#proto-Team Skull.)

[oceandiagonale]

Actually, Guzman is his spanish name.

OH YEAH some other folks pointed that out too, makes sense since it's an irl Spanish name (probably why I see it around a lot!) 😳

(normally it's a surname, I've only seen it used as a first name once in a blue moon -- but also in the pokemon world it's pretty clear that naming conventions aren't the same lol)

[softantlers]

Did you see the parallel lottienathive pointed out of Lottie getting beat up under a moose skull while Nat gets pushed around under a deer skull when moose has always been associated with Nat and deer with Lottie

ahh i hadn't seen that! that's a really interesting detail!

tbh i am pretty hesitant to give the writers flowers on stuff like this because i do sometimes interpret them to be flukes, but i also think there's something to be said about what the show does on its own, ie: the natural symbolisms that come up in scenes (potentially unintended) without having to make a case that they were put there deliberately. as in, we can have fun with the sort of serendipity of this parallel simply because it exists. (sorry for the overexplanation on this but i see so many people suggesting others are "reaching" and dismissing us when we analyze these kinda shots & it's like no shit!! that's what makes literary analysis so fucking cool.)

with regard to the moose skull vs the deer skull in the different scenes, i think it's rich to consider them as foils!

so the moose is hanging over lottie in this scene. what's fascinating to me is that moose are solitary creatures that don't form herds. this is absolutely oppositional to everything we understand about lottie-- her whole arc in s2 is her desperate plea to bring the girls together & use the power of a proto intentional society for survival in the wilderness. girl wants a herd BAD.

but it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because the more she tries to bring everyone together, they either deify her (like most of JV) or resist her (like shauna & nat), which doesn't allow her to be part of her own herd. instead, it elevates her. the dynamic puts the crushing responsibility of leadership (and its associated resistance) on her shoulders.

in a way, lottie almost becomes the moose even though she wants to be the deer. when shauna beats the hell out of her, the isolation furthers & she is kept even more separate from the girls. she's not even part of the decision that leads to the queen hunt. also, her "herd" lets the violence happen to her in the beatup scene. she's very alone in this moment.

to an extent, lottie gets to experience the world as nat & the moose toward the end of s2. nat is quite solitary in this season as well; as the hunter, she is frequently alone in the wilderness & as the leading skeptic, she's also isolated.

we got the deer hanging over nat in this scene, and i think a contrasting experience is happening. natalie actually doesn't want to be part of the herd. this season is about her desire to run rogue for her own sanity when the choices & tide of the yellowjackets conflict with her own morals (hiding ben & later killing him; working toward repairing and using the transponder, etc).

what's interesting to me about this is while nat wants to break free from the herd, she's actually very embedded--much more so than lottie. by the end of the season, it's revealed that she's essentially the people's queen. despite being dethroned, folks are still following her & undermining shauna. tbh even "people's queen" is a bit of an oversimplification. nat is simply one of the yellowjackets--she's on their level, reflecting their own feelings back to them, in a way that neither shauna nor lottie can be. and so, there is a lot of love for natalie among the team that stays consistent despite this scene.

unlike lottie, natalie isn't actually deified as a leader. she is kept down to earth, able to connect with the JV in their acts of resistance because she is relatable--she is of them. in a sense, then, natalie actualizes the herd that lottie could never really be a part of. nat's functionally a deer this season.

it's kind of funny because when lottie saves nat by crowning shauna, she is essentially using her power as the moose, which i would say is part of this "ethereal wisdom" she gives off that allows her such influence over the yellowjackets (whether she actually even has it; moreso people place that expectation on her). but it's a solitary & lonely position.

anyways, these are just some random thoughts but i kinda vibe with the idea of what @lottienathive said about them blurring & part of that maybe could be that these seemingly clear-cut "deer" and "moose" roles are reversing and blurring as well.

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists have uncovered the fossilized skull of a 270-million-year-old ancient amphibian ancestor in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. In a paper published today, March 21, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the team of researchers described the fossil as a new species of proto-amphibian, which they named Kermitops gratus in honor of the iconic muppet, Kermit the Frog. According to Calvin So, a doctoral student at the George Washington University and the lead author on the new paper, naming the new creature after the beloved frog character, who was created by puppeteer Jim Henson in 1955, is an opportunity to get people excited about the discoveries scientists make using museum collections.

Continue Reading.

[epicspheal]

Do you ever wonder about the former kahuna that let the group that would be a precursor to Team Skull? Like, was he the former Ula’ula kahuna? If he was, did Tapu Bulu kill him for his crimes? And was Nanu involved in stopping him, hence his appointment as the new kahuna?

