Happy Thought for 5 August 2022

Have a Happy Thought: 

 

Remember last week’s albatross with the amazing hair?

Turns out that humans have loved mullets for a long time, too.

Like, not just since the 1980s.

How long ago do you think it was?

 

 

No, further back than that.

 

 

Keep going…

 

 

The first known record in literature of a mullet was in Homer’s Iliad, which was written/compiled/told sometime in the late 700s BCE.

That’s… 2700 years ago.

You see, there’s a group of warriors called the Abantes, and apparently they were the original business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back devotees.

Here’s the quote: “The sprinting Abantes followed, their forelocks cropped, hair grown long at the back” (II.632-3).

Homer. Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles and with an Introduction by Bernard Knox. Penguin, 1990.

 

But you’re here for cool photos, so you get double the facts this week!

 

Scientists researching fossils in the Burgess Shale have found, well, an Earthling that would amaze even most science-fiction writers and artists.

Meet the Balhuticaris voltae, a massive bivalve that swam the ancient oceans on this. very. planet.

 

I’ll let one of the authors of the paper that described this creature take it from here:

Balhuticaris belongs to a 500 million-year-old group of arthropods that we think are related to modern crustaceans and insects.

Other ancient sea creatures like trilobites had a large number of body segments, but this one has 110 – one hundred and ten segments! It’s a Cambrian record. Today only centipedes and millipedes have that many segments.


Image: Hugo Salais, via Izqierdo-Lopez and Caron. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

 

Even weirder/cooler, this may have actually swum upside-down from how we might normally expect it (or even just flipped itself and swum upside down sometimes, just for fun!):


Image: Hugo Salais, via Izqierdo-Lopez and Caron. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

 

When the scientists found this skeleton, they actually found two of these creatures right close to each other. So here’s the happy family, as they might have been 506 million years ago.


Image: Hugo Salais

 

All three images are by the artist Hugo Salais, a digital artist doing some amazing scientific imagery. See more of his work here: https://www.metazoa.studio/home

 The top two images were included in the article Extreme multisegmentation in a giant bivalved arthropod from the Cambrian Burgess Shale by Alejandro Izquierdo-López and Jean-Bernard Caron, published July 15, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104675

 

Thanks to the absolutely amazing Literature and History podcast for bringing ancient Greek mullets to our attention: https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episode-009-glittering-bronze-men

The full article about the massive bivalve can be found here: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(22)00947-6#%20

And thanks to PhD candidate Alejandro Izquierdo for sharing this discovery with us. https://twitter.com/trichodes

 

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