#taxonomy is weird

[rotationalsymmetry]

Apparently buckwheat isn't a cereal. Isn't a grass. Isn't even close to grass. Is in the same general ballpark as carnations, cacti, and beets. Wut.

[lichenaday]

Ramalina labiosorediata

Powdery twig lichen, chalky bush lichen

Look, I know that "labio" is just the Latin for "lips." I know that. But that doesn't stop the dumb 13-year-old that lives in the back of brain from cringing and giggling when I read that word. I just . . . I would simply choose to not name R. labiosorediata that, ya know? This fruticose lichen has a shrubby thallus that grows in ragged clusters up to 2 cm long. It has flattened or slightly inflated branches which have marginal or terminal, lip-shaped soralia which often look like accidental splits in the surface spewing powdery soredia. R. labiosoreiata was established as its own species in 2017, and is the North American counterpart to the more widespread R. pollinaria.

images: source | source

info: source

[verysharpfish]

if there was a plant that grew bones and flesh like fruit that you could harvest, would it still count as meat?

na cause it's a plant

[hayaniii]

yay selfship reblog game

reblog with a pic of your f/o and ill assign them a caniform!

(caniforms are "dog-like" carnivorans)

(also disclaimer that im not an expert on these)

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

It's so hilariously American-centric to say that

This (Southern Resident)

Is a distinct species from this (Transient/Bigg's):

-

But that means that this (Bremer Canyon offshore ecotype)

is the same species as this (Type D Antarctic ecotype)

And is also the same species as this (Icelandic ecotype)

I get we have a lot of data on Residents and Transient/Bigg's but it's going to get real confusing if we start defining killer whale ecotypes as entirely different species - especially if the most distinctly different ecotypes are being ignored.

Edit: I am mostly joking here and I get that by defining them as a separate species, they could be considered more for protections like the endangered Southern Residents. However I feel like they will still be referred to as killer whales by the general public, who will be going off visual rather than the other genomic evidence provided in the paper.

It's not a huge drama, really. It's just going to be interesting to see if every ecotype is going to be given its own species classification and how that relates to the conversation about culture transmission and hybridisation in killer whales as well.

[bitterrobin]

🌀

🌀Post the fic summary for a fic you haven't written/published yet. It can be hypothetical or something you really plan on releasing..

YOUR FEELINGS AND MINE ARE ALL HOLY (LONELY) He gets it. Bette Kane is a wildfire. Scorching, hot and hungry. Or an exploding star, subdued only by the magnitude of distance between planets - reaching for everything it can. That won’t stop him from reaching back. After all, when has he ever avoided an explosion?

Just a fun little one-shot set pre-CHIROPTERA of how Tom and Bette meet, and little observations made by Tom about her. (Also fun nods here and there about his friendship with Grant/his experiences with the JSA).

[thereareeyesinsidethetrees]

ae had no idea how many birds were passeriformes until now. turns out it's...most of them probably

[baroquepopcorn]

I swear all phylogeny looks like this:

[peterbwatsonparker]

my controversial marvel opinion is that mutants and mutates are related, taxonomically.

mostly to rationalize how even in universe some people get in radiation/chemical/whatever accidents and die while others get superpowers.

so the way i see it is that there’s a certain subset of people who possess certain genes that make their DNA more malleable, and able to accept and reorder itself around mutations, which includes both mutants and mutates, with the main difference between the two being that mutates are able to accept changes, but need some sort of outside trigger to set off/activate mutations, while mutants have the x-gene that acts as a sort of internal trigger, allowing for powers to activate without external influences

[tysonfurybattlepass]

What’s the group of animals that look like sabertooths but are not felids I think you mentioned o: ?

yes, the families nimravidae and barbourofelidae! some of them were sabertoothed, some had conical teeth like carnivorans of today. they were feliforms, but could be distinguished from true cats by their bearlike plantigrade feet and five back toes!

some, like dinictis felina, were as small as ocelots. some, like quercylurus major, were as large as grizzly bears!

afaik it’s still being debated whether the incredibly bizarre barbourofelids were nimravids or part of their own family.

built more like bears than like cats, these guys had some of the biggest mandibular flanges any animal has ever evolved. second only to the equally strange thylacosmilus, of course.

