[ID: Four art pieces showing a lion, a seal, a wolf, and a bear beside their common ancestor, a miacid, who looks a bit like a large weasel. They’re each drawn in realistic style, in matching poses. /End ID].
Oh I love them
Sorry to correct the visual description (no harm meant, I’m just autistic and pinnipeds are my special interest) - but that’s a sea lion (family Otariidae), not a seal (family Phocidae)
Visual Comparison Of Bird Beaks And Their Uses
I adore darwinism, maybe my religious upbringing speaking but after being told evolution was a myth and then studying zoology and animals at college is/was the funniest thing ever because suddenly EVERYTHING MADE SENSE
[Image: drawings of bird heads facing the left with text under each one. "Generalist, insect catching, grain eating, coniferous seed-eating, nectar feeding, fruit eating, chiseling, dip netting, surface skimming, scything, probing, filter feeding, aerial fishing, pursuit fishing, scavenging, raptorial". /End description.]
My Brain, for no goddamn reason: You know what would be funny? Me, up too early to drop my car off for maintainence: what? Brain: What if Wookiees and Kaminoans shared a recent common ancestor? Me: ... Me: *rapid mental theoretical xenobiology montage* Me: LOL. LMAO.
Some of us biologists would like an artist’s interpretation please.
How fortunate :)
My degree is in Scientific Illustration :)
Now I'm currently high off my tits on allergy medicine and Star Wars has only a passing relationship with Scientific Rigor, but let's have a little fun with HIGHLY SPECULATIVE EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE!!
Anyway, for those of you that aren't neck deep into the world's most deranged Space Opera, these are Wookiees and Kaminoans:
Wookiees are about 6-7 ft tall on average, Kaminoans about 7-9 ft.
Wookiees are from the Planet Kashyyk, which, in the style of single-biome planets in Star Wars, a temperate rain forest, not unlike the north pacific coast of the US and Canada, (and are also the ancestors of Ewoks according to this article I just read). Kaminoans are from an entirely flooded ocean-world called Kamino, and have been genetically modifying themselves for ages. I genuinely cannot remember if it's one of SW's 20-odd canons or a really good fic I read, but IIRC: 1. Kamino used to have solid land before the Bougies flooded it for ethnic genocide reasons. 2. Wookiees are not native to Kashyyk either- their ancestors crash-landed or were abandoned on the planet over a million years ago.
So, perhaps neither species is Native to their respective homeworld, what would the theoretical ancestor look like? Let's start with some features of the descendant species! Some notable features I'm deriving from half-remembered canon and a GREAT exhibit on costuming I saw:
So, the WKCA likely had:
All these taken together suggest one thing: The Common Ancestor of Wookiees and Kaminoans evolved in a DESERT.
It's specifically a social sprinting predator- humans terminator-pursuit our prey down, leopards ambush, but the exceptionally long legs and short ankles (Those are short ankles on the Kaminoan compared to many terrestrial mammals) suggest a hybrid strategy more like that of African wild dogs- this is an animal that runs it's prey down with a lot of power, but it doesn't like to run for long, so it brought friends to corner the prey. We are looking at a very tall Mad Max Extra with the galaxy's Most Magnificent Mowhawk here.
LOL. LMAO.
You may note some Bonus features on the above Sketch- the larger ears and heavier legs- Wookiee ears and necks would have shrunk fairly fast to conserve body heat in such a wet environment, and the overall size decreased in order to be light enough to actually manage their new arboreal lifestyle. The Kaminoans were selecting for culturally desirable traits over all else, hence the lack of ears, dubious structural integrity in the neck and total absence of Ass. The WKCA is have been caked the fuck up on account of walking across huge amounts of desert, needs those big ears for thermal regulation and hearing each other and prey, and being purely terrestrial, probably outweighs both descendant species by a good amount.
I also gave it a Nubbin tail, because it's cute, and there's no evidence that Wookiees and Kaminoans DON'T have them.
Now I know I've been discussing carnivory, but mammals wander all over that spectrum of Omnivory all the time. Pandas are bears that are Vegan, Rodents love chicken.
So please consider, because it makes me laugh: The Common Ancestor is an Ungulate.
There have been Carnivorous ungulates before! Andrewsarchus comes to mind. I think they were social herbivores that developed a taste for meat as their planet dried out and these very large animals needed to get creative about calories and moisture in the encroaching desert ...Like if giraffes decided to start eating tourists.
Anyway, after doing some Lineart, giving her a BF (the Kaminoans made the crest a sex-indicative characteristic, which is HILARIOUS to the WKCA), omitting any gender-presenting nipples or sex organs to avoid the banhammer, Giving them toe-hooves like Eohippus and making them soft and velvety like a proper Desert Creachur:
Behold! The Common Ancestor of Wookiees and Kaminoans (and technically Ewoks too!). Truly, Speculative Evolutionary History is a fascinating subject...