Hey there @ether-gearhead! Ooh good question! This is the type of lore dive I REALLY wished the Alola games focused on. As we know Team Skull has always been about misfits. Of course before Guzma and Plumeria made the Team Skull we all know and love in the current Pokemon Timeline there was of course the proto-team skull that as you mention formed around a former Kahuna Now Ula-Ula island is interesting in the fact that we see first hand the effects of the wrath of the Tapu, that being how Tapu Bulu destroyed the Abandoned Megamart which was built upon sacred ground. And we know that in some ways Kahunas act as emissaries between the Tapu and the islanders. So we can infer that perhaps this former kahuna permitted the construction of the Megamart probably citing their connection to the Tapu as being permissible...even though it didn't. I'm hesitant to say this former kahuna was explicitly a crimelord...especially considering how team skull isn't in the same league as say Rocket or Flare in terms of actual villainy and like the proto-team skull wasn't that much rougher. If anything I'm seeing this kahuna more as someone who just abused their own standing as the emissary to Tapu Bulu and this proto-team skull coalesced around them because of that. So at the very least we can imagine that Tapu Bulu probably demoted this former kahuna (if the tapu can bestow the title of kahuna, they likely can take it away). Now as far as killing the kahuna...perhaps. We know Pokemon have killed humans before so it's not out of the way at all. Now we don't know how long Nanu was on Ula'ula before any of this happened. It's possible Nanu was involved with trying to keep things under control, but also we have to consider that Nanu was apart of the international police for a bit and we don't exactly when he left. It's possible that Ula'Ula island was like Poni island for a bit in that there wasn't a kahuna after the old was demoted/killed and after Nanu took up residence and showed qualities Tapu Bulu liked then he was made kahuna. Or maybe it was a bit of both, as Hala said the Tapu are fickle so it may not have been an immediate appointment and after what happened with the former kahuna, I'd imagine Tapu Bulu wasn't super hasty in picking a new successor.

[dropsofsciencenews]

The Giant Salamander That Rewrites Tetrapods' History

ITA version ESP version

When we open palaeontology books and travel back in time among our ancestors, we find that tetrapods, the first four-legged vertebrates, are often described as animals closely tied to the equatorial wetlands of the Carboniferous period, which spanned from 358.9 to 298.9 million years ago. As we continue reading, we discover that during the late Carboniferous, around 307 million years ago, the more archaic tetrapods were quickly replaced by the ancestors of modern amniotes (vertebrates with amniotic eggs, such as reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals) and lissamphibians (modern amphibians such as frogs, salamanders, and caecilians). These hypotheses are primarily based on fossils found in the palaeoequatorial region of Pangaea, known as Laurussia, which included North America and Europe.

However, an unexpected discovery in Namibia suggests a more global distribution of this group of animals. A research team led by Drs Claudia A. Marsicano and Jason D. Pardo found fossil remains in the Ugab River valley, in Damaraland, preserved in the muddy stone of an ancient freshwater lake. The remains have been dated to 280 million years ago, right at the beginning of the Permian period, and come from high palaeolatitude deposits (about 55° S), a region that was part of the supercontinent Gondwana. The dating and unique location of this find demonstrate that tetrapods were already well-established in the temperate-cold latitudes of Gondwana during the final stages of the Carboniferous-Permian deglaciation.

Upon discovering the remains, researchers immediately realised that this ancient tetrapod represented a new species, which has been named Gaiasia jennyae. The name refers to the Gai-As Formation and honours Jenny Clack (1947–2020), a scientist whose discoveries were fundamental in the study of early tetrapods. The animal lived during the Permian period, long before the appearance of the first dinosaurs. The characteristics of Gaiasia jennyae indicate that it was a proto-tetrapod, a transitional form between fish and the first terrestrial tetrapods. The fossils, which include an almost complete skeleton of an adult about 3 metres long, are the largest ever discovered for this type of vertebrate. The analysis of the fossils revealed a broad, flat head, almost 60 centimetres long, attached to a 2.5-metre body. The structure of the skull, adorned with unusually large and curved fangs, suggests that this animal was also a formidable predator, likely a fish hunter in the swampy waters and lakes of the region. Gaiasia jennyae still exhibits aquatic traits, such as gills and underdeveloped limbs, which allowed it to live both in water and on land.

The discovery of this species in Namibia is particularly significant as it challenges the previous hypothesis that early giant tetrapods were confined to the northern hemisphere during the Carboniferous-Permian transition. This new perspective suggests that significant adaptations in the early radiation of tetrapods took place outside the well-sampled basins of palaeoequatorial Pangaea. The diversification and extinction dynamics of tetrapods during the late Palaeozoic may therefore have been much more complex and globally widespread than previously thought.

source

[covenawhite66]

The fossil is a 16 million year old scull of a dolphin.

The dolphin is more related to South East Asian river dolphins than River dolphins in the Amazon River. The even older ancestors of the fossil started in the Ocean before entering the Proto Amazon River.

Many current day dolphins species are endangered and at risk for extinction. With river dolphin species decreasing by 73% since the 1980s.

This year, nine countries signed the Global Declaration for River Dolphins, a united effort to safeguard these aquatic mammals and emphasize the urgent need for action.

[rickyreeves1980]

Mega Man 4 is an action-platform game developed by Capcom for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It is the fourth game in the original Mega Man series and was originally released in Japan in 1991. The game was localized in North America the following January, and in Europe in 1993.

The game's story takes place after the third defeat and supposed death of Dr. Wily, and features the Earth coming under threat from a mysterious scientist named Dr. Cossack and his eight "Robot Masters". Fearing the worst, Dr. Light sends Mega Man to save the world once again. Mega Man 4 carries on the same action and platforming gameplay as the first three games, in which the player completes a series of stages in any order and adds the weapon of each stage's boss to Mega Man's arsenal. One notable added feature is the "New Mega Buster" (often shortened to "Mega Buster"), an upgraded arm cannon that lets the player charge a regular shot into a much more powerful blast. The development team was mindful that this innovation would change the overall feel of the game.

