#history of evolution

[othmeralia]

What is happening on this title page!?

Farting fire at weird demon things, playing hide-and-go-seek around a tall column, gargoyles with ropes hanging from their mouths... what more could you want?

The coming of evolution (1911) by John W. Judd

#title page #early modern collections #gargoyles #angels #old books #new aquisitions #evolution #history of evolution #history of science

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

zany to me how these um actually nihilists like to pretend that "um actually love/friendship/cooperation/kindness isn't real bc we evolved that way to benefit ourselves as a species..." um YES? that's also where tool use comes from? that's where cooking comes from? am i supposed to think social bonds & tool use & cooking aren't "real" because they evolved over time instead of appearing fully formed from the ether?

sorry u can't enjoy things. im a superior being twirling a fork in my bowl of delicious noodles whilst staring in adoration at the world

#'love isn't real it's a chemical reaction' #hon i got news for u about chemical reactions and the nature of existence #'we evolved social bonds to benefit ourselves' so you agree? #you agree that social bonds are helpful and important enough that they literally shaped the history of human evolution? #i do not think u are saying. what u think u are saying.

[prokopetz]

If you've seen trivia posts going around, may have seen ones about the baculum, a bone in the penis whose purpose is to help support erections which is present in most placental mammals, including non-human apes, but which is conspicuously absent in humans.

Those posts typically don't go into why this is the case, which is fair enough, since the question is far from settled. However, there are a lot of hypotheses about it, and some of them are pretty fucking wild.

I think my personal favourite is the recently proposed idea that, since soft tissue injuries tend to heal more rapidly and completely than broken bones, a flexible and resilient boneless penis constitutes a reproductive advantage in situations where genital trauma is common, possibly as a result of the development of upright posture rendering the penis more prone to blunt encounters.

Like, imagine humanity's proto-hominid ancestors going "actually, bipedalism is great" and promptly getting whacked in the ding so much that it exerted evolutionary pressure on the morphology of the penis.

#science #biology #evolution #history #penis mention #violence mention #injury mention #genital trauma mention #swearing

[amnhnyc]

Research alert! New insights into mammalian tooth, jaw, and ear evolution, gleaned from analyzing fossils of two Jurassic-era mammal species from China, are reshaping how scientists think about early mammals. This research, led by scientists at the Museum and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, focuses on two new species of fossil mammals—Feredocodon chowi and Dianoconodon youngi—that offer new evidence about early mammalian evolution.

“Scientists have been trying to understand how the mammalian middle ear evolved since Darwin’s time,” said Jin Meng, a curator in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology and a corresponding author on both papers. “These new fossils bring to light a critical missing link and enrich our understanding of the gradual evolution of the mammalian middle ear.”

Check out our latest blog post to learn more!

Image: Chuang Zhao

#science #museum #fossil #nature #amnh #animals #natural history #ancient animals #jurassic #did you know #new research #resear #paleontology #mammals #evolution #mammalogy #fossils

[protectoursharks]

I heard that sharks and rays are super closely related. Are skates an approximate bridging “group” between them? Or are they outside of both groups

They are all really closely related- there in all the same class known as Chondrichthyes, or cartilaginous fish. Sharks evolved first, approximately 350 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. Skates and ray came around at approximately the same time as each other 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

So skates aren't really a "bridging group", they're actually most closely related to rays!

#marine biology #marine ecology #animals #science #biology #animal facts #wildlife #marine life #ocean #fun facts #shark #sharks #rays #sting rays #skates #evolution #zoology #fossils #natural history #jurassic period #carboniferous #sea life #sea creatures #marine animals #fish #chondrichthyes

[reality-detective]

Make Sense... You Decide 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourselves #think about it #think for yourself #do your homework #do some research #do your research #do your own research #ask yourself questions #question everything #evolution #history lesson

[nollthere]

I hope I had good ancestors somewhere in time.

