I like new animals, living and prehistoric. Some of Nature’s
experiment turn out to be really crazy.
A flying squirrel with a 5-foot (1.5m) wingspan? Yes. We have Petauristatetyukhensis, found near Vladivostok and estimated at 30,000 years
old. It easily dwarfs its largest
relatives, which are impressive enough. I’ve written elsewhere about how
Pakistan's woolly flying squirrel, the largest squirrel in the world, was
discovered in 1888, vanished soon after, and stayed missing until 1995. The
animal, which is up to two feet long not counting its two⌐foot tail, was found
by two dogged amateurs after eluding repeated searches by professional
zoologists.
Everyone likes finding new examples of those other flying
vertebrates, the birds. A widespread group called the honeyeaters, the Alormyzomela (fancy scientific name Myzomela prawiradilagae), was announced earlier
this month from the Indonesian island of (of course) Alor. As is too often the case, the scientists
describing a new species recommended it immediately be declared endangered
thanks to habitat degradation. A
handsome little brown and grey creature with a mostly red head, it has a call
described as “tssip” or “vick.”
Then there’s the new crocodile. Really! While New Guinea has a
well-established freshwater crocodile, described 91 years ago, it apears that population is split, and what’s now called Crocodylus halli is a different breed of
reptile. There were even specimens in captivity, at Florida’s St.
Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida. I’ll stop by sometime and see them in a while…
And if you’re not sure what species something is… there’s anapp for that.
The source is inaturalist.org, which describes itself “a
citizen science project and online social network of naturalists, citizen
scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing
observations of biodiversity across the globe.”
My favorite critters include the tardigrades, near-microscopic
six-legged beasties that look kinda cute and are some of the toughest multicellular
organisms on Earth. Freeze, them, dry them, heat them, starve them – they don’t
care. Some of them lived after exposure
to empty space, cosmic rays, and brutal temperature changes in a box mounted on
the outside of the International Space Station.
There’s a very cool Twitter account at https://twitter.com/tardigradopedia. Some sceintists has raised the idea of integrate tardigrade DNA with humans. Ummm… that’s how you get a cross between
Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers. There was an article in one of those old
men’s magazines, like TRUE, that had a blown-up picture of one claiming NASA
had photographed this "unknown alien creature" on Mars or in space.
Speaking of space. I used to spend a lot of time pondering
UFOs. The term stinks, of course:
there’s no way to know whether something in the sky is an “object” or
“flying.” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
(UAP) is used by, among other organizations, the U.S. Navy, which had some
publicized sightings in the last few years.
I’m talking about the philosophy of the topic and not
individual sightings here. I mention it not
because I think aliens are visiting us - I don’t – but because there’s a residue
of UFO reports that stubbornly stick in the “unidentified” category. A couple of more skeptical commenters, Robert
Schaeffer for one, have written that, if 95% of UFO sightings could be
explained (and everyone agrees on some number in the 90s), then why not 99%?
Why not 100%? I find this a bit
unscientific. No one doubts ball
lightning exists, but everyone agrees many sightings are mistaken. A police hotline may hear from 1,000 people
that they saw the murderer whose picture was on TV: 99% may be mistaken and 1%
correct, and police still use such tiplines and do get genuine sightings.
Thousands of sightings of the Eastern cougar have led to a few genuine cougars
(relict, released, or rambling in from other states is not always clear, but
the point is 99 percent can be wrong and the thing can still be there,
Going back to our space motif, there are quite a few reports
from space by astronauts, who you’d think would be good observers of phenomena
in space if anyone is. However, James Oberg had had no trouble explaining them,
especially because low Earth orbit (LEO) is filled with debris of all shapes
and sizes. ( There are also hoaxes, like
an altered Apollo 11 transcript.)
Continuing to ramble, UFO documentaries tend to be low quality at best. One called Unacknowledged,
which ran on Netflix, was built around encounters by military personnel and
astronauts. So far, so good, but it turns out the astronauts were quoted out of
context, some of the military men held way-out fringe beliefs and space and
aliens, and the whole ends up pretty weak.
Groups like MUFON solider on, and not entirely without
reason. Alien spaceships are not here, but aerial
phenomena, both explainable and not-explained yet, are here. The discovery of massive discharges of
energy, spires and elfs, is recent: The late Aviation Week editor Phil Klass’
old idea about plasmas, large, longer-lived cousins to ball lightning, still
has some validity in it. A friend of my father’s, a pilot on duty in postwar
Japan, chased a reddish disk that was translucent – he could make out clouds
through it – that his P-51 couldn’t catch.
That sounds more like a natural phenomenon than a spaceship, but what
sort of phenomenon? We don’t know.
And there you have the starting point for all scientific
investigation: “We don’t know.”
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