Similarly to its predecessors Mega Man 4 was remade for PlayStation in Japan. In later years it appeared on mobile phones and as part of game compilations, including Mega Man Anniversary Collection. The emulated versions were also released through PlayStation Network and Virtual Console.

Mega Man 4 takes place in an unspecified year during the 21st century, described as the year "20XX". One year after the events of Mega Man 3, a mysterious Russian scientist named Dr. Cossack unleashes an army of robots with the intention of world domination, much like Dr. Wily before him. Dr. Light calls upon his own greatest creation, the hero Mega Man, to go after Cossack's Robot Masters, who have seized control of eight cities. He also equips Mega Man with the New Mega Buster, which he developed in secret.

Upon defeating the eight Robot Masters — Toad Man, Bright Man, Pharaoh Man, Ring Man, Dust Man, Skull Man, Dive Man, and Drill Man — Mega Man makes his way to Cossack's icy fortress. However, in the middle of his battle with Cossack, Mega Man's brother Proto Man teleports in with Cossack's daughter, Kalinka. The girl begs Mega Man to stop fighting her father and elaborating that Dr. Wily had kidnapped her and forced her father into building an army of robots. With Wily's plan undone by Proto Man, he steps out of the shadows. Mega Man pursues his nemesis and fights through the scientist's Wily Castle, but Wily manages to escape in the end. Mega Man escapes as the fortress begins to self-destruct, and rides home on the top of a passing train, where he is greeted by Roll and Rush.

Mega Man 4 features similar gameplay to the previous three games. The player must complete a series of eight stages in an order of the player's choosing. The protagonist, Mega Man, is able to run, jump, shoot, and climb his way past obstacles and enemies; the game also retains the slide ability which debuted in Mega Man 3. At the end of each stage is a Robot Master boss. Upon defeating a Robot Master, Mega Man gains the Robot Master's signature weapon, which can then be used by the player in subsequent stages. Once all eight Robot Masters are destroyed, two separate sets of linear stages must be completed to finish the game. One major addition to the gameplay in Mega Man 4 is the "Mega Buster", an upgraded version of Mega Man's arm cannon. By holding down the firing button, the player can now charge a shot, resulting in a blast far more powerful than the standard shot. This feature was later used in subsequent incarnations of the franchise.

The hero's dog Rush makes a return from Mega Man 3 with the ability to transform into "Coil", "Jet", and "Marine" modes for navigating different environments. Aside from Rush, two additional support items called the "Wire Adaptor" and the "Balloon Adaptor" also aid the player in reaching areas not normally accessible. However, these hidden adaptors must be found in the stages rather than being awarded for defeating a Robot Master. Like the Master Weapons, the three Rush modes and the two adaptors are each limited to an amount of weapon power that drains when in use. The character "Flip Top" Eddie is introduced in Mega Man 4. Eddie, who went on to appear in later Mega Man games, provides the player with a random item (such as health, ammunition, or an E-Tank) at designated points in some of the levels.

[she-anemone]

coolest town yet. proto-midgar? reminds me of the team skull town from sun and moon. Edgar's going right back on my team so I can use this kick ass chainsaw

[scientificinquirer-blog]

Researchers name prehistoric amphibian ancestor discovered in Smithsonian collection after Kermit the Frog.

Scientists have uncovered the fossilized skull of a 270-million-year-old ancient amphibian ancestor in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In a paper published today, March 21, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the team of researchers described the fossil as a new species of proto-amphibian, which they named Kermitops gratus in honor of the…

[dontaskchaosandco]

drawing poll backlog doodles 3

Row 1 (from left to right):

Charlequin (Cassette Beasts)

Fawful (Mario & Luigi RPGs)

Leon Kennedy (Resident Evil)

7 Grand Dad

Big the Cat

Birdo / Birdetta / Catherine (Super Mario / Yume Kōjō)

Bloody Bunny

Row 2:

Broly (Dragon Ball)

Curly Brace (Cave Story)

Deadpool (Marvel Comics)

Koleda Belobog (Zenless Zone Zero)

Lanolin the Sheep (Sonic IDW)

Martlet (Undertale Yellow)

Row 3:

Masked Men / Pink Soldiers (Squid Game)

Meow Skulls

Mirko (My Hero Academia)

Miss Circle (Fundamental Paper Education)

Proto Man / Blues (Mega Man / Rockman)

Purah (The Legend of Zelda)

Raven Team Leader

Row 4:

Sage Harpuia

Satoru Gojo (Jujutsu Kaisen)

Sayaka Maizono (Danganronpa)

Sideshow Bob (The Simpsons)

Specimen 4 (Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion)

Spike Spiegel (Cowboy Bebop)

Row 5:

Strawberry Shortcake

Tikal (Sonic Adventure)

Tron Bonne

White Cat (Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion)

[catachan-jungle-fighter]

John Geist: The Old Wolf

John whistles as he sharpens a wooden stake, Peacebringer slowly carving the wood into the proper shape he wanted, and he says "What makes me who I am? What shaped the Old Wolf and created the Revenant... I'll tell ya when I feel like it." He laughs and throws his blade into the air before catching it and flinging it into the dirt, a smirk spreading across his face "bet ya thought I was going to throw that at ya? No worries birdy, i ain't gonna put a blade between your ribs. Here's a little tale for ya... a tale of me Ma and how she created me and my Kin, the Failures."

