a new paper in Science has led to MANY discussions in the paleo community and it appears to have breached containment into the wider world, judging by headlines and google results.
"Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans" by Ikegami et. al describes a new beak of the basal octopus genus Nanaimoteuthis. And yeah, it's a whopper! Just look at the specimen next to a giant squid beak in this figure! They also note that...
...beak shows some intense, asymmetrical wear, indicating a lot of hard objects being processed by this beak. On top of that they assign the genus to the group Cirrata (finned octopuses and relatives) instead of Vampyromorpha as it was in past papers. This is were the hard facts end though.
Don't get me wrong: This must have been a huge animal, but I also think that anything beyond this is purely speculative. The authors give a total length of 7 to 19 meters, an enormous range, with an estimated mantle length of max 4.4 m. They base this on the proportions of finned octopuses and other close relatives but I would argue that is just math for the sake of math. We know VERY little about early octopuses. Their beaks are often the only thing preserved and their diversity in the Cretaceous remains murky.
That's the size part, what I have an actual problem with though is the way they deduce behavior, died and even cognition from this fossil. Based on the size, wear and asymmetry they propose that this animal would compete, maybe even hunt large marine reptiles, in a smart way.
That's plain bullshitting in my eyes. Intense wear on a beak suggests this animal would be durophagous, going after armored or hard shelled prey. cracking the bones of marines reptiles feels very contrived and modern day octopuses (that often eat crabs) don't look much different.
The asymmetry of the beaks is an interesting detail but I would NEVER derive an argument for higher cognition from that. Cognitive abilities are next to impossible to grasp from the fossil record even IF you have the brain. Which leaves the question what was this guy doing?
Short answer is: we don't know. As I hopefully illustrated here we have simply too few data points to make any concrete arguments for this animals appearance or lifestyle. HOWEVER
As people pointed out on Discord: crushing shells in an pelagic habitat is something that was a breeze in the Mesozoic. Ammonites in the cretaceous come in many different shapes but also sizes. 50 cm plus species are not rare.
We also know from the Jurassic there were likely other cephalopods that went after ammonites. So if the ammonites grew in the Cretaceous why shouldn't their predators as well? Beyond ammonites the Late Cretaceous also gave rise to a large to gigantic bivales like many inoceramids
This abundance of durophagous prey is also reflected in the predators, large sharks, mosasaurs and even giant chimeras took advantage of this plentiful food source. I therefore think a large ammonite predator is a much more likely niche for Nanaimoteuthis.
In my interpretation I pair the octopus with the giant ammonite Parapuzosia, these animals aren't known from the same localities but their time ranges overlap which makes it plausible to me that these guys, or close relatives, could have met.
Lastly I want to quickly talk about the promotion and reception of this publication. While I don't completely fault the authors for their writing - after all LOOK AT THE MODERN ACADEMIC CLIMATE - I do think it's troubling that the editor's note, the journal itself, immediately evokes the image of the Kraken, a mythological creature, to sell it's new paper. This in combination with Science being a high profile journal makes it feel as if the claims in this publication are standing on more solid ground than they do. This is just my personal opinion but I think this is just bad science communication. It is something that will echo through the online sphere for years to come and does not in any way promote the caution that I would expect when claims like these are presented. Subsequently the ideas and evocative speech of the paper have already spawned a large amount of paleoart that goes for the largest and most speculative sides of it. Again: I think the size estimates in the paper are certainly possible, but I also think a more critical examination of the text is warranted when presented with such incredible claims. I am not here to kill your fun. But I also think that we are maybe looking at something even more interesting that the (at this point) already rather old trope of the mosasaur eating squid. At least to me a giant mollusk eats mollusk world is cooler.
AS ALWAYS, these are simply my opinions on these matters, but I thought there was enough uncritical yay and nay saying about this paper that I felt like it should warrant a reaction. I think the paper describes fascinating material and I eagerly await more!
Remember when joining fandom as a younger person meant lurking for a bit and figuring out the vibe and etiquette instead of coming in on day one and calling people weirdos for liking weirdo shit in the weirdo factory.
Gif sets are SO important to me. Yes, please take this scene and break it up into 4 or 6 three second loops that I can study over and over to appreciate the small details of it
why are people soo afraid of seeming desperate. i love desperation and hate detachment. ache more idiot
HUH?
Most cop thing I've ever read. what the fuck are you talking about. The posts you're looking for might be on this website but we won't show them to you???
I'm sure all my settings are set to "yes show me mature content no don't filter anything" what are you TALKING ABOUT
the posts are ON THE WEBSITE. I can't search dirty words?? am I five??? is this club penguin??? when I get you
Hellebores (Lenten Roses) under a UV light.
I open Tumblr. I post something that should be a diary entry. I close Tumblr. I open Tumblr after having it closed for 1.2 minutes. I reblog 176 posts in a row. I add tags of absolute gibberish to 7 of those. I close Tumblr. I open Tumblr I post yet another should-be diary entry. I close Tumblr. I open tu
life changing tweet
making the radical claim "11 year old children should be taught how to make extremely simple food" has resulted in people making arguments like "I wasnt allowed to plug in electronics until I was 16 and I think this is super normal actually" and "children dont know what ratios are so its unfair to expect them to be able to comprehend the idea of adding equal amounts rice and water to a rice cooker" and I gotta say originally I thought maybe I was being too judgy but now I feel very secure in my opinion because what the fuck
Children might not know what ratios are in the sense of 1:1 notation, but they are more than capable of understanding 'you have to use the same amount of water and rice otherwise it goes wrong'.
In addition to this, cooking is an excellent way to teach children scaling and ratio in Real Life.
"Children don't understand-" AND THAT'S WHY IT IS YOUR JOB TO TEACH THEM????? LIKE HELLO??? THEY CAN LEARN??????
just had a really good mango it was so good that i had to illustrate how it made me feel afterwards.
op’s tags are so fucking important to me
A fun bonus fact for you: those No Longer Buyable DVDs?
They're the ONLY surviving NONDAMAGED form of the show. In the late 90s, the masters from which the show is printed were damaged with a red-pink hazy filter.
So. Good luck buying them even if you find them. They're some of the most valuable collector's items in the entire franchise.
Without piracy, there would be NO UNDAMAGED COPIES OF SAILOR MOON AVAILABLE TO ANYONE ANYWHERE, PERIOD.
Piracy Is Preservation.
guys what should my 10,000th post be
im so fucking stupid
“must everything be homoerotic” no. but many things are, you will find
and if not, rest assured. I will find a way
Scientists at Cortical Labs have successfully trained a cluster of approximately 200,000 living human neurons, grown on a microelectrode array chip, to play the classic 3D video game DOOM.
