For some, it’s the British Museum. For some, Buckingham Palace.
For me, it’s this
It is one of the most mysterious animals on the planet – no one knows how it moves, where it lives, what it eats or how it reproduces. And now members of the public can see one for themselves.
Yesterday the most complete giant squid ever found was put on display at the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre in London.
Ain’t nuthin like the world’s largest serving of calamari to get me checking airfare.
I must be. First Diary-x, now this:
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I’ve killed Two Dollar Radio.
And strikey, and killey and eatey. But most of all, Giant Squid (note meek and respectful capitalization, any giant squid who may be reading this) kick assy!
I don’t know why I am so fascinated by these critters, but there is nothing that starts my day better than a hot cup of coffee and a paper on Giant Squid from the Royal Society, particularly if it includes, as this one does, the word “cloning.”
Kewl.
Here, we show the first wild images of a giant squid in its natural environment. Recovery of a severed tentacle confirmed both identification and scale of the squid (greater than 8m). Architeuthis appears to be a much more active predator than previously suspected, using its elongate feeding tentacles to strike and tangle prey.
Extraction, amplification, cloning and sequencing methods follow Carlini & Graves (1999) and Kano & Kase (2004).
The recovered section of tentacle was still functioning, with the large suckers of the tentacle club repeatedly gripping the boat deck and any offered fingers (figure 3f)…The longest giant squid on record was 18m total length (Clarke 1969).
say wha???
Okay, so I came to this a little late. Gimme a break, you never heard Stephen Hawking sing “Oh Christmastree” until I gave you the link, so cut me some slack here.
I thought I was doing well. From the first day, I’ve been over 40 hits. Supah. That brings my lifetime total to something like…83,200. Not too scruffy, although all the dx hits are lost forever. But PeterPan, PeterBloodyPan, has just welcomed me as site visitor number 8,333,787.
Apparently, he’s still looking for Tinkerbell so if he’s willing to “mentor” on that web popularity stuff I just might know a gal who’s single. At least I know he won’t make me take the bus: pixie dust is much more romantic!
Oh yeah, he has a Webby, too:
I won both the Webby Award, and the Webby’s Peoples Voice Award, for the ‘wierd’ category. I’m so thankful for all the friends who’ve brought me to this point, and who knows what will happen next!
I say ‘just For the record’, because I heard through the grapevine that one of the nominees had intended to say “Thank God PeterPan didn’t win” for their 5 word speech. Oh well! I guess God had other plans, and instead I got to say: ” Weird???… God Loves us All!!”.
raincoaster 