You are early for supper, but you found a
parking place on the corner of State and College and you can't get any closer
to Jimmy V's than this. You stopped at Aunt Patsy and Uncle Ernie's but are
disappointed in that they are not home. You are happy however that they are
well enough to be out and about. You stopped at Cathy and Tod's and had an
interesting conversation about the involuntary nervous system. You told then
about the eye muscle sensations and Cathy told you that after an acupuncture
session for her inner ear problem she went to see/listen to Bach at a concert
and when she closed her eyes she saw colors that moved with the music, most
were in a large band of vivid blue. She had never had this happen before. Earlier you and Fritz had a good lunch at Bob Evans and a good discussion of personal self-identity in relationship to one's culturally expected self-identity. - Amorella
2303 hours. We are home and ready for bed.
Don't you want to put in the photo you found
in an article Doug sent you earlier? - Amorella
Not really.
You are not nearly as prudish as you sound
here. - Amorella.
In context. Okay.
** **
'Phallus' Worm Fossils May Be
Evolutionary Missing Link, Scientists Say
Posted: 03/14/2013 8:05 am
EDT | Updated: 03/14/2013 8:05 am EDT
By: Stephanie Pappas,
LiveScience Senior Writer
Published: 03/13/2013 02:04
PM EDT on LiveScience
A fossilized creature shaped
(let's just say it) remarkably like a penis may be the missing link connecting
two mysterious branches of sea creatures.
The fossils, more than 9,000
specimens in all, reveal a wormlike animal with an "elongate posterior
trunk ending in a bulbous unit," as researchers describe it in this week's
issue of the journal Nature. The animal appears to be a transition in the
evolution of wormlike tube feeders known as pterobranches.
Pterobranches are part of a group
called the hemichordates, along with another bunch of wormy sea creatures
called enteropneusts, or acorn worms. But while pterobranches are tiny and stay
in one place, filter-feeding from colonies of tubes on the seafloor, solitary
acorn worms move about in burrows, feeding on organic material that drifts down
to the ocean floor. Acorn worms range in size from a few millimeters to a few
meters long.
An overlooked link
The links between these two groups
are mysterious, but now scientists from the Royal Ontario Museum, the
University of Cambridge and the University of Montreal say they may have found
the connection in the Burgess shale. This formation in the Canadian Rockies
holds fossils from the middle Cambrian Period, about 505 million years ago.
Previously, the oldest acorn
worms, or enteropneusts, dated back about 300 million years, said study
researcher Jean-Bernard Caron, the curator of invertebrate paleontology at the
Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. But the 505-million-year-old Burgess shale
held enteropneusts much older than that.
In fact, the specimen, now
named Spartobranchus tenuis, is one of the most common fossils found in
the Burgess shale, Caron told LiveScience. Smithsonian Institution
paleontologist Charles Walcott first reported the discovery of the worms in
1911.
"He just wrote three
lines about this worm," Caron said. "He was not sure what it was. And
basically nothing was done since."
Phallus Worm
A wormy ancestor
Caron and his colleagues
analyzed 9,000 specimens of the worm — no easy task, Caron said, because in
many cases the portions of the fossils containing key anatomical features were
missing or covered up by the bodies of other fossilized worms.
The creature grew to about 4
inches (10 centimeters) in length and had a phallic body shape (not unlike
modern acorn worms) lined with gills. But most important, it is found
fossilized with a tube structure about 25 percent of the time, much like a
modern pterobranch.
"They are like the
enteropneust worms, but they live in tubes, which are quite branching and quite
rigid," Caron said. "We think it is from a tube of this kind that the
pterobranch tubes evolved."
The finding clears up a
mystery about whether today's modern hemichordates started out as tube-dwelling
worms or as mobile burrowers.
"For once, the fossil
record has spoken in a voice that is more or less unambiguous," Nature
editor Henry Gee wrote in a commentary accompanying the study.
The discovery also pulls back
the curtain on the origin of the chordates, a group of animals with spinal
cords that includes vertebrates such as humans, Caron said. Hemichordates,
chordates and echinoderms like starfish and urchins all had a common ancestor
with gill slits, Caron said.
"We think it's possible
that the common ancestor for all three groups was wormlike," Caron said.
Edited from: Huffingtonpost article
***
The
funny aspect of this is upon observing the photo of the worm it looks very
similar to a singular piece of marsupial humanoid male anatomy. If you read the
story you will discover more about how all this biology works. Of course with
the 'proper' blood flow we are talking a 'soda straw' but that is not what you
see here. For the male marsupial humanoid this 'proper' blood flow lasts no more than two seconds. This takes far too much work to set up than it's worth for most male (we are talking one to three hours). When the marsupial female first saw Homo sapiens using a soda straw in a drink they about went into a fit of exhausting laughter (particularly among themselves). The males didn't/ don't think this particularly funny. Being human I think this was quite humorous. I didn't think it was worth sharing
except with Doug and Nancy, but Amorella does. So, I don't think it hurts anything. I attribute this bit of fictional fact to my
somewhat distorted and dark sense of humor. In here you live with it, or go read something else. - rho
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