The Carrot/Prehistoric Invertebrate

 

I have long thought that whoever came up with those bags of peeled, cut baby carrots was a genius—he basically turned carrots into potato chips.

Most of the carrots look pretty much the same, but recently I found one that looks like something from the Burgess Shale.  (That’s probably because of the weird strands at one end that resemble antennae, or mouthparts, or something.)

Orange Dragonfly From Last Summer

 

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 8: The Octopus

I have addressed the matter of Halloween skeletons for invertebrates before with a post about a spider “skeleton” in 2017.  (There is also a scorpion “skeleton” available.)  But I felt that I had to take note of this octopus “skeleton” (available for $14.99 at Spirit Halloween), because it takes the fake invertebrate skeleton concept to new heights of ridiculousness.  A spider at least has a rigid exoskeleton, which might lead someone to think that it has a bony internal skeleton.  But doesn’t pretty much everyone know that an octopus has no virtually hard parts?

Cicada

I’ve been going through my photographs from the last few years looking for things to put on the blog.  I came across this cicada, which looks like Linne’s Cicada (Neotibicen linnei), a type of annual cicada, although the thorax coloration is different than is seen in some internet examples.  

The picture has a nice sense of green, in that the green of the cicada is reflected in the green of the surrounding vegetation.

Here is a closer look from a related picture:

Feeling Crabby

It might not be the Thanksgiving feast for which you are looking, but my friend Mike sends along a link to a news story with a video of a Coconut Crab killing a Red-footed Booby for dinner.  

Actually this video is creepy enough that it might have been good for Halloween, especially considering the associated story that crabs of this same species may have eaten Amelia Earhart.  

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 4: The, Um, Spider

For our final installment, we have the Halloween spider skeleton, available for $20.99 from Target.  

I don’t know if I even need to say this, but . . . SPIDERS ARE INVERTEBRATES!!!  THEY DON”T HAVE SKELETONS!!!!! 

My series is at an end.  And, as I said earlier, maybe it is wrong for me to provide osteological criticism of plastic Halloween skeletons.  And maybe that is why I don’t getting invited to Halloween parties.  Or maybe it is because none of my friends ever have Halloween parties.  

In any event, I feel better.

The Wings of the Dragonfly

A great many years ago I read an article about scientists studying dragonflies.  The method for identifying a dragonfly in the field was to shoot the dragonfly with a shotgun shell filled with dirt.  The body would be damaged, but usually enough of the wings would remain intact to determine the species.  (The patterns of veins in insect wings are a key factor in establishing and identifying insect taxa; in fact, wing veins can be preserved in fossil insects, and used in the naming of species from millions of years ago.)

I’m not up on the state of the art in dragonfly research, but I have to wonder if the shotgunning is still necessary now that we have digital photography.  Even with my amateur-level camera, I can get pictures of perching dragonflies that clearly show the details of wing venation. 

Here are some from the last few years:

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

(I felt that I should have one more post for August.)

As always, click to enlarge

Big Black and Red Millipede

I haven't been in the mood to blog recently, but I suppose that I should get something on the books for May.  

May be I'll throw this millipede out there. 

On Wednesday I was at Algonkian Regional Park in Loudoun County, Virginia.  These millipedes were all over the place in the wooded part of the park that I walked through.  I probably saw ten live ones, and another ten dead ones.  And they were gigantic.  Well, okay, maybe not big enough to eat a car, but they were three or four inches long.  

I'm thinking that they were Narceus americanus or something related.  

Prehistoric Polchaete Rock

I've blogged before about prehistoric animals named after rock stars, specifically the dinosaur Masiakasaurus knopfleri, named after Mark Knopfler, and a set of trilobites named after various Eighties alternative musicians.

Now I've learned of two new instances, thanks to a December article in the Washington Times.  In 2006, paleontologist Mats E. Eriksson named Kalloprion kilmisteri, a Silurian polychaete worm, after Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead.   Then in 2012, Eriksson named another Silurian polychaete, Kingnites diamondi, after King Diamond.  

(This is just my personal opinion, but I think that naming something after King Diamond is taking things too far.)

Anyway, here is a video of Lemmy and Mark Knopfler, in their pre-fossiliferous days,  performing (along with many others, including David Gilmour) in a BBC comedy sketch. 

Slimy Distractions

My friend Josh e-mailed me a while ago saying that I should change the name of the blog to Slimy Distractions and make it all about slugs.  This was because of all the pictures of slugs that I had posted.  I actually hate slugs; I only posted the computer-drawn pictures because slug pictures had worked out well in my post about how to get a slug out of your house.

I like almost all animals, with a few exceptions. The animals that I don't like generally fall into two categories.  

The first consists of slimy terrestrial invertebrates, specifically slugs and earthworms

The second consists of animals that want to drink my blood, such as ticks and mosquitoes, or otherwise bite me in a way that will leave me itchy.  

And then there are the leeches, which combine elements from both categories. 

The Middle of December

Here it is the middle of December, and I am still having trouble dealing with how fast November went by.  Of course, November felt over by the 19th, which was the Monday of the week of Thanksgiving.  

As always, I have a lot of blogging that I want to do, but realistically I doubt that I will ever do it.  I just don't have the energy, or the self-discipline.  When I started this blog in 2010, I hoped to put up two posts per week, but in practice I feel lucky to do two posts per month.  

