Sunday, November 9, 2008

In the new spirit of the blog, I’m going to post some neat things every so often. Consider this a digest of other neat science blogs.

I’ve always like cephalopods. If you haven’t heard me start gushing in class about them, that’s the family of mollusks which include, squids and octopi. I’ve always held tentacles = cool. Whether I got that influence from gaming…
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…or literature….
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…or the sheer cuteness of the bobtail squid…
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…add tentacles to it and it gets my attention. Now, scientists have just discovered the common ancestor of most every octopus. Not only did they only start diverging 30 million years ago…the ancestor’s species is still ALIVE.
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Details can be found here.

Imagine the idea that we’ve only discovered 25% or so of the species in the oceans.

Also, leaving with an awesome picture of a right whale with a human for scale.
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These guys are so endangered that National Geographic put a picture of every member of that species on a two page spread. Good luck, guys.