-

"My Ma was a mean old bitch, sweet lady but mean as sin and twice as sharp as most noble women... didn't stop her family getting iced and she had to flee as a bunch of fat bastards took the family holdings and ran them into the ground."

"..."

"Oh fuck off, I'll continue... anyways, she took off with a bunch of servants and a handful of loyal Family Guard members who had served her family since she was a Pup on a ship that she barely understood how to fly... got to some nowhere place where the Mechanicus sent folks who they didn't want around any important forgeworld's but those folks had lots of influence back on Mars."

"..."

"Well she damn near plowed the ship right into their fuckin' planet numbnuts, lost quite a few of her servants and some of the older bastards in her guard died from the stress of such a sudden exit from the Warp, Navigator bit the bullet and got to see the Emperor with all three eyes... Mechanicus on the surface send up shuttles after noticing the big fuck off ship in orbit, pulled her and the survivors off the ship and nursed her back to health."

"...?"

"Yeahhh... looks like ya got something rattling around in that skull of yours, they had converted everyone else into Servitors while leaving her alive due to her noble gene line. Ma took that and ran with it, wanting those bastards to build her an army to take back her home and she'd give them whatever they wanted... brilliant fuckin' speaker with enough charisma to Charm a Eldar, shit at planning ahead."

"...?"

"This is around the time one of the Clankers offered her a genetic line of perfect 'Sons and Daughters' to serve as her soldiers... they just needed all of her eggs, she went under the knife and was made barren by that shit. First gen of the bastards were more cancerous flesh and mutations then human and damn near begged for death from how they grew em, those were the first of the 'Failures' who were jammed full of tech and forced to work until their bodies literally fell apart in front of Ma's and the Techpriest's eyes."

"...!!!"

"Yeah... like I said Ma didn't plan ahead or look into exactly how they were making them, they were using her 'perfect children' as test subjects for various fuckin' experiments... second gen were all Psyker's of some form, freaks each and everyone of em."

"...?"

"The Burning One, a Fetus that was covered in a never dying coat of warp flame was one of the more notable ones... I don't know what the fuck they were experimenting with during the second gen, but I don't think I ever want to see it fully actualized. Third gen were much closer to humans but were still incomplete and failures, tough sons of bitches though with bones like ceramite plate... they grew with no arms or legs and their bodies were decaying to the point the mechanicus just shoved em full of metal bits and prosthetics before setting them to guard the bottom floors where Gen 2 were being held.... Gen 3 were an attempt at something by those mechanicus bastards, fuck if I know what though."

"...?"

"My Gen was 6, one of the more successful one of the bunch... I found records of a 7th Gen but some fucker seemed to have snatched em... anyways, 4th Gen had a 1 out of 5 success rate... so I had about 5 siblings from that Gen that were locked up in the bottom levels by the techies due to them looking far too eldar like... yeah, 4th gen was the techies attempt at making Eldar human hybrids from a captured Eldar's genetic material... fucked up that was."

"...?"

"Why does it sound like I give a frak about the Eldar? Mostly because I love one and the big boss of the Imperium currently has pointed out we got some allies in the pointy eared fuckers... anyways 5th Gen were a lot more successful but every member of that Gen that survived died pretty fuckin fast from weird as fuck accidents... ah! Here's one... 'Fell on slightly loose grate and stabbed self in head with loose screw from unknown mechanism'."

"???"

"Yeah it does sound like Tzeentch was fucking around doesn't it? Anyways my gen was a fucking shitshow due to three of the fuckers teaming up to make it together. A proto-geneseed made from a nearly mummified iron warrior's corpses remaining geneseed they found that dated back to the great Crusade, Eldar genetic material, and the genetic material from one of the 'top' death worlds... from fucking 20,000 eggs grown in artificial wombs, only three survived and we got tossed across the fuckin' galaxy by our ma."

"???"

"Yeah fuck off, I know it implies I possibly have two siblings kicking around out among the stars, but if they haven't hooked up with the Wolves yet, they are either out of the emperor's light or dead."

"???"

"Oh what happened to the rest of Gen 6? They were some of the most mutated and freaky looking fucking things I've seen and I've invaded Slaaneshi Cult buildings and ritual sites."

-

John pulls Memorial off of his back and activates the power field as he says "now fuck off, storytime is over."

[saritawolff]

I wanted to draw some of the recently described dinosaurs in my Archovember style since they weren’t released when I did Archovember and I probably won’t be adding them to next year’s list but I still thought they were cool enough to make some art of them (and stickers)

First is the enantiornithine bird Falcatakely forsterae, a tiny lil bird from Cretaceous Madagascar with a big ol beak. I started off making it look like a pied crow, then realized that the skull would have only been 3 inches long, so I made it much slimmer and gave it some more “small jungle bird” type colors.

