growing up on tumblr is weird bc they let you say anything on here except show tits but on tiktok you have to censor curse words and say things like d1e and then instagram calls it hate speech for saying u dislike men
i have a lot of feelings and thoughts about coelacanths today
likeā¦ theyāre blue
you have this mysterious fish that Ā no one really cared about, because everyone assumed theyād gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species.Ā
and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-calledĀ āmissing linkā species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks ā bones in fins! ā people were likeĀ āoh, they must be a missing link.ā so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.
and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and sheās likeĀ āwell, this is sure weird,ā and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.
and itās this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but itās still recognizably the same species)!
but itās also blue.
not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.
proper shimmering sapphire blue and white. almost turquoise in some lights. this likeā¦ muddy, fossil creature. always drawn in dinosaur browns and grays. and itās alive and itās blue. just imagine being the scientist who opened that crate to this creature for the first time. youāre already excited, youāve known about this fish for decades, you thought it was a story, you know itās in this box. you expect Ā to see the weird fins and the strange tail. you know itās large and odd looking. and you open it up and itās this beautiful, shining blue, you know?
Single tracking thru union station today bc of “person struck by train” they said it like that in the announcements and on the screen that says when the trains are coming. Made me realize I’m part of an invisible secret group of commuters who’ve seriously thought about jumping in front of a train and how the person who was struck by a train used to be one of us but now they’re just dead :(