#my art #digital art #illustration #digital illustration #nature art #animal art #deer art #vent art #emotional art #family tree #evolution #fossil art #natural history art #artblr #small artist #original art #artists of tumblr #art on tumblr #krita #digital painting #animal illustration

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

My mom bought me this book for Christmas

The Resurrectionist by EB Hudspeth, a fantasy field guide full of anatomical illustrations of monsters and cryptids.

The musculoskeletal systems are fun to look at, but not nearly as in-depth as I would have liked. If you have more than a passing knowledge of taxonomy (or in my case, access to Wikipedia), a lot of the details fall apart under scrutiny

The harpy has four upper limbs connected to one shoulder girdle; it shouldn't have arms, only wings

The sphinx is not classified as a mammal, but is still somehow in the family Felidae with cats (and like the harpy is also drawn with only two girdles despite having six limbs. I will give the author credit for giving the sphinx a keel for the wing muscles to attach to)

It lists the Hindu deity Genesha as a cryptid, which is a no-no.

Cerberus is also explicitly not a mammal, but somehow still a canine (literally in the species Canis with wolves, dogs, and coyotes)

Both mermaids and dragons are listed as members of the order Caudata; the only extant members of Caudata are salamanders, which kinda makes sense for dragons, but not so much for mermaids (also, the author keeps playing it fast and loose with cladistics; both mermaids and dragons are in the same order despite being in different classes, and while dragons are explicitly said to be amphibians, mermaids are given the fictional class mammicthyes, which means mammal-fish. At that point, why not just call mermaids amphibians? Why make up a fake latin hybrid name?)

But what bugs me most of all is the classification of the Minotaur as its own order of mammal when in mythology it is explicitly described as a hybrid of two known species (made possible only by the cruel machinations of the divine, but still)

To use actual taxonomical nomenclature, the minotaur's species would be B. taurus × H. sapiens (specifically B. taurus♂ × H. sapiens♀; there are, to my knowledge, no legends of H. sapiens♂ × B. taurus♀). That's how ligers, tigons, mules, zorses, pizzly bears, narlugas, etc., are described.

If I had written this book, I would have leaned more into evolutionary biology. Most land animals have four limbs because they all evolved from boney lobe-finned fish, which split off from the boneless sharks and rays millions of years earlier, so any six-limbed vertebrates would need to be descended from a fictitious category of six-finned fish which would either be an offshoot of boney fish/tetrapods (I guess they'd be hexapods, though that term refers to insect arthropods), OR a precursor to boney and cartilaginous fish that both clades split away from much earlier (it's easier to lose structures than to gain them, so it makes more sense for a six-limbed ancestor to spawn four-limbed descendants than the other way around).

Think about how different elephants are from humans, and humans are from aligators, and aligators are from penguins, and remember that they all evolved from the same ancestor tiktaalik, an amphibious fish that existed some 375 million years ago. Imagine a precursor six-limbed species and how diverse all its descendants would look after 400 million years. Save for the occasional instance of convergent evolution causing two unrelated species to independently evolve similar body plans to fill the same niche, tetrapods and hexapods would look nothing alike. There would be very little recognizable overlap between the two. A six-limbed "pegasus" would not look like a real world horse, and a six-limbed "dragon" would not look reptilian/dinosaur-ish, for much the same reason that giraffes don't look like frogs; they're just too distantly related. Bonless sharks and boney fish and whales/dolphins all have similar looking bodyplans only because their environment requires the same hydrodynamic shape, while terrstrial vertebrates are much more physically diverse.

#biology #anatomy #monsters #cryptids #cryptozoology #book of monsters #evolution #evolutionary biology #evolutionary history #taxonomy #cladistics #science #hard fantasy #hard science fiction #hard science #tetrapod #hexapod

[silkwhim]

Sophonts for a shiny new project ✨ Beatha (bay-ha) ✨, an alternate earth set a couple thousand years ago

The first species (green bg), Lau, are offshoots of Indriidae and are most closely related to sifakas. They originate in Madagascar but now occupy most of the continent of Africa.

The second (yellow bg) are a species of wallaby (yet to be named). They originate in the East coast of Australia, now occupying most of the country as well as most of Asia and some Pacific Islands. They are the earliest sophonts.