...Except. It's a Big Galaxy. Much of it Unexplored.
The Common Ancestor might still be out there. Lurking. :)
[Image 1: photos of examples of each species on a white background. They are both humanoid (two arms, two legs, a torso, a head) but the wookie has long brown fur covering their whole body, and the kaminoan is very pale and very thin, with long limbs and neck.
Image 2: the photos of the examples are devoid of color and there is drawn in red over them, points of articulation and connections between them. There is also, between the two, a figure that occupies a middle ground. And also a second, different head next to that to show variation.
Image 3: the original photos are still missing their color and between them is a colored drawing of two individuals from their last common ancestors.
End description.]
There's a certain simple joy that comes with the knowledge that humans' 'I wanna fuck a sapient of a different species' tendencies are genetic. Like, we're reasonably certain that we and all our sister species were fucking each other back in the day, this is a tendency we can reasonably assume predates humanity by a few evolutionary hops.
In much the same way you could bring a prehistoric individual forward and bond over a nice roast, or both get excited about a warm blanket, you could bring someone forward, show them a picture of Cthulhu, and there is the very real chance that they too would go "I'd fuck them".
And I think that's delightful.
“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.
Blood is what now?
It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing
Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.
Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.
Thank you that’s…very disturbing
It’s not my fault you’re human.
Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.
You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.
Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”
“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”
“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”
At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)
You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.
And that’s what a human is!
Well, there’s another few steps, of course.
Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.
A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,
and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“
“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)
“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”
“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”
And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“
“Like an egg.”
“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”
“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”
“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”
“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”
You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.
“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.
“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.
“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”
Everyone waits.
“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”
Everyone looks uncomfortable.
“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”
You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.
The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”
And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”
That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.
It has been MONTHS, @elodieunderglass, and I am still mumbling “furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship” under my breath as a comfort phrase, and the FUCKING INDIGNITY that it came from this godforsaken post about THE HORRIBLE WETNESS OF MAMMALS!
“The horrible wetness of mammals” would make a great band name.
“hold hope, internally, at 37.5 degrees” and “Mammals internalize everything (eggs, grudges)” Now live permanently in my vocabulary
[Gif: the reaction gif of a confused woman, with her eyes looking around, like she's doing complex math equations in her head.
Image: tags reading, “The inside of your intestine is outside of you. Just like the inside of your lungs and stomach. Although the mucuses and stomach acids are partly made of filtered blood, I guess.”
End description.]
The whole "Sherlock Holmes still believes in a geocentric universe" bit is funny, yeah, but it always makes me wonder about what massive blind spots might exist in my knowledge. What assumptions am I carrying that would make an expert in the field go "You idiot, that was disproven in the Middle Ages"
Hey people in the notes, how old were you when you learned kelp was more closely related to malaria than to plants
Well, I was 31
….today. I was today years old.
I know most people think Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake", but first of all: -The joke is that she would have said "qu'ils mangent de la brioche"
which is not cake, but fancy sweet bread. It'd be like saying "Oh, the people don't have running water" "let them drink Evian". It's funnier that just "no bread? Well cake".
and also: -Also she never fucking said that to begin with. that sentence was a satire (sort of like SLN) but it was not ever about Marie Antoinette at all, it was not mock someone else.
Also as I have learned, the original sentence was related to what was actually a pretty cool law!
So basically, you had two kinds of bread: poor people bread and fancy breads. This is still a thing today—go to your grocery store and you’re gonna find the wonder bread right next to some multigrain artisanal small-batch nonsense that’s like $10 a loaf and primarily made of birdseed. Thing is, everybody had to have bread. It was the main part of a meal back then because it was cheap and filling. So unscrupulous bakers would deliberately short the number of cheap, basic loaves, and instead put all their flour toward the fancier, more expensive breads to force people to buy the more expensive bread. Thus people were saying “we have no bread because it’s too fucking expensive, this is what’s happening” and France responded by making a law that said “if you run out of the cheap bread, you’re required to sell the more expensive bread at the same price as the cheap bread.” In other words, if there is no wonder bread, let them eat multigrain artisanal whatever at a wonder bread price. Nobody wanted to lose money by having to sell their expensive bread for cheap, so this law effectively stopped a bread shortage.
I’ve got another note or two on the cost of bread, but first...
[Image: An artistically displayed braided loaf of brioche, some thick jam spread on a slice from one end. End ID.]
There we go!
