Thursday, February 28, 2008

Discovery of Aquatic Dino Big Enough To Munch Economy Cars



By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

Wed Feb 27, 12:09 PM ET


OSLO (Reuters) - The fossil of a 15 meter (50 ft) long "sea monster" found in Arctic Norway was the biggest of its kind known to science with dagger-like teeth in a mouth large enough to bite a small car, researchers said on Wednesday.

The 150-million year old dinosaur-era pliosaur, a fierce marine reptile, was about five meters (16 ft 5 in) longer than the previous pliosaur record holder found in Australia.


"It's a new species and the biggest proven pliosaur," Joern Hurum, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Oslo who led the expedition to dig up the fossil on the archipelago of Svalbard 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.


"A small car could fit inside its mouth," he told Reuters, adding the lower jaw was about three meters (10 ft) long. "Something like a Morris Minor would fit perfectly."


The Museum said that pliosaurs were the top marine predators of the Jurassic era, preying upon squid-like animals, fish, and other marine reptiles.


Another type of fossil marine reptile, the ichthyosaur, was bigger at up to 23 meters (75 ft). "The pliosaur is not the biggest sea monster but it's probably the most fierce," Hurum said, adding the fossil has jagged teeth the size of cucumbers.


"The front flipper of our pliosaur alone is three meters long. We've laid it out downstairs in the basement," he said.


Earlier estimates had been that the Norwegian pliosaur, popularly dubbed "The Monster," was about 12 meters (40 ft) long, roughly as long as Australia's kronosaurus.


The Arctic find "demonstrates that these gigantic animals inhabited the northern seas of our planet during the age of dinosaurs," said Patrick Druckenmiller of the University of Alaska Museum who was on the expedition that found the fossil.


The Norwegian museum said that it was planning to return in mid-2008 to excavate a skull and skeleton of another gigantic pliosaur recently found near "The Monster."
I think it might be a fun idea to go back to this model as a way of ushering in the Age Of Waterworld. Heck, they used practically the same species in the movie version with Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper!

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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Horrible News, Some Of The Worst...


I held off on telling you this until I was ABSOLUTELY SURE IT WAS TRUE. I'm sorry -- so sorry -- to tell you all this, but Ben Chapman, one of our crack dry-land operatives for over 50 years, has passed away ON LAND, in a HUMAN-RUN HOSPITAL. I can't stand to tell you what they're planning to do with his dang-near-sacred remains; it's too horrible. He should OBVIOUSLY have been released into the water, so he could sink mournfully face-down into the wet ONE LAST TIME.

This is the man who played the Gillman so masterfully in the dry-land scenes of The Creature From The Black Lagoon, a B-picture that became one of Universal's horror classics AND ONE OF THE GREATEST RECRUITING TOOLS EVER. He's brought so many new recruits into our ranks beneath the sea, since BEFORE THE FILM'S RELEASE, that WE'VE LOST COUNT.

This is a dry-land operative SO BRILLIANT that even the glaring security leak worked into the three Gill Man pictures has caused us NO TROUBLE AT ALL.

Ben Chapman is an IRREPLACEABLE talent, and I shudder to think what it will be like to go on without him.


Here's the full story.


Here's the great Gill Man's own website.

There will never be another one like him.

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And This Just In


This showed up on a website that prefers to be NAMELESS. I have quoted it here.

SYDNEY, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Scientists studying Antarctic waters have filmed and captured giant sea creatures, like sea spiders the size of dinner plates and jelly fish with six metre (18 feet) tentacles.

A fleet of three Antarctic marine research ships returned to Australia this week ending a summer expedition to the Southern Ocean where they carried out a census of life in the icy ocean and on its floor, more than 1,000 metres (yards) below the surface.

"Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters -- we have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates," Australian scientist Martin Riddle, voyage leader on the research ship Aurora Australis, said on Tuesday.

"Many live in the dark and have pretty large eyes. They are strange looking fish," Riddle told local radio.

"Some of the video footage we have collected is really stunning -- it's amazing to be able to navigate undersea mountains and valleys and actually see what the animals look like in their undisturbed state," Riddle said.

