James Tang

Screenshot of a tweet from @TylerGreenfield, showing a juvenile basking shark & talking about how we don't know much about their ontogeny. Little guy looks like Gonzo from the Muppets 😭 The baby shark has a soft, pointed beak that hooks down at the end sticking out beyond its mouth, and no/very tiny teeth. Just felty-looking gums.

hey guys wanna see a sea muppet

If you want to add more irony to this situation, I've been to museums in Indonesia which still subscribe to the outdated Out-of-Yunnan hypothesis of Austronesian origins.

You could probably base it on the Soviet economy, which had multiple currencies for accounting reasons for partly these issues.

You've basically restated the quasi-unsolvable question at the heart of human evolution: 'Why did humans evolve?'.

I'd reckon bipedalism seems to have been a necessary pre-requisite, with the other apes and monkeys not evolving it/evolving out of it cause it wasn't needed for their locomotion.

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

Man I hate this clade
🦭 Animal #793 🦔
I figured it out in 10 guesses!
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 6.3

metazooa.com
#metazooa

Yes, otherwise you will be confused and do poorly on the final exam for the Scorigami course.

My favourite book of his is 'Bursting the Limits of Margins'

Every time I get a Meal Deal in the UK, I'm reminded by how much more flavourful and filling Singapore food courts are by comparison. And they'd be cheaper 😔

iirc
3 geological periods named after Wales (Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian)
2 named after England (Devonian, Carboniferous)
1 Russian (Permian)
1 German (Triassic)
2 French (Jurassic, Cretaceous)
1 Australian (Ediacaran)
2 funky American ones (Mississippian, Pennsylvanian)

Street brawl outside one of the many pubs in Birmingham?

And that's not even getting into what sedimentologists do to mudrocks with their mouths.

L'importation du suicide méthodologique de la presse libérale americaine se poursuit tranquillement dans nos rédactions. Plus aucun consensus, rien que des opinions qui s'équivalent dans le grand marché des idées, et une presse stérile. La "neutralité" est une politique de soutien à la catastrophe.

The Hunger Gap A gulf in public understanding prevents us from seeing how and why our food supply is at risk.

1. At the Tipping Points conference in Exeter yesterday, I spoke about the likelihood of food system collapse: a massive existential threat few people's radar. If you want a handle on the issue, here's the submission I made to a parliamentary committee.
+ 🧵
www.monbiot.com/2023/03/09/t...

Starmer says trans bans must be implemented 'as soon as possible' Keir Starmer has ordered that public bodies to enforce the Supreme Court's controversial gender ruling "as soon as possible".

For real, Sir Starmer, what are trans, intersex, gender non-conforming, or even just kinda weird-looking people supposed to do? How about we just accept that trans women are women, rather than policing what kinds of bodies are allowed to exist in public?

www.thepinknews.com/2025/06/30/k...

Day57 of photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver with fossils in the hopes that he saves the Paleontological Research Institution

It's ok, John (H. sapiens) you can be with an Antarctic Cucullaea rea (PRI 58984) at PRI while in NY, the penguins won't be jealous
#MolluskMonday #Antarctica 🦑

Photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver onto fossils until the Paleontological Research Institution secures their funding!

Fossil is a modern specimen of the slate pencil sea urchin, Heterocentrotus mamillatus. Comedian is H. sapiens. Not to scale.

'OMG, they put in my favourite fragmentary large theropod which is reconstructed to look the same as its more well-preserved relative!'

I find it annoying how so much weird diversity gets eclipsed by a handful of theropod families in the paleofan discourse

I realised afterward this idea does sort of replicate the plot of a werewolf survival story lol

But I think exploring that idea from the point of view of governments struggling to understand a new disease and the moral costs of treatment hits on a lot of ideas bubbling around since covid

I've always thought about the idea of a zombie plot where there is actually a decent chance that the infected recovers from the virus before starving to death or dying of some other infection given its eating raw meat. Really changes the moral calculus of killing them thoughtlessly.

Yeah. It hit really hit me when I started seeing Hindutva accounts going "we're not safe in the *only Hindu* nation in the world".
Which ngl feels a lot weaker rhetorically coming from the literal largest country in the world by population.

Hindutva ideology conceives of Kashmir as a heavenly place, integral to the Hindu homeland. Kashmiri people by contrast are an alien (read non-Hindu) race they despise, despite rampant fetishisation of Kashmiri women. The parallels with Zionism aren't too surprising since this is nationalism 101

Do they take international, non-Polish speaking volunteers?

The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh by Ewan McColl

Durian hater: L list

Shoutout to the weird free-swimming pelagic trilobites like Opipeuterella

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

🐄 Animal #592 🪱
I figured it out in 1 guesses!
🟩
🔥 4 | Avg. Guesses: 6.6

metazooa.com
#metazooa

Rescuing the Panda of the Sea

Wait son of a bitch the grifters are "involved" supposedly
colossalfoundation.org/project/supp...

I mean that would probably require them catching vaquita and putting them in captivity. The last time people tried that they killed 5 of them and released the last one to prevent it from also dying iirc.

The Long, Slow Death of Global Development - American Affairs Journal Most emerging markets have not found an engine of durable growth comparable to manufacturing—most have indeed grown over the last few decades, but dependence on services and commodities exports has no...

Read this article from a few years ago and it keeps feeling true. Hard not to be pessemistic about the fate of the Global South with how few major successes we're seeing in terms of industrial growth.

americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-...

Fellas wouldn't be crazy if we were all just worms in a cheese and God was the cheesemaker