Okay, now here’s the thing: People were desperate for cheap bread, right? To the point where they would use all sorts of “fillers” to make their flour stretch farther. Some of the common options were potatoes and the used grain from breweries. Brioche, meanwhile, is made with butter. Loads of butter.
Now, it’s not that easy for the average person to get used grain from breweries these days, unless you know a home brewer or something. But potatoes and butter are relatively easy to find.
Looking up the cost on my local grocery store’s website, a five pound bag of your average russet potatoes costs $3 USD. Five pounds of the cheapest butter, meanwhile, comes to $25 USD. It’d probably be more like $20 USD if the grocery store sold butter in bulk, but even that would still be over six times the cost of the same weight of potatoes. Even if the relative price stayed the same (which seems unlikely to me), it sounds like it would be pretty reasonable to expect a good loaf of brioche to cost at least six times as much as a cheap loaf of the same size with potato filler and no butter. So if a potato loaf is $1.50, a brioche loaf would be $9, probably more. You can see how “Let them eat brioche!” would be very useful as a soundbite to spur on revolutionary sentiment.
w. wait. hold on a second. are. sharks whales????????
Nope! Sharks and whales are VEEERY different. They haven’t shared an ancestor since... well.... since the devonian, I suppose. That was over 450 million years ago!
See, it’s...
Oh, bother. Alright, fine, I’ll do an infographic. It’ll be easier to explain, because there’s a lot of stuff to digest.
Let’s go back in time to.... THE CAMBRIAN!!
Disclaimer: I made this in like an hour while slapping together what I knew about these two animals and decorating it with cute images. It isn’t totally accurate, and I’m simplifying a lot for ease of reading. Please don’t eat me, I’m not a bio major!
Transcript below the cut!
People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves
Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.
Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:
Some more stuff!
The growing rift between tumblr culture as practiced on this site & 'tumblr culture' as practiced by expats to twitter is a fascinating example of divergent species evolution when like a cliff or river separates groups
I think a fascinating aspect is that both are changing from what came before, and even then most examples of both these groups were different in behavior to begin with. Different perspectives, views of how things were during and after.
Those who stay are changed by how the environment changes around them and their daily life. Those who leave are changed by the environment they leave for (pinterest, facebook, tiktok, twitter, instagram) and their daily life too.
The idea that something is too complex to happen “naturally” is one of the oldest arguments against evolution.
How can something so complex arise randomly? It may sound like a legitimate question, but further probing shows that it suffers from 3 basic problems.
Life did not arise in the same randomness as a house being built by a tornado, or boxes of matches falling down, only to form an intricate sculpture. Life appeared as a result of very predictable physical laws acting over unimaginably long periods of time.
Text in image:
Creationists say
Too improbable
@wallace.evolution
One of the most frequent objections that are repeated incessantly is how life is too complex to have formed randomly, without the intervention of an intelligence. For example, the odds of a protein forming by chance is 1 in 10 to the 113
These probabilities make three assumptions that are quite wrong: 1- Biological molecules appeared in their current form, 2- Their assembly is governed by hazard, 3- Reactions that formed the 1st ever molecules happened one at a time
The first assumption ignores the basic idea of evolution: The start with simple forms. While the spontaneous appearance of a fully formed DNA molecule is improbable, the appearance of small RNA is so likely, we were able to observe it happening
The second assumption ignores that the formation of molecules is not a hazardous event, but one caused by precise physical and chemical laws that have predictable effects. Like Fingal's cave it was not giants who made it, but water erosion
The third assumption ignores countless reactions happening in the early Earth simultaneously. This is akin to saying that it's impossible to comb your hair, because you will need to comb 100,000 individual hairs
End text.
What is island dwarfism and what are your favorite examples?
island dwarfism is actually just one half of a whole phenomenon, the flip side of this coin is called island gigantism and this story really can’t be told without it!
basically, island dwarfism/gigantism is a descriptor of the effect on animal populations when they get stranded on an island for a few million years and evolve to fit their new limited biome! when this happens, large animals tend to become smaller (due to the limited resources on an island) and small animals tend to become larger (due to the lack of natural predators).
island gigantism and island dwarfism sort of work together in this way to force animals into an equilibrium state. this effect has given some truly bonkers results over the eons, including pygmy mammoths on the channel islands off california:
<art src: Victor Leshyk>
and giant rabbits on an island in the mediterranean:
<art src: Nathan S. Upham>
my favorite example of island dwarfism in particular though is the dwarf elephants of cyprus, believed to be the source of the legend of the cyclops.