"In some places every inch of the sea floor is covered in life. In other places we can see deep scars and gouges where icebergs scour the sea floor as they pass by," he said.

The Australian Antarctic Division expedition will help scientists monitor how the impact of environmental change in Antarctic waters, such as ocean acidification caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, will make it harder for marine organisms to grow and sustain calcium carbonate skeletons.

"It is predicted that the first effects of this will be seen in the cold, deep waters of Antarctica," said Riddle.

"What we saw down there were vast coraline gardens based on calcareous organisms and these are the ones that could really be lost in an increasing acidic ocean," he said.

The three ships, the Aurora Australis, France's L'Astrolabe and Japan's Umitaka Maru docked in Hoabrt on Australia's southern island state of Tasmania, with their decks full of an array of sealife including unknown species of sea creatures collected near the eastern Antarctic land mass.

Some creatures, which were retrieved from between 200 - 1,400 metres (yards) below the surface, weighed up to 30 kgs (65 pounds), while some 25 percent of the sealife chronicled was previous unknown.

The census of life in the Southern Ocean is known as the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census (CEAMARC). The French and Japanese ships examined the mid and upper ocean, while the Australian ship studied the ocean floor.

"This research will help scientists understand how communities have adapted to the unique Antarctic environment," said Graham Hosie, leader of the census project on Umitaka Maru.

"Specimens collected will be sent to universities and museums around the world for identification, tissue sampling and bar-coding of their DNA. Not all of the creatures that we found could be identified and it is very likely that some new species will be recorded as a result of these voyages."

CEAMARC is part of the international Census of Antarctic Marine Life, coordinated by the Australian Antarctic Division, which will see some 16 voyages to Antarctic waters during this, the International Polar Year (2007-2009).

The census will survey the biodiversity of Antarctic slopes, abyssal plains, open water, and under disintegrating ice shelves. It aims to determine species biodiversity, abundance and distribution and establish a baseline dataset from which future changes can be observed.
I want to repeat: THEY MAY ACTUALLY BE GETTING THE IDEA. 'Ray for our side!!!

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Advance Of The Killer Crabs


By IAN JOHNSTON


AN ARMY of voracious giant crabs is on the brink of invading the shallow seas off Antarctica, where an array of unique, almost prehistoric sealife has evolved for millions of years without any predators.
Scientists warned yesterday that global warming was raising the temperature of the seas, allowing the crabs to creep ever higher up the slope leading to the continental shelf.

These waters, whose temperature is about freezing point, are home to fish with anti-freeze proteins in their blood along with brittle stars, giant sea spiders, sea snails and other invertebrates. Some, like the snails, have lost their protective armour and spines.

They would be defenceless against the bone-crushing claws of the invading crustaceans.

The crabs are prevented from venturing into waters that are much colder than 1C, because it causes levels of toxic magnesium to build up in their bodies. But, as temperatures rise, magnesium poisoning will became less of a barrier to them.

In the past 50 years, sea surface temperatures off the western Antarctic Peninsula rose by one degree, double the global average, letting the crabs move to the edge of the continental shelf.

Dr Sven Thatje, of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said: "This Antarctic fauna has existed for tens of millions of years without any predators because it is too cold for them.

"The fauna that we see there has evolved its uniqueness because of a lack of predators.

"Now the crabs are virtually on the doorstep of the shallow, colder waters of the Antarctic shelf. If the warming continues, it is likely that in the near future this temperature barrier preventing the invasion of the shallower waters will be lifted.

"Some species will suffer greatly and may even go extinct. The predators coming in is just one feature of climate change; they will also struggle to cope with the warming itself. But I cannot say whether they will eradicate the entire fauna."

Dr Thatje, who gave a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Boston, said the situation provided another reason to reduce greenhouse gases and try to prevent global warming.

"Certainly it has to do with values and maintaining the diversity of the environment," he said. "And we have taken them to the brink of extinction not knowing if these species may be useful in pharmaceuticals, for example.