Second is Ubirajara jubatus, a small compsognathid that was (illegally) smuggled out of Brazil in 1995 and was just recently finally published. It was interesting because it had at least two long, stiff filamentous structures coming from its shoulders, similar to the Standardwing bird-of-paradise. It also had a mane of fuzzy proto-feathers running along it’s back. These features probably would normally lay flat against the animal and be puffed out only for display.

Ubirajara is also the subject of much debate, as the nature of its removal from Brazil was shady at best and, since 1990, it has remained illegal to remove any Brazilian fossils from Brazil, and to not have at least one Brazilian paleontologist on the team when assessing the fossil. The authors of the paper on Ubirajara, specifically David Martill, have scoffed at these laws and made some bordering-on-racist comments in their refusal to return the fossil.

[archaeologicalnews]

Byzantine-Era Skeletons Found on Greek Island Show Signs of Complex Surgery

A proto-Byzantine-era skull which was discovered by anthropologists in the Paliokastro area on Thasos island shows signs of complicated surgery, according to a new Athens-Macedonian News Agency (AMNA) report.

The skull, which dates from the early Byzantine period — the fourth to the seventh century AD — bears traces of surgery that are “incredibly complex,” according to researcher Anagnostis Agelarakis, Ph.D., who teaches at Adeplhi University.

The discovery was made by an Adelphi University research team led by Agelarakis. A total of ten skeletons, of four women and six men, were found and studied. They are likely to be persons of high social status, based on the location and architecture of the burial site.

“According to their skeletal-anatomical features, both men and women lived physically demanding lives…The very serious trauma cases sustained by both males and females had been treated surgically or orthopedically by a very experienced physician/surgeon with great training in trauma care. We believe it to have been a military physician,” the report says. Read more.

[watusichris]

My Brilliant Career in Chicago Pro Wrestling: A True Story

Damn, I could have sworn I’d posted this 2015 Night Flight story, which remains the funniest thing I’ve ever written. Every word is true. ********** In the early 1970s, before Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (today World Wrestling Entertainment) turned professional wrestling into a pay-per-view cash cow, pro grappling was a wide-open game run by maverick regional promoters and catering to lunatic fans. I got to experience this incredible world intimately: For two years, I served as “publicist” for the promoter in one of the biggest wrasslin’ towns in the country, Chicago.

I was fresh out of college back in 1972, and returned to my old room in my mother’s apartment in Evanston bearing a seemingly worthless bachelor’s degree in English and no immediate prospects for gainful employment. Fortunately, my father believed in nepotism.

After a long career as a TV executive that had garnered him two Peabody Awards, my dad was then the general manager of WSNS, a Chicago UHF station that broadcast on Channel 44. It was a low-rent operation that my old man helped legitimize by securing telecasts of White Sox games. (He loathed Sox announcer Harry Caray, who would get hammered out of his skull while working in the booth, and rightly thought major league screwball-turned-color man Jimmy Piersall was out of his mind.)

Though such questionable WSNS programming as a daily late-night weathercast delivered by a buxom negligee-clad blonde stretched out on a heart-shaped bed was a thing of the past, colorful holdovers from the old schedule remained. And thus my dad called me one day to say he could get me some part-time work doing PR for Bob Luce, the local pro wrestling promoter, who mounted the weekly show All Star Championship Wrestling on the station.

Naturally, I was hired on the spot at my first meeting with Luce, who was something of a legend in Chicago sports circles at the time. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bob Greene captured had him perfectly in a famous column in which every sentence ended with an exclamation point.

Stocky, florid of complexion, and as loud as his off-the-rack sport coats, the outsized Luce was the dictionary definition of the word “character.” You’d sit down with him in a restaurant, and the other diners would duck and cover. Constantly agitated and gesticulating wildly, his stentorian conversation was a manic torrent of hype and madness, punctuated by explosive laughter than sounded like a machine gun going off next to your ear.

Fittingly, before joining the wrestling biz, Luce had edited a tabloid, the National Tattler. Like the National Enquirer of that frontier era, the rag made its bones with totally fictitious “news” stories featuring lots of cleavage and outré bloodletting. At one lunch, to the very evident embarrassment of the neighboring clientele, Luce regaled me with the tale of one inspired Tattler cover story, which I will recount Greene-style. Imagine it at full volume: “I got this idea, see, for a story about a sex orgy! [He pronounced “orgy” with a hard “g,” as in “Porgy” of Porgy and Bess.] But it had to be a different kind of orgy! So I got my wife Sharon to take her clothes off and covered her with peanut butter! And we took some pictures, and the lights were HOT, and the peanut butter melted all over her! They were great pictures! We called it – ha ha HA! – ‘PEANUT BUTTER ORGY!’”

Luce had graduated to promoting pro wrestling events in Chicago and other Midwestern markets, in partnership with the American Wrestling Association’s star attractions, Verne Gagne and Dick the Bruiser, of whom more in a moment. (His sweet, funny, but definitely tough wife knew the business: She had wrestled under the name Sharon Lass.)

