pacificprincen

[pacificprincen]

➡️ historical moment: i'm gonna Doxx The Zoo for the first time.

but only because my little cold bear heart is currently tremoring.

the Zoo, where i live, is about two hours away from Western North Carolina, which has been obliterated by the latest hurricane. i don't mean "a lot of damage." i mean all highways are destroyed so no one can get in or out except by air. i mean whole towns are gone. Actually Gone. period. kaput

i mean no cellphone service & no power & very little wi-fi. i mean people trapped on Mountains with food running out & stranded on hospital rooftops. i mean San Diego is sending a convoy of rescue vehicles. yes, California. this is why you haven't seen a Ton of footage yet.

Western North Carolina, for those who are not in the know, is very far inland. they do not get hit by hurricanes or if they do, it's very light. this is where people go to EVACUATE from our coast. they were not prepared, understandably.

dams failed catastrophically. with the exception of satellite connections like Starlink and spotty wi-fi here and there, people cannot get in contact with their relatives and friends due to a total grid collapse. it's, uh, Not Great.

we're fine, here at the Zoo. we were to the far east of the hurricane. we just lost power for a hot minute. but knowing that so much devastation happened nearby is...harrowing. there but for the grace of god go i etc. esp since not much can be done directly right this second.

the point of this Post for now is just overall awareness since i haven't seen too much info on how you, reader, can directly take action at the moment. and i'm nervous that this horrific thing will go unnoticed. search "Asheville" or "Western North Carolina" anywhere for more details.

i don't think i can really do an Event to help, but we'll see in the coming months. (it will take months to rebuild. years, even. like i said: highways into the area gone, towns gone. GONE. good-bye.) so...just be aware? i suppose.

i'm still collecting my thoughts.

god damn.

[pacificprincen]

Does anyone know of any transition paths from the default clover path to the arched tile path? I need it for a diagonal bridge.

[pacificprincen]

Do the executives at Pixelberry or Nexon have a fetish for cheating stories or is writing toxic and morally questionable romances your M.O. now?

[pacificprincen]

Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.

[pacificprincen]

[pacificprincen]

He’s a musician

(via)

[pacificprincen]

[pacificprincen]

Just found out some whale species sleep vertically in the water, figured it’d fit right in with your cursed biology tag lol

yes, but only sperm whales!

these fuckers take their snooze all together as a group, floating vertically in the water column around fifty feet down. we think that they're the only whales that do this, and they can only pull it off because they're the only whale that spends their entire lives in a group!

most whales are lonely creatures, speeding through the deep blue sea solo except at certain times of the year- and that means that these whales have to use the dolphin method if they want to catch some Z's, turning half their brain off at a time and leaving the other half to pilot their body slowly through the water and watch out for predators. and, uh, also to remember to breathe. that's important.

sounds extremely unrestful, actually. can we introduce these poor guys to the concept of memory foam?

somebody call tempur-pedic and ask if they make a size XXXXXXXL.

but anyway, if you're lucky enough to be born a sperm whale, you don't have to do that!

sperm whales are able to enter a much deeper rest state than any other known cetacean, much closer to the traditional mammal deep snooze. they float vertically in the water and keep just enough of their brains on to swim up when they need to breathe, but other than that it's light's out for these snoozeville boys.

and the reason for this is very simple, yet profound- who the FUCK is going to pick a fight with a sperm whale pod?

when you spend your entire life hanging with a couple dozen of your closest friends, all of whom are 60-80 feet in length and weigh more than three school buses stacked on top of each other, you get to learn what the term "safety in numbers" really means.

[pacificprincen]

photography  Will Burrard-Lucas

[pacificprincen]

i was curious as to what you meant by pterosaurs probably having the some of the worst deaths of the chixulub impact. would they just get swept away in the extreme wind?

any animal close enough to the impact site to feel the blast wave would have been almost instantly dead. but pterosaurs on the other side of the world would have been soaring along and then suddenly been pelted with a mini-meteor storm of molten debris raining down from low earth orbit where it was flung by the impact, which would have literally burned holes in their wings and bodies until they just couldn't fly anymore and fell to the ground below, which was also suddenly on fire and simultaneously experiencing a cataclysmic global earthquake/tsunami. if they survived the drop, they died there instead.

large pterosaurs probably stayed in the air the longest, but they eventually fell too once the atmosphere got hot enough to literally cook them alive.

[pacificprincen]

source

[pacificprincen]

[pacificprincen]

Actually forget every other post about “primal” feelings and actions, the most connected to my early hominid ancestors i have ever felt in my LIFE is when slowly following an increasingly panicked sheep. I believe that slowly following ungulates is the most primally human activity in existence

[pacificprincen]

If there’s any equivalent to carcinization in mammals, it’s turning into an otter-beaver-like semi-aquatic form.

Because it just keeps happening.

Modern examples alone include otters, beavers, muskrats, giant otter shrews, desmans, aquatic genets, yapoks, lutrine opossums, and platypuses – and in the fossil record there were early pinnipeds, remingtonocetids, pantolestids, stagodontids, and Liaoconodon going as far back as the early Cretaceous. Even outside of the true mammals there were also Castorocauda, Haldanodon, and Kayentatherium during the Jurassic, and much further back in the late Permian there was the early cynodont Procynosuchus.

So a non-cynodont synapsid doing the exact same thing really isn’t all that surprising.

Perplexisaurus foveatus was a member of the therocephalians, a group of synapsids that were close evolutionary “cousins” of the cynodonts-and-true-mammals lineage. Similar in size to a modern rat, about 20cm long (8"), it lived in Western Russia during the Late Permian about 268-265 million years ago.

At the time this region was a river plain with a tropical climate, experiencing seasonal floods that turned the whole area into what’s known as “viesses” (a name based on the abbreviation “V.S.S.” standing for “very shallow sea”), vast shallow lake-seas that persisted for weeks or months at a time.

So this little animal has been interpreted as being semi-aquatic, swimming around and feeding on aquatic invertebrates and tiny fish and amphibians. Its skull had numerous pits around the front of its face, suggesting that it had a highly sensitive snout – probably whiskery, allowing it to hunt entirely by touch in dark murky water, but it’s also been proposed to have possibly had an electroreceptive sense similar to modern platypuses.

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