Bang!

When I first saw this video I was positive that it had to be a clever hoax but, I'll be damned, the Pistol Shrimp really does exist!

And here's a link to the science behind it.

Unstructured Pharyngea

One of the freakier things about H.R. Giger's design of the Alien (from the movie of the same name) was that weird set of inner jaws that the alien had which would snap out at you when it got close.

The technical term for these sorts of second jaws are pharyngeal jaws. Such jaws actually do exist in nature, but, before now, no one had observed a set of pharyngeal jaws that could actually move independently of the outer jaw (they tend to be more like a second row of teeth). Recently, however, scientists have discovered that moray eels actually do have a pharyngeal set that do work something like the one's that the Alien has.

Let us hope that the rest of Geiger's more creative speculations remain in the realm of fiction.

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Thanks to Arturo Magidin for pointing me to the NPR link

Ratfish Redux

Behold, the ratfish!



This is a "living fossil" discovered by Brazilian scientists. It's related to sharks and rays.

The so-called Age of Discovery, when such organizations as the National Geographic Society were having to continual update the lists of new creatures, flora, and peoples, pretty much came to an end with the culmination of the epoch of European imperial expansion. New species are still discovered (mostly arthropods and the like), but the pace has slowed to a comparative trickle.

The oceans are the last great frontier on the planet that have remained largely unexplored. Such discoveries as this ugly little fish hold out the possibility that a new Age of Discovery may yet exist in our future.