As the noisy host of All Star Championship Wrestling, Luce would interview the stars of his upcoming promotions, show footage of recent contests, and pump the next matches. Thrusting a finger at the camera in one of his windups, he would shriek, “BE THERE!!!” Ever the sales impresario, he also served as the show’s principal pitchman, appearing in tandem with some of his hulking charges -- and occasionally with special guest hucksters like former heavyweight champ Leon Spinks -- to spiel for a long line of sketchy local advertisers. They are among the greatest and most hilarious commercials ever made.

As Luce’s publicity rep, commanding a monthly paycheck of $200, I was charged with lightweight duty: writing and mailing press releases promoting the bi-weekly Friday night matches at the Chicago International Amphitheatre, assisting the WSNS camera crew at the gigs (sometimes by protecting their extra film magazines from flying bodies at ringside), and calling in the results of the matches to the local papers. (The last task proved to be the most onerous. I’d ring up the local sports desks late on the nights of the matches and harangue some half-drunk, bored assistant editor whose interest in the “sport” could not have been more infinitesimal. When I finally managed to get the Sun-Times to print the results of one match, I felt as if I’d qualified for a Publicists Guild award.) I also performed certain functions for Luce when he was out of town or too busy to handle them. One weekday afternoon I accompanied Superstar Billy Graham, later a big WWF name and a sort of proto-Hulk Hogan, to Wrigley Field, where he was interviewed by nonplussed announcer Jack Brickhouse between innings of a Chicago Cubs radio broadcast.

Every other week for nearly two years, I’d take the El down to the Amphitheatre, located on Halsted Street on the far South Side, adjacent to the old Chicago Stock Yards. (I held onto the job even after I secured a similarly nepotistic but full-time position – writing about cheap component stereo systems for Zenith Radio Corporation.) The antique, immense Amphitheatre had hosted big political conventions, auto shows, circuses, rodeos, and concerts by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, but Luce’s dates at the venue, as you will see, attracted a distinctly different class of customer.

The pre-match staging area, where I’d meet Luce and the crew, was the Sirloin Room of the adjacent Stock Yard Inn, not far from the site of the old South Side cattle slaughterhouses. This is where Luce’s employees and pals would also convene before the night’s entertainment began to swill a couple of cocktails and shoot the breeze. It was a cast worthy of a Damon Runyon story.

Luce employed a bodyguard, a towering ex-Chicago cop named Duke, who had reputedly shot six men before being relieved of duty by the PD. He stood about six-four and dressed exactly like John Shaft. He emanated an aura of extreme menace. Once, when I asked him what he would do if someone actually started any serious trouble, Duke wordlessly pulled back the lapel of his full-length leather coat to reveal a shoulder holster bulging with a .44 Magnum.

The promotion’s bagman, charged with collecting the night’s cash receipts, was a diminutive cat everyone called Bill the Barber. I never knew his last name, but he did in fact run a South Side barbershop. He’d invariably show up dressed in a sport coat that looked like a TV test pattern and a skinny-brim fedora, with watery eyes that sometimes flicked nervously above his pencil-thin mustache. He kept a .38 strapped to his belt.

Many nights, a mysterious character referred to only as “Carmie La Papa” would put in an appearance. This elderly Italian gentleman was always treated with great deference and ate on Luce’s tab. I never found out exactly what he did. But he looked a lot like the mobster played by Pasquale Cajano in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, and I thought it wise not to inquire about his line of work.

There were also bona fide wrestling groupies, well-stacked, slightly haggard old-school broads who draped themselves on the bar, sipping pink ladies. One night, Luce leaned over to me in the Sirloin Room and said, in a whisper that could be heard 20 feet away, “After the matches, these girls and the guys go to a motel up in Prospect Heights, and they have orgies.” (Again, pronounced with a hard “g.”) The most popular of these was reportedly Gloria, a tall, pneumatic redhead of uncertain but rapidly advancing age; Luce confided, “She will do anything.”

The matches themselves were something to behold. I’d usually watch them in the company of WSNS’s young, jaded camera crew, from the dilapidated press box high above the ring in the center of the Amphitheatre. The crowd – thousands of poorly dressed, myopic, malodorous, and steeply inebriated men – was a product of what may be called the pre-ironic era of pro wrestling. There was no such thing as a suspension of disbelief among these spectators. Disbelief did not exist. Though the matches were as closely stage-managed as a production of Richard III, these rubes accepted every feigned punch and bogus drop kick as the McCoy.

Pro wrestling is the eternal contest between virtue and evil, and the wrestlers were identified in equal number as good guys and heels. Most of the good guys on the undercard – there were usually half a dozen matches, with one main event – were young “scientific” wrestlers whose Greco-Roman moves were no match for the brazenly illegal play of the dirty heels, who almost invariably won their bouts with tactics that would not pass muster with an elementary school playground monitor, let alone a legitimate referee. About the only one of these “babyfaces” (or, alternatively, “chumps”) who was vouchsafed an occasional victory was Greg Gagne, son of the promotion’s star attraction and part owner.

By the early ‘70s, Verne Gagne had been wrestling professionally for more than two decades; drafted by the Chicago Bears and then rebelling against team owner George Halas’ prohibition of a sideline on the mat, he had chosen the ring over the gridiron. He was 46 years old when I started working for Luce; he was still in decent shape, and, unlike almost all of his opponents, he still had all of his teeth.