Finally, the Kepa-ka-o-o, an ancient relative of corvids. They originate in Aotearoa, with many relatives across the Pacific Islands which they now also live across. They have many colonies in Australia and Asia, having a close relationship with the wallaby sophont.

Despite the distance, it's not uncommon to see Lau living in Asia and Oceania and vice versa. The Americas and Europe aren't completely untouched but they don't hold very large populations of the three sophonts due to their mostly colder climate which is not preferred, however there are colonies quickly growing in South America in particular.

#spec bio #Beatha #spec evo #speculative biology #speculative evolution #art #digital art #alternate history #alternate earth #speculative zoology

[monarchbutt]

basilosauruses scare me so much. why do they look like htat. why are they so long. why do they always look like they're in pain. teeth

#god im so scared #paleontology #archaeology #dinosaur #basilosaurus #biology #science #earth science #sciblr #stem #geology #fossils #evolution #prehistoric #natural history

[achronalart]

So I've made another art history video, "Smile! Smile! Smile! - Teeth in Western Art (It's Weirder Than You Think)"

Romans viewed laughter with suspicion, as a sign of low character. They never depicted anyone reputable smiling. And they never ever showed teeth except for scary theatrical characters. Europeans emulating them followed suit in their own art for two thousand years.

And then the façade cracked. And here we are, where smiles are seen as showing happiness and laughter is seen as expressing joy.

I'm a working professional artist and sometime art teacher, and I had a blast putting together this art history video of the extremely strange history of the fashion for never-smiling in historical European art, and how it finally changed.

#art history #smiles #smiles in art #art evolution #Achronal Art #Alessandra Kelley #Youtube

[notbeetle]

UPDATE: Plz reblog the updated version of this post with like, the reblog chain, the first post isn't really that accurate...

Something i think is kinda underutilized in spec evo right now is alternate domesticates. There's potentially hundreds of thousands of domesticatable edible plants and animals and such, and humanity only ended up domesticating a tiny slice of the worlds biodiversity. And the divergence from the wild types is extreme- it's evolution at hyperspeed

this is all the product of like, a few thousand years of effort and it's so utterly divergent, it's incredible. You see the possibilties here, right? You can place your point of divergence incredibly recently- maybe only a few millenia back- barely have to change much about the world- and get a radically different human symbiote biosphere. What if we'd domesticated amaranth instead of wheat? Weasels instead of cats? The possibilities are (almost) endless

and that's not even getting into the alternate history aspects. Imagine how different history would've turned out if rather than having to wait for europeans to reintroduce horses to the americas, the peoples of the great plains had been mounted centuries or millennia earlier on the backs of riding-deer

#speculative biology #speculative evolution #worldbuilding #alternate history #alt history #spec evo #spec bio #hawk.txt

[froggerworld]

hi guyss :) im studying supernatural belief, religious belief, locus of control, and their relationship to evolutionary sex differences for my master's thesis!! i'd grately appreciate if yall can complete and share this survey:

#dark academia #chaotic academia #study motivation #study blog #religion #evolution #supernatural #destiel #human #human history #history #religious trauma #evolutionary biology #evolutionary psychology #evolutionary anthropology #high evolutionary

[museaumofnaturalhistory]

Oviraptor, Khaan, Citipati - by ABelov2014

#natural history #palaeontology #paleoart #prehistoric life #prehistoric animals #oviraptor #theropod #citipati #evolution of flight #avian dinosaurs #dinosaurs #paleontology #prehistoric

[bongo-clash]

Peacock Au Part 1

Okay so Big Huge credit to @stealingyourbones for letting me do my own take on their amazing eldritch Danny idea!!!! This started out as me just doing a drawing but then I ended up with a whole DPxDC fic that I'll be posting the part two for at some point!!! Anyway, here's the vague designs:

And here's the part one of the fic under the cut!!! :D (Edit: Part 2 is Here!!)

