This is the only video of a frilled shark on the whole internet but it’s a deep sea animal in the process of dying which is why it swims so weird and its gills are puffed out and its whole front end seems paralyzed. Somewhere there are vibrant happy frilled sharks swimming gracefully like regular sharks but almost no one has ever seen what that’s like.
RE: why this happens: most of the ocean is just one huge open space with no physical barriers, so a deep sea animal relies only on its senses of light, temperature and pressure to tell it where it should stay. As it wears down with age or sickness those senses start to break down so everywhere probably begins to feel the same. It randomly wanders farther out of its habitat and sometimes that wandering takes it up and up and miraculously one of us humans sees it before any predators catch it, which is incredible because that’s hundreds of meters of distance it might have avoided porpoises, seals, barracuda, morays, squid, tuna, marlins, large jellyfish, even scavengers like lobsters and hagfish will often start eating something on the brink but not quite dead yet.
It’s sad, but it’s likely this shark lived a very long life, and it doesn’t know it, but it survived a very long trip in a very vulnerable state just to visit us for a moment. With its senses so far gone it may not have felt too bad. It might have felt like any ordinary day floating around its home until it fell asleep one last time, never knowing how it amazed and enlightened members of an entirely alien species in the process!
“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”
no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it
The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.
Guys, palaeontology is not some big fun guessing game. We’re not pulling things out of our ass for fun. We have a LOT of ways to tell what an extinct animal may have looked like. Everything from scars on bones, mathematic calculations on load bearing, soft tissue impressions, understanding modern biology, signs of rate of growth, preserved organic materials – we can tell a LOT from fossils. We can get pretty good ideas of how things probably looked. We can definitely get a broad idea of an animal, its shape, its size. Even things like colour, patterning, and integument follow recognisable rules and trends. Maybe we can’t get everything absolutely certain, and maybe there are some areas we’re questioning, but we do have ideas grounded in reasonable assumptions.
No, T. rex did not look like a round, soft bird. No, plesiosaurs were not penguin shaped. No, a Triceratops was probably not bright pink and purple all over, and no, Brachiosaurus could never have had a trunk. These are things we absolutely can and do know.
Palaeontology is a science, and treating it like some experiment in imagination just harms an already misunderstood and looked-down-on field. Especially when our science is so often talked over or ignored by people who want to make animals “cool” or “scary” or “retro”. Please. Understand the intricacies here and stop acting like our study means nothing.
Some loose illustrations to expand my visual library bit by bit – empty dragonfly exuviae and the blue emperor, the biggest dragonfly around our region. At some point this summer, I watched a dogfight between two males, and when a brown hawker (looking like an X-Wing with its reddish wings :D) came too close, they teamed up and chased the intruder instead. I learned so much this summer, freaking awesome animals!