[hasellia]

This poll is so fascinating to me.

I remember seeing art on tumblr few years ago of gryphons but with characteristics of various different birds

And the artist left the comment: : "The kiwi gryphon doesn't look like a gryphon, and that's fine because kiwi's are barely birds."

That comment was probably mostly for the funnies, but it struck me as an odd thing to say. And now, in the results and tags of this poll, people are going off mainly by if it has wings or not. The benchmarkers of almost bird but not quite seems to be bats, (a mammal that moves with powered flight and has no beak), and a cassowary, an animal that is very typically bird-like except for it's size and small wing to body ratio.

So, to the layperson, is a bird anything that has wings and can fly? Is a chicken only a half bird? What about turkeys? (I actually don't know if they can fly, but I assume most people believe they can not). If that's the case, why aren't butterflies considered birds? A proboscis is rather beak like, and the can, as a very observant person, suggested, fly. If the butterfly can be considered a bird, what about the common housefly, bee, or wasp? Grasshoppers and mantis are capable of powered flight. Do they count?

Many marine critters swim using a motion very similar to that required for flying with wing like projections. Is a clam or shrimp a bird?

No they're underwater right? A bird is anything with a beak that can fly, in the air.

Does an aeroplane count? What is the difference in the beak of a sacred ibis and a 747 cockpit? They have different functions, right?

Can you define the characteristics of a living being the same way you define machinery? Machines are made by human beings with only a single purpose in mind. Why don't we call a spade a spade? If walks like a spade, talks like a spade, is it a Crescent moon spade made for burying the roadside dead and 1st degree manslaughter or is it a kunai, commonly believed to be an aerodynamic knife when in actuality it is a Buddhist trowel. But when you've just been caught digging under the daimyo's castle, it makes for a good bird, right? It is capable of flight and has a beak. It has no functional wings, but neither does a cassowary or kiwi.

The best bird is a ninja knife.

(Don't do a Linnaeus folks)

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.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Happy/spooky Friday everyone.

Obviously I'm sad about the long days getting shorter and summer fruit season slowly drawing to a close, but there are compensations. Like PERSIMMONS!!!

(happy it's persimmon season dance.)

Not only are persimmons delicious, but they are also in the order ericales in the...taxonomic category*...asterids, which you can vote for (or against) in the @plant-taxonomy-showdown bonus round semi-finals which will almost certainly start later today! So, keep your eyes peeled!

But your persimmons don't have to be!

*the correlation between traditional linean categories and actually useful categories is a bit hit or miss.

[rival-the-rose]

Fun new body thing is instead of having true asthma attacks I'm just unconsciously adjusting my breathing around lungs that aren't inflating+deflating all the way so I'm slowly becoming hypoxic without really realizing bc it's hard to notice that you're suddenly so cold and unbearably sleepy as symptoms of hypoxia with a brain that is hypoxic

[reddest-of-apples]

Taxonomy is all fucked up because that's just what happens when you go around getting smart about semantics with the forces of creation

[ramenheim]

I mean yeah but tbf both the word and the concept of FISH predate modern taxonomic attempts to define them, & that's just a problem of taking a word out of its original environment (the shared concept we agree on-- ~[animal creature in water]) & trying to artifishially constrain it with "new boundaries (-> jargon definitions)" as those boundaries are deemed relevant by people seeking to draw them for the purposes of communicating among others *in a specific academic field that requires the least amount of semantic wiggle room to usefully communicate* (and then rigidly demand that only this *new, less expansive jargon term* counts as the ""real"" definition, superceding common understanding** even where it would be wildly inappropriate/blantantly incorrect to do so.)

So yeah it's exactly the same thing happening in gender and sexuality 'discourse' which is why trying to taxonomically delineate "who counts" as xyz genders/sexualities/queer kinship sucks absolute dogshit & fails to actually grasp what those concepts are by trying to pare away as many aspects as possible to falsely pursue a "pure, undiluted core of Meaning" that not only *doesn't* tangibly exist, but actively flies in the face of real, lived human experience and understanding of /what those words mean to the ppl who have used them/, which is actually how those things are 'defined'. It's a dialogue between an individual's sense of understanding of self, and of the self within the context of the society and culture it exists within; facilitated with shared words that only sort of generally agree on complicated clouds of nuance (where no two ppl's clouds are precisely the same; even if those two ppl are both you just seperated by time).