There’s a Lazarus Pit forming underneath Gotham. Normally, this would not concern John Constantine at all, because it’s Gotham, therefore Bat territory therefore not his problem, and honestly he has his own things to worry about. Unfortunately for him, however, the infamous Dark Knight has somehow gotten it into his head that he can do something about it and, Hell, he’d said it would be a ‘big favour’, which meant the man really must be desperate; had to have been in the first place, he supposed, to have even bothered with John in the first place. 

Still, he’d almost kind of forgotten what a huge mess any kind of favour for Batman could be, and thus, he now holds possession of a book that is probably going to get him killed. 

Whether the actual book itself wants to kill him is up for debate, but Constantine has read the contents of this particular Book of Summonings and nothing in here seems remotely safe. He’s absolutely going to be hiding this away somewhere deep in the archives of the archives of the Justice League watchtower with an incredibly pointed ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ on it once he’s done with this, but for now, it’s the only thing he’s got in the way of sorting out this Pit problem. 

There’s an entity that exists, this book claims, that keeps the balance between realms. ‘Closes doors’, apparently, and the doors the pages depict certainly look like a Lazarus Pit. This is brilliant news, obviously, but the book doesn’t describe the entity itself at all beyond that; barely any of the other entries are as vague as this, and that plus some of the frankly bizarre sigils he’s having to draw to summon the damn thing are giving him no comfort. The only remotely comforting thing about it is that the ritual doesn’t require any blood- which either means the entity is benign, or it wants something more valuable than blood. 

…Okay, maybe not that comforting, actually. 

But, before he can consider that maybe this wasn’t his best idea and backing out would be for the best, the sigils flare with light, and Constantine squints to keep track of the way they activate, desperate for any indication of what he’s managed to summon with that stupid book. 

His feet feel feathery against the ground, like they’re barely tethered by gravity and just waiting to float away, and perhaps the seeming lack of atmosphere is fitting with how dust like stars lift from the summoning circle, bringing with them intercepting layers of purple-blue-pink-white, galaxies and nebulae being peeled off the floor. It comes with a sound- something whistling, almost. Seeming hollow, between a shriek and a bell ringing, or maybe more musical than that. It seems to change every moment he tries to focus on it, as if it’s something his ears can’t really hear but his brain is desperate to process, painful to try. 

And then, the entity begins to form. 

Unnoticeably at first, a white glow drifts forming in the centre. It congeals as Constantine’s gaze finally fixates on it, layers forming like jellyfish trails, or flowers, or peacock feathers with runic circles at the tips, fading smaller and smaller as they reach the centre, and a thing akin to a body unfolds into view at the front, a centrepiece. A child’s image of a shadow in opalescence, a strange curving feature where a neck might be, and searing-green spots of varying sizes scattered along the space where cheeks and eyes could’ve been, fading up and down across the lower-half of the ‘face’ and into the ‘hair’. He barely understands what he’s looking at, but maybe that’s the point. 

The sound of a thunderstorm rings across the room, and the curve of the neck unfolds, and it’s an eye, and the tips of a thousand twisted, cosmic peacock feathers become eyes as well, if they weren’t always. They move, wavering, either lashing or flickering from visibility. 

“And what is this?” The voice is a kaleidoscope, echoing off and from every corner of the room, and when they speak, infinite eyes become infinite mouths, too many teeth barely contained by the edges of what seem vaguely like frostbitten lips. To have something even remotely human suddenly etch itself onto the entity is somehow worse than the parts he can’t comprehend. “Who are you, to have summoned me, and seem so afraid?”

Constantine wishes, maybe for the first time, that it hadn’t been an obligation to do this alone; he’s never wanted Batman or one of the Light members with him more than now. It’s a difficult thing, almost impossible, to shake off the speechlessness. It’s a wonder that it’s possible at all, with how the room seems to have been twisted into a vacuum. “I was told you could- you could help with the pits?”

“The pits. There are many pits.”

God, this is creepy. “The Lazarus pits to, uh, to be specific. There’s a huge one cropping up under Gotham that’s not supposed to be there, and the local- I mean, the locals are getting antsy about it. …I heard you can take care of them.”

