Sepiadarium austrinum, Southern Bottletail Squid
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’ve been very, very bad at keeping up with all the carnivals, so here’s a quick roundup.
As usual, talk about whatever you want in the comments (at last, a place where the Coulter defenders can be evasive with permission!)
Official number of attempts to address my challenge of the science in Coulter’s book:
I seem to have drawn in one Coulter fan in the comments who can’t shut up, but he hasn’t got the guts to stand up for anything specific that she has said.
This new strange question is sweeping the scienceblogs: “what kind of scientist is Batman?”
The answer is obvious.
The National Academies or Royal Society web pages make a peep about it. It’s good news if it is confirmed, though!
This is why I should read the other science blogs before posting: Afarensis has the official statement.
While I was out playing all day yesterday, a new Tangled Bank appeared at Centrerion. I’m so late in my announcement that you’ve probably all read it already, but if you haven’t, there’s much science writing to occupy you for a while.
You may have noticed it was a bit quiet here on Pharyngula yesterday. I took the day off. My daughter Skatje has been away for a few weeks, visiting her sweetie-pie in Kentucky, and we had to make the long drive to the airport and back, so we decided to make a day of it in the big city as long as we were there. I also had to drop by the Big U and sign some papers.
When my boys and I decide to paint the town red, guess what we do? We headed to Dreamhaven Books, Comics and Art, Phoenix Games, Uncle Hugo’s (what is it with the remarkable concentration of geekdom on Lake Street in Minneapolis?), and The Source Comics & Games. After eating lots of Chinese food, we headed to the airport, only to discover Skatje’s plane was delayed.
So we sprawled on the floor of the Humphrey terminal and played Zombies until she arrived. I have discovered that when faced with the shambling horrors, I will roll lots of “1”s, slapping ineffectually at them until they grapple with me and gnaw on my brains. My sons Alaric and Connlann will grab shotguns, fire axes, and grenades and cut a bloody swath through them on their way to the helicopter pad, where they will fly away leaving me in a slowly closing circle of implacable moaning flesh-eaters.
When Skatje finally showed up (she had a fine time with her boy toy, who apparently works in a comic book shop and plays D&D), it was midnight, and we had the long drive home to face…we finally staggered into the house after a long day of nerd decadence at 3AM.
As you might guess, now I’m feeling exhausted and my brains have been repeatedly chewed upon. And you all know what weirdos we are here at Chez Myers.
PvM at the Panda’s Thumb has already written a bit about this issue in the article “Human Gland Probably Evolved From Gills”, but I’m not going to let the fact that I’m late to the party stop me from having fun with it. This is just such a darned pretty story that reveals how deeply vertebrate similarities run, using multiple lines of evidence.
Cephalopods can inflict a nasty bite. On their underside, at the conjunction of their arms, they have a structure called the beak which does look rather like a bird’s beak, and which can close with enough force to crush shellfish. Many also dribble toxins into the wound that can cause pain, tissue necrosis, and paralysis. They aren’t the best animals to play with.
If you think about it, though, cephalopods don’t have a rigid internal skeleton. How do they get the leverage to move a pair of sharp-edged beaks relative to one another, and what the heck are they doing with a hard beak anyway? There’s a whole paper on the anatomy of just the buccal mass, the complex of beak, muscle, connective tissue, and ganglia that powers the cephalopod bite.