I only managed to spend time with him once. For some reason now lost in the dense fog of time, Luce dispatched me to meet Gagne at the elegant Pump Room of the Drake Hotel near Lake Michigan. There, as cabaret star Dorothy Donegan serenaded us on the piano, the 16-time world heavyweight wrestling champion of the world got me brain-dead drunk, and then poured me into a cab home. He was an excellent guy.

Many of the other good guys on Luce’s undercards were reliable patsies for the baddies. Pepper Gomez, one of the domestic game’s few Mexican stars, was a venerable attraction who was allowed the rare triumph; billed as “the Man with the Cast-Iron Stomach,” he once allowed a Volkswagen Bug to be driven over his gut on Luce’s TV show, where he was a frequent guest.

One of my favorites was Yukon Moose Cholak. Then a veteran of 20 years on the mat, Moose owned a bar not far from the Amphitheatre, but he still worked regularly for his close pal Luce in the AWA. Huge, pot-bellied, and benign, he boasted a ripe Sout’ Side accent rivaled only by Dennis Farina’s. He was hardly an exceptional combatant: He moved around the ring with the fleetness of a dazed sloth. He was a regular on Luce’s show, and often appeared with the host in his TV spots.

The only time I appeared as a guest on All Star Championship Wrestling, Moose was the victim of the on-camera carnage that was a requisite feature of the show. At the time, conflict of interest be damned, I was writing a column about wrestling for a short-lived local sports paper called Fans, and was brought in to lend something like legitimacy to the proceedings. Luce offered me a chair on his threadbare set to push a forthcoming match between Cholak, who appeared on camera next to me, and Handsome Jimmy Valiant, a new heel on the rise in the market.

I figured something ugly was going to happen, but I went about extolling the virtues of Moose’s nearly non-existent mat skills in the front of the camera. Suddenly, Valiant crept up from behind the black scrim behind us and whacked Cholak over the head with a metal folding chair. To this day, I believe my expression of outraged surprise was worthy of a local Emmy, but a nomination eluded me.

I was actually very fond of Valiant, whom I interviewed with his “brother” and tag team partner Luscious John Valiant for Fans. Jimmy was a peroxided, strutting egomaniac in the grand Gorgeous George manner, and he had some classic patter: “I’m da wimmen’s pet and da men’s regret! I got da body wimmen love and men fear! And you, you’re as useful as a screen door in a submarine, daddy!” A rock ‘n’ roll fan, he went on to a very successful solo career, appropriately enough in Memphis, the capital of all things Elvis.

After Gagne the elder, the AWA’s biggest attraction was the tag team of Dick the Bruiser and the Crusher. Bruiser had gotten his competitive start as a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers, but had been a top wrestling draw since 1955. Somewhere along the way, he had been converted from heel to hero, and the Chicago fans adored him. Among the merch sold at the Amphitheatre were Dick the Bruiser Fan Club buttons; measuring six inches in diameter, they could either be pinned on one’s chest or, with the aid of a built-in cardboard stand, be displayed as a plaque. I kept mine on my desk at my straight job to freak out my co-workers.

Early in my gig with Luce, I was taken to meet Bruiser in the locker room. He sat on a table smoking a huge cigar. When I was introduced to him, he exclaimed, “Hey, you’re Ed Morris’ kid? You got more hair than your old man!” My father, who was in fact almost completely bald, had been known to associate with winners of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. I was a little surprised that he ran in Bruiser’s circle.

The Crusher’s career in the squared circle dated back to the late ‘40s. I was even more impressed by him than I was by the Bruiser, for he had been the inspiration of the Novas’ wrasslin’-themed single “The Crusher,” a huge 1965 radio hit in Chicago for the Minnesota garage band the Novas (and later eloquently covered by the Cramps). Bruiser and Crusher were a unique combo: They were “good guys,” but they earned their keep by being badder than the “bad guys” they gutter-stomped.

The villains in that era of pro wrestling were often the object of atavistic xenophobia and hatred. Long before the U.S.’s conflicts in the Middle East, the Sheik (né Ed Farhat in Lansing, Michigan), who took the ring wearing a burnoose, was among the most reviled of heels. Some of the older fans were World War II vets, and they lustily booed Baron von Raschke, who climbed through the ropes with a monocle in one eye, draped in a Nazi flag. He was actually a U.S. Army vet born Jim Raschke in Omaha, Nebraska. His fake German accent was utterly feeble.

The AWA’s all-purpose villain, who would go on to bigger things as one of McMahon’s first WWF stars, was “Pretty Boy” Bobby Heenan, dubbed “the Weasel” by the Bruiser. Heenan was featured in his own matches, but he was most reliably entertaining as a manager, of the most duplicitous and cowardly variety, in another villain’s corner. You didn’t need a script to know what was going to happen: Just as it looked like the good guy was going to triumph, Heenan would leap into the ring and smash the apparent victor’s head into a turnbuckle or hit him over the skull with a water bucket.

