I love u ridiculous leg ball

I may not have gotten any volunteers, but this DID happen to coincide with me trying to learn how to use Illustrator, so I gift to you: I Voted badges.

These, of course, feature our 9 Generational winners, and since those tournaments are technically done, I think these apply! Thank you so much to everyone's who's participated so far, and I hope you all enjoy the Inter-Generational Tournament!

[Begin Image ID:

9 round badges with the faces of Bulbasaur, Umbreon, Mudkip, Leafeon, Chandelure, Sylveon, Mimikyu, Snom, and Clodsire. Each face is done in a simplified style and captures the design of the face only. The badges have a black border and in red, upper-case text, read "I VOTED. ULTIMATE POKEMON TOURNAMENT". Below the cut are the same badges but the text has been changed to be yellow and light blue.

/End Image ID]

Coelacanth fish are considered to be living fossils, meaning they exist in pretty much exactly the same form as they did millions of years ago.

But if you went back in time and brought a coelacanth fish from 100 million years ago to the present day and introduced it to a modern coelacanth fish, they would not be able to breed, because even if the visible form of the animal has not changed, its DNA is nonetheless so different as to be incompatible.

Over millions of years, mutations accumulate in the genetic code, inevitably changing it. Thus it is impossible for a creature to stop evolving. This makes sense but it makes me really existential for some reason

Well , I mean likely can’t breed but but there is the rare possibilities:

Taxonomy and genetics agains says “eff your rules”

Well that sure is something!

So something interesting I learned during my brief stint as a geneticist is that things that "look" similar to extinct taxa on the outside often have undergone WAY more genetic changes than things that look visibly different

This is because the traits self correct. Genetic drift is always happening, and life is always changing. So, if a population experiences such strong selection that they need to stay the same, they need to correct that with just as many mutations as those that happen to make them drift away.

So, in many ways, "living fossil" could not be a more misleading term. We talk about coelacanths, sharks, crocodilians not evolving for millions of years, but in many ways... they're evolving more than the rest of us, just so they can stay the same.

And that's the coolest shit I've ever learned

Wow...to stand still you have to keep running, because the very code of your being is moving underneath you...

follow the creator on instagram :)

Ultimate Pokemon Tournament!

Generation 8 - Round 5 - FINAL MATCH

★ This poll is part of a project to determine Tumblr's favorite Pokemon! ★

Our Contestants:

★ Follow if you want to see new polls as they're made! ★ ★ Go here for more info about the project! ★ ★ Consider reblogging so that others can vote too! ★ ★ Don't forget to have fun, be kind, and have a wonderful day! ★

🎊 Congratulations to our Generation 8 Winner, Snom! 🎊

afaict the only christians with theological content remotely interesting enough to chew on are 1. tolkien 2. dostoyevsky 3. some random black metal guys????

any theological black metal recs? 👀

the big one is the group Panegyrist, which as of now has only the one album, Hierurgy. This includes, no joke, some of the best lyrics I've ever seen and some of the highest theological sophistication I've seen just about anywhere, and certainly from christianity. Some examples:

The group does not consider itself christian because not every member is, but Elijah Tamu, the lyricwriter, is greek orthodox and as you can see here, meaningfully insightful.

(In addition the music is among the most fantastic I've heard, so there's that.)

What this post was brought to you by, however, was running into some catholic black metal, which, while not to this level, included this offering with liner notes saying:

Which is still, like, around Tolkien level.

Below the poll is a series of animal images labeled A through J. A is the least close to the birds we have today; J is the closest. If you encountered these animals in the wild, which would you call birds? If you pick a higher up option, then that means you consider all the below ones birds as well - so if you pick A, then BCDEFGHIJ are all birds. If you pick J, only J is a bird.

A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

F:

G:

H:

I:

J:

PLEASE REBLOG THIS SO IT CAN LEAVE PALAEOBLR. I NEED PEOPLE WHO DON'T RECOGNIZE THESE ANIMALS ON SIGHT TO VOTE.

I apologize to all of y'all with vision impairments for whom this poll is inaccessible. Alas, this is an experiment, and I cannot name the taxa. Thank you.

All alt text includes artist attribution; I did not make these pictures myself.

By Travis Chapman

Hello my friends, it is my delight to announce my debut children’s book: The Deep!

It has been long been my dream to create a children’s book specifically about deep sea creatures, which have been one of my deepest (pun intended) fascinations since my own childhood. The book is chock full of facts, comics, puns, and ridiculous jokes all about the denizens of the darkest reaches of the ocean and I hope it will inspire young readers to appreciate our incredibly wild and wondrous world. 

So if you love weird sea critters yourself or have a kid in your life who would love to learn about pigbutt worms and swimming sea cucumbers, consider preordering a copy at this link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709331/the-deep-by-lindsey-leigh-illustrated-by-lindsey-leigh/

 The book releases June 27th, 2023!

tbh i don't really get why we divide the oceans into different oceans because they're all connected it's the same ocean

no metaphor here just pure confusion...is there a line where one ocean stops and another begins? or is it like a smooth gradient of percentages of one ocean shading into another ocean?

Yes, there is a line. There are confluences you can see and touch and they are NOT subtle in the slightest.

That's the Atlantic and the Caribbean on a particularly pronounced day.

This is the Indian and the Pacific. It's not always this obvious everywhere but the dividing lines are very much there.

Oceans have their own properties as far as temperature and salinity and unless something like a storm or a current forces them to mix they won't. Mostly this applies to vertical mixing and it gives you things like thermoclines and haloclines but water is wierd and won't mix horizontally either.

The ocean basins tend to have their own currents that go in a circle and define that ocean, and those patterns mix the water within that ocean. Like a washing machine.

The Caribbean has a little loop of its own that not on this map, but that current keeps that ocean pretty internally consistent. It's got clear warm water because of the shallow bowl of limestone sand it sits in. Where it meets the Atlantic with wildly different conditions the water is traveling in opposite directions, and it acts kind of like an oncoming lane of highway traffic. Species that have adapted to a narrow band of temperatures and salinities (most fish) can't cross, while species with a stronger homeostasis hang out there on purpose, (marine mammals, turtles, sharks). Plankton, that cannot control their horizontal movement in the water column, are held in their home territories by these barriers.

Do y'all know what a war zone my notes are right now because of this. These photos have been mislabeled. They do not show two oceans meeting. There are multiple instances of these pictures, (which show runoff from glaciers hitting the ocean,) being mislabeled as "two oceans meeting" and it goes all the way back to 2010. that's THIRTEEN YEARS.

And everyone reblogging is like "woah this seems like the kind of post that would be fake!" that's because it is. "I was expecting this to be debunked at the end" ?!?!?!?! And you think that if a post doesn't have a debunk on the end, it's automatically true???!??That's what gets me! Y'all HAVE a functioning bullshit detector installed in your brain and you're just like

I'm sure this reblog wasn't meant as deceptive or a trick, i'm just. I'm witnessing the horrors.

I'm starting to consider posts like these good reminders that everyone's bullshit detector fails once in a while.

On both piracy and the “can I send writers ‘creatives’ ideas?” question a lot of the talking points I see from the trad-publishing industry standard pov seem to go “My publisher is a miserly capricious racketeer that sustains itself parasitically on intellectual property while threatening me with a loss of at will employment if i don’t side with them over my fellow authors, fans, and art; this is why it’s deathly important I get others to play along with my publisher as well so they don’t take it out on me”

I can see how the incentives align for you there but from my perspective as a lowly consoomer I think the obvious winning move to this rigged high-stakes game in which you are trying to involve me is simply not to play