Like, a tuatara *IS* a lizard by virtue of it Being Like That, not bc it is from any kind of rigorously demarcated lineage that has been stamped Gold Star Lizard, a standard that all other lizards are marked /against/ based on deviations from that arbitrarily decided norm* (that itself will also shift as new developments like dna sequencing/etc. get added to the 'data to sort' pile).

Your individual self *can* be labelled, but those labels can never truly express, with excruciating precision, what you are to other ppl (nor can other ppl ever precisely express what you are to them). There's never been a combo like you and there never will be again; and no amount of taxonimocal efforts are ever going to be comprehensively true (both individually+collectively)-- only ever usefully true, in context.

[Tweet from @/fozmeadows: "human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there's actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that's okay"]

[hedgehog-moss]

Pls give recommendations for Odd books 🙏

Here we go, a list of literary oddity :) This post contains majestic spheres, alien taxonomies, cruel subway polytheism, a fourth-dimensional cat, disturbing earthworms, infinite space football, existential mussel terror, a Parisian absurdist time loop, and a picture of a telegraph-pole-man-cheetah. I'm not exactly recommending these books, in the sense that I won't take any complaints if you find them more odd than good, and some of them transcend the concepts of good and bad anyway.

• The Other City, Michal Ajvaz. It's all like this:

• Contes du demi-sommeil, Marcel Béalu ('Half-asleep tales') —is the book that prompted my post about stories that have no ambition or justification beyond being odd. I'm sad that it hasn't been translated :( One of the tales is about a strange opaline sphere that rolls on the road. It doesn't accelerate when the road becomes a steep slope but continues rolling majestically. At one point it floats away towards the sky. Someone wonders if it was the moon. Someone else says authoritatively "It was an angel's egg." Everyone is reassured by this explanation. The whole thing feels exactly like remembering a dream you had. There is also a man who reads too much and whose body atrophies so only his head is left and his wife puts it in an egg cup for better stability.

• Leonora Carrington— The Skeleton's Holiday, or maybe the Hearing Trumpet. I've read them so long ago but I think the latter is the one with the old ladies and nuns? There's also a guy who was murdered in his bath by a still-life painter because he said there was a carrot in one of his paintings, but it might not have been a carrot? It's hard to remember details from this book without feeling like I might be making them up. Bonus Leonora Carrington painting which kind of feels like a short story:

• The Codex Seraphinianus, of course. I wish there were more bizarre encyclopaedias out there.

Also I love this review:

• Sleep Has His House, Anna Kavan —I really liked the way this book used language; making life feel like a fever dream even more than in Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream (which I really liked too.)

The eye is checking a record of silence, space; a nightmare, every horror of this world in its frigid and blank neutrality. The actual scope of its orbit depends on the individual concept of desolation, but approximate symbols are suggested in long roving perspectives of ocean, black swelled, in slow undulation, each whaleback swell plated in armour-hard brilliance with the moonlight clanking along it . . .

• The second half of Michael Ende's Neverending Story, where things get stranger! I remember the hand-shaped castle with eyes and the city of amnesiac former emperors and the miserable ugly worms who cry all the time out of shame then create beautiful architecture with their tears...

• The Gray House, Mariam Petrosyan. This is the one I had in mind when I talked about a 'museum of the strange, but one you wouldn't want to be trapped in after closing time'. Another book that made me feel uncomfortable in a similar (good) way was Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions, the protagonist of which is a man who curates an odd private museum and can't stand the sight of his own hands.

• Oh, speaking of uncomfortable, and hands—He Digs A Hole, by Danger Slater. To me this book was in the more-odd-than-good category but I liked its refusal to have a coherent philosophical meaning. It's about a man who can't sleep so he goes to his garden shed and saws off his hands and replaces them with gardening tools. Then he starts digging a hole. And then it gets weird. (Read at your own discretion if you have a worm phobia; there's some body horror featuring sexually aggressive earthworms. And then it gets disturbing.)

