fishteriously

[fishteriously]

Some simpler Perspectives fare

"I Spyhop With my Little Eye..." Helicoprion Permian, 290 million years ago, Divya Formation Helicoprion's whorl has gone through a huge variety of interpretations over time. Luckily, more complete fossils indicate that the whorl looked something like, well, a skin-and-flesh covered whorl, to the extent that with mouth closed, the animal's teeth wouldn't even be visible! Either way, though, this was a super interesting whorl. By biting cephalopods, the motion of this whorl "rocking" back into the mouth, like a pizza cutter, would have shucked them right out of their shells! Presumably, this could have also absolutely obliterated smaller fish as well, cementing it as an aquatic apex predator. In the modern day, many species of sharks and whales are known to spyhop - the action of poking one's head out of the water to investigate what's going on. Helicoprion may have done the same. This is an entry in my Perspectives series! Check out my #perspectives tag for more. And follow me on yee-qi.bsky.social!

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daily affirmations:

i am kind

i am in control of my emotions

it does not bother me when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

everyone in the house has the right to be in the kitchen

i am kind and in control of my emotions even when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

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endless night

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Dhritiman Mukherjee, photographer

Critically endangered freshwater gharial. Once numbering over 20,000 in South Asia, fewer than 1,000 adults remain today, with most concentrated in a sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh. Unlike other crocodiles, the unique shape of the gharial's snout prevents it from carrying its babies in its mouth, so the little ones cling to its head and back for protection and connection.

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oops got chicxulub'd

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i love you front facing coelacanth :]

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It’s funny how sacabambaspis is like the funniest looking animal in every hypothetical except for that one picture that makes me feel like I’m about to be killed

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Shocking how many people don’t know that hens lay non-fertilized eggs and think the yolk they’re eating is a baby chicken

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utahraptor, for a friend

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"Why is it a problem if students use AI to get through college"

Because if you demonstrate to me that you're willing to set aside concern for truth, evidence, and verifying things with your own eyes whenever it happens to be inconvenient for you, I have a solemn responsibility to make sure you don't get into medical school.

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they could have said, like, "we made a new wolf morph, which shows how far genetic science has advanced". they could have said, "we're calling them direwolves out of a love for the extinct species." maybe too much to ask for but would have loved it if they'd pointed out some kind of ecological niche they were theoretically intent on resolving - like, "wolves are having trouble adapting to human sprawl and we are hoping that our research into the past will help us save wolves in the present."

but alas they did not do this. and see this sucks because i want to be hype about new bigass fantasy wolves. there is a 7th grade version of me that would be ecstatic about this. she would be obsessive.

unfortunately, due to capitalism, now i gotta have beef with puppies. can you imagine.

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My train was late. AGAIN.

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Given that sturgeons have five rows of scutes, they are basically pentagonal (we can squish them around a bit to make them regular). This of course means that we can use twelve of them to make a dodecahedron. If we used Acipenser stellatus (one of whose common names, according to wikipedia, is the stellate sturgeon) for the faces, we might call the resulting object a stellate dodecahedron (if we imagine the chosen pentagon being roughly in the middle of our fish with the fronts facing outwards, I think this would look vaguely like a small stellated dodecahedron). Of course, by extending the faces we can get a great dodecahedron, which in our case we’ll call the great stellate dodecahedron (I don’t think this changes much visually since we’re working with fully 3D — though freely intersecting — sturgeon whose bodies will mostly block out the new geometry. I could be wrong about that though.). Now if only we can figure out what it means to make star polygons out of fish, we can create great stellated stellate dodecahedrons and small stellated stellate dodecahedrons. And I’m sure we can all agree that sturgeon are great, so we could even call the great stellated version the Great Great Stellated Stellate Dodecahedron.

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I took a quick break from my usual D&D/fantasy work to design a poster for myself! Its been ages since I ever had a significant dinosaur phase, but I'm still quite fond of archaeopteryx (:

Like my work? Please consider taking a look at my commissions or Inprint!

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Do you ever wish you were a lovely river fish with a face like a shovel just eating everything smaller than you and no upper limit on how big you could grow?

The water is muddy and murky but you have whiskers and you can feel the other fish in the water.

Someday you dream of eating a man in one of those "fish fear me" hats, if he'd just wade in deep enough for once.