Heenan featured in the most outrageous story I heard during my brilliant career in wrestling. One night I was sitting with the film crew when Al Lerner, the mustachioed, shaggy-haired, bespectacled WSNS sports reporter, entered the press box with a portable tape machine on his shoulder and a stunned look on his face. “I’ve interviewed people in front of burning buildings,” Al said. “I’ve interviewed people as they were jumping out of airplanes. But I’ve never interviewed anyone while they were getting a blowjob.”

It seems that while Al was in the locker room recording some audio bites from Heenan, a voluptuous girl standing nearby walked over to the wrestler, kneeled down in front of him, pulled down his trunks, and began giving him the kind of pre-match service Mickey Rourke probably dreamed of but never received. As she went about her business, Heenan continued to spout invective to Al as if nothing extraordinary was transpiring. With that moment alone, Bobby Heenan earned his place in the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame.

I visited Heenan in the locker room on a somewhat less eventful evening, but that night I learned the secret of many pros’ mat success. As I was talking to him, I noticed that his forehead was crosshatched with tiny scars, some of them new and still livid. I later mentioned this to one of the crew, and was told that these wounds – referred to as “juicing”  -- were actually self-inflicted, so that the wrestlers could easily draw blood during critical moments of violence in their matches.

As Heenan said in a later interview, “If you want the green, you gotta bring the red.” Gore was a staple of pro wrestling, and there was nothing like sitting in an arena filled with 10,000 or 15,000 crazed spectators and hearing a drunken chant go up as a good guy pummeled a heel to the mat: “WE WANT BLOOD! WE WANT BLOOD! WE WANT BLOOD!”

My last hurrah in pro wrestling was one of Luce’s rare alfresco promotions, a multi-bout 1974 card at old Comiskey Park, the White Sox’s stadium, which climaxed with a 16-man battle royal. I don’t remember who triumphed in the main event, but I do remember that someone on the crew brought a bat and some softballs along, and we ended the evening shagging fly balls under the lights where Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio once played.

The outlaw era of regional pro wrestling is a dim memory for most. The racket would get wilder after I left it: In an interview with Nashville wrestling figure Jimmy Cornette, Heenan said that a fan at a 1975 Amphitheatre match pulled out a pistol and began firing at him, but the shooter only managed to wound four people in the rows in front of him.

McMahon’s WWF brought the regional promoters’ day to a close, pillaging most of the big names in the game in the process. Today, the WWE has been displaced in popularity by the even gaudier UFC contests. Most of the stars I met – including Bruiser, Crusher, and Cholak – are dead now. Heenan, a throat cancer survivor, has been in poor health for more than a decade. Verne Gagne died this April; in 2009, suffering from dementia, he accidentally killed a 97-year-old fellow resident in a Minnesota assisted living facility. Even the old stomping grounds are gone: The Chicago Amphitheatre was razed in 1999.

Bob Luce passed away in 2007, but his wild-ass legacy may live on via an unlikely champion. There are many analogs between pro wrestling and rock ‘n’ roll, and this April, mat mega-fan Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins announced on Twitter that he had bought Luce’s memorabilia and an archive of 9,000 vintage wrestling photos. Maybe he and former Hüsker Dü front man Bob Mould, a fellow wrasslin’ aficionado who once worked for McMahon as a writer, can make something of it. That would rock. 

[rperboni]

(Note: I am not a professional paleontologist or even biologist. I am just and amateur paleoartist and enthusiast. If my infos are off in some way, feel free to correct them ^^)

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DINOCEMBER

11 - Ubirajara jubatus (from Tupi “lord of the spears”) - Early Cretaceous (110 Ma BCE) - Crato Formation, Ceará, Brazil Named at the end of 2020, Ubirajara is one of the most impressive fossils found in Brazilian territory, being a member of the  Compsognathidae, small theropods covered with proto-feathers - or "dino-fuzz" - related to raptors and tyrannosaurs, whose most famous members are China's Sinosauropteryx and Germany's Compsognathus itself. Described from a partial skeleton without the skull, Ubirajara presents impressions of its fuzz, having an apparent "mane" in its dorsal region and pairs of quills on its shoulders, similar to what is found in the current birds-of-paradise, probably used in courtship or to intimidate rivals. The Crato Formation, as well as most of the formations in the Araripe Basin, would be the margins of a large saltwater lagoon, as well as a system of rivers surrounded by gymnosperms and some of the first flowering plants, being rich in fossil extract, especially of pterosaurs, and some curious animals, like the Enantiornithe Cratoavis. Unfortunately, Ubirajara, like other Brazilian fossils, is a target of international fossil trafficking, not having a single native author in the paper that describes it, with the team led by David Martill, a German paleontologist who smugled the Ubirajara fossil to Germany in 1995, and he cannot set foot on Brazilian territory for this and other crimes. Since its description, Ubirajara has been the target of campaigns for its repatriation, as well as other national fossils. I use this drawing as my collaboration for the campaign, and that so that this colonialist and criminal mentality ceases to exist in the paleontological community.

- Ubirajara’s color scheme inspired by a Vinaceous-breasted Amazon (Amazona vinacea) and a Vulturine Parrot (Pyrilia vulturina) and Cratoavis’ colors isnpired by a Black-thorated trogon (Trogon rufus). All of them are Brazilian birds