• 17776 — Someone sent me an ask a few years back to recommend this online multimedia narrative to me and I really enjoyed it! Here's the summary, borrowed from the wiki page: Set in the distant future in which all humans have become immortal and infertile, the series follows three sapient space probes that watch humanity play an evolved form of American football in which games can be played for millennia over distances of thousands of miles. The work explores themes of consciousness, hope, despair, and why humans play sports.

• Saint-Glinglin, Raymond Queneau —the author admitted that this book presents some "internal discontinuities." I didn't like it much but I respect the talent it takes to write a novel where everything feels like a random digression, including the key suspenseful scene that matters to the plot. The one digression I loved had to do with the way the narrator is existentially horrified by various sea creatures. It's like he dreads them so much he can't help but think about them when he should be telling a story.

The oyster... This gob of phlegm, this brutal way of refusing the outside world, this absolute isolation, and this disease: the pearl... If I conceptualise them even a little, my terror starts anew. The mussel is even more significant than the oyster and even more immediately admissible in the domain of terror. Let us indeed consider that this little sticky mass whose collective stupidity haunts our piers, consider that it is alive in the same way as a cow. Because there are no degrees in life. There is no more or less. The whole of life is present in every animal. To think that the mussel, that the mussel has, not a conscience, but a certain way of transcending itself: here I am once again plunged into abysses of anxiety and insecurity.

Near the beginning he philosophises about what would happen if a man and a lobster were the only two survivors of the apocalypse. The lobster would break the man's toe and the man would say, "We are the only beings that remain on this devastated Earth, lobster! The only living beings in the universe, struggling alone against the universal disaster, don't you want to be allies?" But the lobster would disdainfully walk away towards the ocean, and "the sight of the inflexible and imperturbable lobster pierces the sky of humanity with its unintelligible claws." (I can't overstate how little this has to do with the rest of the book.)

• Autumn in Beijing, Boris Vian —needless to say the story does not take place in autumn nor in Beijing.* To the extent that it can be said to be "about" something, it's about people trying to build a train station in a desert with tracks that lead nowhere. (I just went on goodreads to check the title, and it's actually called Autumn in Peking in English. I also discovered that it was featured in a list of Books I Regret Reading. I liked this book, but I understand.)

(* French writers love doing this—like when Alphonse Allais said about his 1893 book The Squadron's Umbrella "I chose this title because there aren't any umbrellas of any sort in this volume, and the important notion of the squadron, as a unit of the armed forces, is never brought up at all; in these conditions, hesitating would have been pure madness.")

• The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins—I fear this one makes a little too much sense for this list, but you can't say it isn't weird; and I loved it and recommend it any chance I get.

• The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, Carol Hill —this book was so wacky and made me laugh. I've not yet managed to successfully recommend it to someone; its brand of odd didn't resonate with the people I know who've read it but that's okay. You could say it's about a woman astronaut whose weird cat disappears into the fourth dimension (or the quantum realm?) and she goes to space to save him—but that makes the book sound more straightforward and less messy than it is. Her cat leaves her a note before he disappears:

• The Bald Soprano, Ionesco —fun fact, there's a tiny theatre in the Latin Quarter in Paris where this absurdist play has been staged every night for nearly 70 years, with the exact same set design and costumes and everything, like the actors are stuck in a time loop. They celebrated the 20,000th performance this year! There's an actress who has been playing her character for 40 years and said joining this theatre was like joining a religion. I've been going to see this play as a New Year tradition with my best friend since we were 14, so I love it madly, though I wouldn't say it's good, necessarily—the author said it was about "absolutely nothing, but a superior nothing."

• Statuary Gardens; or Les Mers perdues (apparently not translated) by Jacques Abeille. This man is obsessed with weird statues. Unfortunately I find his writing style rather dull—I feel like he takes strange ideas and makes them feel mundane in a bad way...! But his books still have a nice, quiet, oneiric atmosphere, and images that stayed with me, like a solitary gardener trying to grow stone statues in the depleted soil of a walled garden. Here are some illustrations from the second one:

I'll look into some of the books recommended on my previous post! (and I agree with the people who brought up Cortázar, Borges, and Junji Ito. <3) Some potentially-odd books I have on my to-read list: Clive Barker's Abarat, Goran Petrović's An Atlas Traced by the Sky, Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, Jean Ray's Malpertuis; Jan Weiss's The House of a Thousand Floors; Brice Tarvel's Pierre-Fendre.