I will relate, said Finn...

I like the gull-cries, and the twittering together of the fine cranes. I like the surf-roar at Tralee, the songs of the three sons of Meadhra and the whistle of Mac Lughaidh. They also please me, man shouts at parting, cuckoo-call in May. I incline to pig-grunting in Magh Eithne, the bellowing of the stag of Ceara, the whinging of fauns in Derrynish. The low warble of the water-owls in Loch Barr also, sweeter than life that. I am fond of wing-beating in dark belfries, cow-cries in pregnancy, trout-spurt in lake-top. Also the whining small otters in nettle-beds at evening, the croaking of small-jays behind a wall, these are heart-pleasing. I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail, the pilibeen mona, the bottle-tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-toed guillemot, the pilibeen sleibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine plough-gull, the long-eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small-fowl, the bevil-beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common corby, the fish-tailed mud-piper, the cruiskeen lawn, the carrion sea-cock, the green-lidded parakeet, the brown bog-martin, the maritime wren, the dove-tailed wheatcrake, the beaded daw, the Galway hill-bantam, and pilibeen cathrach.

-- from At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

Giant killer squid of the Triassic?

We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a 'kraken,' with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid

-- from here.

P Z Myers is sceptical :

This 'Triassic kraken' has not been found; no fossils, no remains at all, no evidence of its existence. It is postulated to have been large enough to hunt and kill ichthyosaurs, which is remarkable—comparison to modern giant squid is invalid, since they are prey, not predator.

P.S. 11 Oct: Microecos has some fun, but Nature does not dismiss the idea out of hand.

Truth will trout

...no matter how much pain creatures we view as "food" are scientifically proven to experience, 94% of us will go on fuelling demand for them, sticking our fingers in our ears and yelling, "la la la, they taste nice, so shut up and let me eat them!"

-- Ariane Sherine.

Crypto clunckers

Following the discovery of a giant prehistoric snake, a 'real' one pops up in Borneo.

Borgesian monsters

At this stage in the proceedings, the most likely place to find Diego Armando Maradona ought to be in the pages of his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, alongside the stiff-bristled, mud-wallowing Catoblepas, the 100-mile-long Earthquake fish, the weeping, wart-covered Squonk and the Peryton of the ancient world - half-deer, half-bird, but casting the shadow of a man.

-- Richard Williams

The war on teddy bears

When I was a correspondent in Kabul in 1997 I kept a pretty good list in my head of everything that was outlawed. And so at a press conference when the head of the Taliban Department for Preventing Vice and Promoting Virtue mentioned in passing that of course teddy bears had been banned, I knew they weren't on the list. So I said, actually teddy bears aren't banned. The Vice and Virtue man looked at me and said, OK then we'll ban them tonight.

--Alan Johnston in the second of two broadcasts about 'thirty years of conflict and chaos in Afghanistan'.

Fig 1. The suspect: Johnston - no friend to Afghan teddy bears


Fig 2. "Mo", typical victim of British infidel imperialist no good fellow

At war with nature itself

Joe Romm on Sarah Palin's axis of evil.

(Actually, I'm glad she's standing up to those atheist, gay, Muslim, socialist, European Belugas. Sing, baby, sing.)

Beasts at the Igs

Among the 2008 winners:

Archaeology: Astolfo Mello Araujo at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil for measuring how the contents of an archaeological dig can be disrupted by the actions of an armadillo.

Cognitive neuroscience: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, at Hokkaido University in Japan, for discovering that amoeboid organisms can solve puzzles.

A beagle escaped