I will end this post with another poor-quality picture of a slug, which looks a lot like my last poor-quality picture of a slug.  At least for commercial purposes, the Christmas season seems to begin around Halloween, which is way too early for me.  But now we are past December 15th, which I see as a good starting date for the Christmas season, so please consider this a Christmas slug.  

Now November Is Half Over and There Is a Slug

It seems as if I was just writing about how it was September and fall was more than one-sixth over, and now it is November and fall is more than five-sixths over.  And it is almost Thanksgiving, but it seems as if Halloween was only a week or so ago.  (Thanksgiving is on the earliest possible date this year, so there really are only about three weeks between the two holidays.)  Time passing way too quickly is a recurring theme at this point in my life.  

I notice that in my last post, I had a terrible time using AppleWorks to draw the pictures of jars, but the slugs worked out pretty well.  Maybe I should put drawings of slugs in all my blog entries.

A Helpful Hint: How to Remove a Slug from Your Home

Perhaps there will come a day when you will find a slug on the floor of a building.  If you are like most people, you will want to remove the slug.  And also if you are like most people, you won't want to touch the slug or otherwise interact with it.  Here is a simple method for removing the slug without making contact with it. 

1) Place an empty jar or other open-mouthed container over the slug.

2) Wait a half an hour to an hour, and the slug will slide up the inside surface of the jar.  

3) Pick up the jar and place it on the ground outside.  

4) In another hour or so, the slug will have slid back out of the jar and into the surrounding environment. 

(Needless to say, the container used for this should be one which you wouldn't mind coming into contact with a slug and its associated slime.)  

In case anyone is unclear on how this method works, I have included two low-quality computer drawings illustrating a slug moving from the floor to the inside of a jar, viewed from the side. 

I came up with this method by accident many years ago, when I found a slug on the floor.  I didn't know what to do about it, so I put a jar over the slug to keep it from going anywhere, and then went away, intending to figure out how to deal with it later.  (I have a tendency to put off dealing with my problems, which usually makes them worse.) When I came back, I found to my surprise that the slug had gone up inside the jar.  

Belated Halloween Blogging

Thanksgiving is over, which means that it is much, much too late to be blogging about Halloween. I posted some entries about Halloween last year, and I wanted to post about Halloween this year. Unfortunately, I was trying to get several other things done, and didn't have time to write anything about Halloween. Also unfortunately, I was not able to finish most of the other things that I was trying to get done.

My main plan for Halloween blogging was to recount the story of attending my friend Adam's Halloween party ten years ago, the last time that anyone invited me to a Halloween party. But that story is much too long, and I don't think that I'll be getting around to it this year.

In addition, just as I marked last Halloween by using my computer to draw a crude jack-o'-lantern, I wanted to mark this Halloween with a crudely-drawn ghost. Now I have produced that ghost; you can see him at the top of this post. (I was trying for a ghost; it could be a really bad attempt at a baby seal, or maybe a white tree stump.)

I leave you with one final thought in the theme of Halloween, and also (for any twelve-year-old girls out there) in the theme of the new Twilight movie: To horseshoe crabs, we are the vampires.

Trilobites on the Small Screen

In March of last year, I blogged about a scientific paper in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences in which several new species of trilobites were named after alternative rock stars of the Eighties.

Now, in the same combined spirit of paleontology and popular culture, I report on a paper in the December 2010 Journal of Systematic Paleontology (abstract here). Stephen R. Westrop, Raina A. Waskiewicz Poole, and Jonathan M. Adrain investigate trilobites from the Cambrian of Oklahoma. (Adrain is one of the authors of the earlier paper.) The following new species are established:

Dokimocephalus stewarti

Dokimocephalus blacki

Stittella beeae

The theme here, which may or may not be apparent to you, is that these trilobites are named after people from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—Jon Stewart, Lewis Black, and Samantha Bee. (I must admit that I have never watched The Daily Show, which appeals only to a very specific audience of smug young urban liberal college-educated white people.) I, of course, know who Jon Stewart is; I have no idea at all who Samantha Bee is; and I have some idea of Lewis Black from his appearances on other shows, though not much beyond the general impression that at any moment his head could explode.

Trilobites Rock the Eighties

In 2001, paleontologists unveiled a new dinosaur, a small theropod from the Cretaceous of Madagascar. The discovery made headlines because the dinosaur was named Masiakasaurus knopfleri, after rock star Mark Knopfler, former leader of Dire Straits. The discovery caught my attention both because of my interest in dinosaurs, and because, in my purely subjective opinion, Dire Straits was the absolute greatest band ever. But keep in mind that this is my purely subjective opinion, so please don't waste your precious time arguing over it.

Recently I came upon a paper (abstract here) in the December 2009 issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. In the paper, Neo E. B. McAdams and Jonathan M. Adrain from the University of Iowa investigate trilobite fossils from the Ordovician of Nevada and Utah, and establish the new genus Heckethornia. Within Heckethornia they establish the following new species:

Heckethornia smithi

Heckethornia hyndeae

Heckethornia numani

Heckethornia bowiei

Heckethornia morriseyi

Heckethornia ballionae

Perhaps these names look familiar to you. The full text of the paper reveals that the trilobites are named after Robert Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Gary Numan, David Bowie, Morrissey, and Susan Ballion (who, Wikipedia informs me, is better known as Siouxsie Sioux).

I support this trend of naming extinct taxa after Eighties musicians. But I also think that some guidelines need to be put in place, lest anyone name a conodont after Vanilla Ice, or a benthic foraminiferan after the New Kids on the Block.