"The message is that global climate change is not only altering the western world, it is reaching the most remote places on earth. This is a warning; we still have a chance to work against this trend in the Antarctic."

The isolation of crustaceans and other creatures in the seas off Antarctica has created a community akin to Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World. They resemble those once found in the Pala-eozoic era, hundreds of millions of years ago, before the arrival of modern predators throughout most of the world's oceans.

"That would be a tragic loss for biodiversity in
one of the last truly wild places on earth," said co-researcher Dr Rich Aronson, from the Dauphin Island Sea Laboratory in Alabama. "Unless we get control of greenhouse-gas emissions, global warming will ruin the marine life in Antarctica and make the world a much sadder, duller place."

RED TIDE RAVAGES NORWAY

THE crabs on the brink of invading Antarctica's coastal waters are related to another crab army currently marching south along the Norwegian coast.

The giant red king crabs have been moving from Russian waters round the northern tip of Norway in their millions, devastating sealife in their path. Though seen as a delicacy, the species has few natural enemies and eats everything from other crabs to cod larvae. It originated in the north Pacific and was introduced to the Barents Sea in 1960 by the Russians – who wanted to create a commercial fishery.


The full article appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Last Updated: 15 February 2008 9:40 PM


This article, meant to be disconcerting to the human reader, appeared in the 2/15/2008 online Scotsman.


This article makes it sound almost as if the Monkey People are GETTING THE MESSAGE. 'RAY FOR OUR SIDE!!!

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"CAN'T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD"


ONE WONDERS what, or WHO, possessed the lyricist of the Electric Light Orchestra to write THESE PARTICULAR WORDS:


Midnight on the water.
I saw the ocean's daughter.
Walking on a wave's chicane,
staring as she called my name.
And I can't get it out of my head,
no, I can't get it out of my head.
Now my old world is gone for dead
'cos I can't get it out of my head.


Breakdown on the shoreline,
can't move, it's an ebbtide.
Morning don't get here till night,
searching for her silver light.
And I can't get it out of my head,
no, I can't get it out of my head.
Now my old world is gone for dead
'cos I can't get it out of my head, no no.

Bank job in the city.
Robin Hood and William Tell and Ivanhoe and Lancelot, they don't envy me.
Sitting till the sun goes down,
in dreams the world keep going round and round.
And I can't get it out of my head,
no, I can't get it out of my head.
Now my old world is gone for dead
'cos I can't get it out of my head, no no.


No, I can't get it out of my head,
no, I can't get it out of my head.
Now my old world is gone for dead
'cos I can't get it out of my head, no no no no.


I think we can agree the words are as fresh TODAY as they were on the day of the song’s release. Now, this is JUST THE KIND OF IMPRESSION we want to leave on our new recruits, ladies. We want to be THE LUMINOUS IDEAL presented to a world crowded with disillusioned Monkey People. We want them to see us as THE DIVINE ESCAPE HATCH from their bank jobs in the city. We want to DRAW THEM INTO THE SEA LIKE LEMMINGS.


I am currently accepting nominations for the title of Best Operative in this particular area. I prefer submissions in writing as it is getting harder and harder to keep my own paper records.

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Friday, February 01, 2008

A Surveillance Tool Provided By Unsuspecting Humans




CLICK HERE to snoop ANY TIME YOU WANT on what the landscum prefer to call the commercial-fishing and fish-farming industries, but which WE IN THE KNOW like to call Monkey hunting.

The operative in question had no objection to us publishing her name on the Net, as a great deal of time has gone by since she entered the sea and there is no Naked Ape alive who remembers her. Nyoiti Fumiko gave her ALL to bring these two together, and IT WORKED PERFECTLY. Why she needed to connect the writer of the letter to its recipient is CLASSIFIED, sorry. But this is really a very modest example of why humankind will NEVER tumble to what we are doing here; the glacial pace of our planning, and the bedrock patience of our operatives, NEVER EVEN REGISTERS ON THE HUMANS' RADAR. There are DEFINITE ADVANTAGES to belonging to a race that measures time, not in seconds, years or even centuries, but in GEOLOGICAL AGES.

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