<art src: Julio Lacerda>
How do dwarf elephants relate to cyclops legends, exactly? I just... can’t see the connection here.
dwarf elephants went extinct in a volcanic eruption about 12,000 years ago, but they left plenty of bones kicking around for humans to find! and if you were an early human sailor just wandering around an island beach stuffing clams into your pants and you happened to stumble across THIS:
...you could very easily believe that you were looking at the skull of an extremely large dude who had exactly one giant eyeball and also some pretty scary teeth.
You ever think about how crows are acting not unlike how early humans probably did and you're just like. Oh ok
I saw a Thing one time about how the earliest sign of civilization is a healed femur because that shows that we were taking care of each other because if we Didn't a broken leg would mean you Die because you can't. Do things
And I was thinking about this and I remembered also seeing an article about this one mated pair of crows where one of them broke its beak and thus couldn't properly feed itself on its own. So the other one helps
So basically I have connected the two dots ("you didn't connect shit") I've connected them
And also they not only use tools but teach each other how to construct them, so uh
Really makes you think
Realistically I know immortality would kinda suck but I'd love to see where crows are going with this
So are you going to tell us about the giant hyperpredatory sperm whales or do I have to go google some nightmares myself?
we’re all familiar with the Sperm Whale of our modern seas, largest of the Toothed Whales! it’s also completely specialized for eating squid and squid ONLY, a comfort to anyone who’s ever managed to get just a bit too close to those enormous razor jaws.
but this was very much not always the case! the earlier members of the Sperm Whale lineage were much less… discerning.
early Sperm Whales all resembled our friendly modern swimming school bus to some degree, but the main difference was in the jaws- early Sperm Whales like Acrophyseter and Zygophyseter all had wide, powerful jaws with ENORMOUS teeth suitable for snacking on fish, dolphins, aquatic sloths, and pretty much anything else they could fit down their enormous gullets, kind of like a modern Orca.
and from 12 to 7 million years ago, these things RULED the seas. Megalodon who?
but the greatest of these was Livyatan Melvillei, which was the size of our modern Sperm Whale.
reaching up to 60 feet long and weighing well over 60 tons, it this thing was a Sea Monster in every sense of the word.
it is so BONKERS huge that they named it after the Hebrew name for the Biblical Leviathan (and also Herman Melville, who would have gotten a real kick out of it). I cannot overstate how unsafe it would be to share an ocean with this thing. Moby Dick would have been an entirely different book if it was still around.
so what does a 60-feet hyperpredatory whale eat?
*Groucho Marx voice* WHY, ANYTHING IT WANTS.
(but mostly other whales.)
Livyatan spent most of its time cruising around looking for delicious smaller whales to shove into that nightmare maw up there, a lifestyle choice we call macroraptorial. though in a pinch, anything else would also do.
(basically, if you were a mid-sized baleen whale in the paleozoic seas you were just SHIT out of luck, between Megalodon and this thing.)
Livyatan may have died out as little as 5 million years ago, meaning it might even have been around to make the early ancestors of Orcas regret their life choices! (Livyatan is the only animal that could possibly make an Orca regret anything, but God, at what cost)
but die out they did, and that’s probably a good thing for us. why don’t we all just take a moment to really appreciate our modern hyperspecialized Sperm Whales, especially the part where they don’t eat us!
UNRESTRAINED SUMMER FUN
Aquatic sloths?
Thalassocnus. Got pretty big, between 2 and 3 meters long. Used their claws to walk across the sea floor.
See the monster whales eating the giant underwater sloths
Wanted to share this cause A) I love reading about human pre-history and this type of DNA analysis and B) I’ve seen some very but hurt comments by people pissed off at being reminded what the first humans to migrate into Europe looked like
You know that post that’s going around about how sometimes it doesn’t seem like housecats know they’re small?
I strongly suspect that a lot of the weirder impulses people get are at least partly attributable to the fact that the dumb monkey part of our brains doesn’t realise that humans are big.
Impulses of this type include:
What, so the voice telling me to jump off that tall thing if I get too close to the edge isn’t suicidal intrusive thoughts, it’s just monkey mind massively miscalculation our capabilities?
Weirdly, yes. In cognitive science that’s known – somewhat unimaginatively – as the “high place phenomenon”, and though it’s popularly miscategorised as a symptom of intrusive thoughts, some studies estimate that up to 50% of all people experience it, most of whom have no particular tendency toward suicidal ideation, nor toward intrusive thoughts of any other type.
My money says that’s what plesiosaurs were like: fast underwater, extra padding for buoyancy, long neck. Look at their skeletons!
It’s just like this:
They’re basically large horizontal penguins with a long tail and spiky teeth.
OH SHIT THEY PENGUINS!!
OH SHIT PLESIOSAUR PENGUIN!!!!!!!!!