“I can smell its blood between the gaps of atmosphere, encircling. You, whose soul is bound in so many directions, who may be pulled apart like meat in time- can you sense it? Does it draw you?” John doesn’t know how this- this thing knows that, but he’s scared asking will invoke some kind of consequence, and more and more he’s wondering why the Hell he decided to do Batman this favour. He feels exposed. 

“Uh… no, I don’t think so. But can you fix it?”

“Yes.”

“…Will you fix it?”

The chill is getting to him. Goosebumps are running across his arms like a livewire, and he’s never doing anyone a favour ever again. The entity makes an approximation of a hum, his ears shriek with whale song and stars, and after a pause, everything switching up and down on itself, the peacock eyes form into huge, reaching hands. For a second, Constantine’s whole body freezes with terror, because he’s petrified the thing’s going to grab him, but then the arms tumble phasing into the ground, and the green spots on their ‘face’ flare with a supernova glow and they make another piercing noise, chiming or trilling. 

A long moment later, the hands slowly return to the entity’s back, and fade into the peacock feathers or jellyfish bells or whatever they were before, blinking at him. “It is gone.”

“Uh… cheers?”

“It will not return, but this place shall see its dead for some time. Try not to look.”

This is maybe the worst day of Constantine’s life. “Can I- uh, yeah, great advice. ‘Appreciate it. But, can I ask just, y’know, what you are? Or not.”

“That is up to you.” They say, and though the eyes that appear briefly between sentences bely or reveal no expression, it feels scrutinising. “What is it that closes doors? Is it alive?”

He hates riddles. He hates riddles and he hates cosmic horrors and he hates eldritch entities and he hates Batman for getting him to agree to this horrible favour. He wants to go back to the House of Mystery and pass out for long enough that this whole thing becomes a dream. “Fair enough! Forget I asked- cheers for sorting out that pit, though. Uh, don’t suppose you’ll just let me go on my way or anything now.”

“I know of your Bat.” 

Oh dear. Constantine’s stomach sinks like a shipwreck into the Mariana Trench, but the entity moves on like they’d never even said it. “I will recede, and find you in time, perhaps both. You will know when I am coming, and I will find my recompense.”

And just like that, their whole form shimmers into clouds and pearls and smoke and mirrors, and they fade back into the runes that summoned them like tap water down the drain. The galaxies they’d formulated within the confines of the room fold back in on themselves and turn to whispers and then nothing, but the feeling persists on his skin long after weight has settled back onto his bones. He hadn’t known a thing like that existed until now. He doesn’t know what it can do, doesn’t know how all-encompassing it truly is. 

And he owes it a favour. 

Crap. 

#I'll be posting the part two at some point soon since it's already written out so prepare for that lmao!! #Warning that there might be some mistakes in here since I literally just wrote this and the second part a couple hours ago #This is a Little bit of a thing about my hc on the Ghost Monarchy and how it isn't Actually a monarchy #It's just that the 'king' keeps the actual physical balance of the GZ (ie natural portal stuff) & the title originally had a different name #But when Pariah Dark took the mantle he decided it made him the ruler of the GZ and that's why the Ancients took him down #But I'll talk more abt that if I ever get around to finishing that GZ culture/history/evolution post thing I had planned lmao!!!! #Either way I Love Eldritch Danny sm and writing this was so so fun!!! #Part two will be from Danny's perspective!!! #I might colour those drawings and stuff at some point but for now I like them as they are!!! #Also before I forget I Am still thinking about that pizza delivery guy pt. 2 I just got stuck a bit!!! It'll hopefully appear at some point #dp au #danny phantom au #dpxdc #john constantine #danny phantom fanart #dp fanart #danny phantom #Bongo's Aus!!! #Bongo's Writing!!! #Bongo's Art!!! #tw body horror #peacock au

[kazz-brekker]

episode 6 of blue eye samurai was rough. can't believe mizu fought through 9 levels of traps and soldiers with a sword only to get to the top and abruptly be confronted with the fact that guns exist

#oof! #i do really enjoy whenever this show touches on the evolution of weapons #and how guns from the west are going up against samurai swords #history! love to see it #pie says stuff #blue eye samurai