It's so weird how people tend to treat men and women as entirely separate species, with no overlap in bodies, experiences, or feelings. You really start noticing how people tend to believe this when you're trans, I've noticed. Ever since transitioning, I've really come to grips with the fact that humans of all genders have more in common than we don't.
accidentally activated my ok google somehow while I was throwing socks at the ferret to get her to attack them
P!atd is over. Finally some peace and fucking quiet at the disco.
Gigantic Skull of Prehistoric Sea Monster Found on England’s ‘Jurassic Coast’
The remarkably well-preserved skull of a gigantic pliosaur, a prehistoric sea monster, has been discovered on a beach in the county of Dorset in southern England, and it could reveal secrets about these awe-inspiring creatures.
Pliosaurs dominated the oceans at a time when dinosaurs roamed the land. The unearthed fossil is about 150 million years old, almost 3 million years younger than any other pliosaur find. Researchers are analyzing the specimen to determine whether it could even be a species new to science.
Originally spotted in spring 2022, the fossil, along with its complicated excavation and ongoing scientific investigation, are now detailed in the upcoming BBC documentary “Attenborough and the Jurassic Sea Monster,” presented by legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough, that will air February 14 on PBS.
Such was the enormous size of the carnivorous marine reptile that the skull, excavated from a cliff along Dorset’s “Jurassic Coast,” is almost 2 meters (6.6 feet) long. In its fossilized form, the specimen weighs over half a metric ton. Pliosaurs species could grow to 15 meters (50 feet) in length, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The fossil was buried deep in the cliff, about 11 meters (36 feet) above the ground and 15 meters (49 feet) down the cliff, local paleontologist Steve Etches, who helped uncover it, said in a video call.
Extracting it proved a perilous task, one fraught with danger as a crew raced against the clock during a window of good weather before summer storms closed in and the cliff eroded, possibly taking the rare and significant fossil with it.
Etches first learned of the fossil’s existence when his friend Philip Jacobs called him after coming across the pliosaur’s snout on the beach. Right from the start, they were “quite excited, because its jaws closed together which indicates (the fossil) is complete,” Etches said.
After using drones to map the cliff and identify the rest of the pliosaur’s precise position, Etches and his team embarked on a three-week operation, chiseling into the cliff while suspended in midair.
“It’s a miracle we got it out,” he said, “because we had one last day to get this thing out, which we did at 9:30 p.m.”
Etches took on the task of painstakingly restoring the skull. There was a time he found “very disillusioning” as the mud, and bone, had cracked, but “over the following days and weeks, it was a case of …, like a jigsaw, putting it all back. It took a long time but every bit of bone we got back in.”
It’s a “freak of nature” that this fossil remains in such good condition, Etches added. “It died in the right environment, there was a lot of sedimentation … so when it died and went down to the seafloor, it got buried quite quickly.”
Fearsome top predator of the seas
The nearly intact fossil illuminates the characteristics that made the pliosaur a truly fearsome predator, hunting prey such as the dolphinlike ichthyosaur. The apex predator with huge razor-sharp teeth used a variety of senses, including sensory pits still visible on its skull that may have allowed it to detect changes in water pressure, according to the documentary.
The pliosaur had a bite twice as powerful as a saltwater crocodile, which has the world’s most powerful jaws today, according to Emily Rayfield, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who appeared in the documentary. The prehistoric marine predator would have been able to cut into a car, she said.
Andre Rowe, a postdoctoral research associate of paleobiology at the University of Bristol, added that “the animal would have been so massive that I think it would have been able to prey effectively on anything that was unfortunate enough to be in its space.”
By Issy Ronald.
i have gotten literally nothing done in the last 36 hours due to sir michael romance i cant go on like this i have exams and assignments
sometimes you just need a bit of disco in the woods... and now is absolutely one of those times
logic brain knows that nothing’s gonna happen october 19th. but god do dan and phil love committing to a bit.
bastardcore/chaoscore hits different when ur high
hey man it’s very cisgender in here. Can someone open a window or something