Enough. Everyone is describing this new species of deep sea worm as squidlike. IT IS NOT. It's segmented, it swims with undulations of bristles, it's got appendages on its head, not its foot, that it uses to trawl for food.
It's a lovely beastie, but how can anyone mistake it for a squid? What's next, is the Guardian going to cover a sheep-shearing in Scotland and talk about all the four-legged squid gamboling about?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Once upon a time, deep in the Precambrian, this was the planet of worms. Well, actually, this was, is, and always will be the planet of bacteria, but if you filter your perspective to just organisms above a particular size, and if you're an animal writing about it in the modern day with a…
Last week I wrote about a new study that identified a fossil mammal as the closest relative to whales, helping to shed light on how whales moved from land to sea. The mammal, Indohyus, was a small four-legged creature that probably spent a fair amount of time in water and ate vegetation. The…
The AP just reported that project leader Dr. Larry Madin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Phillipine scientists returned from two weeks in the Celebes Sea, located off the Phillippines southernmost archipelago, this Tuesday with some potential new deep sea discoveries. Among the more…
The giant cephalopods (squids and octopuses) of the deep sea have captured the imagination for centuries. But despite our fascination with these creatures, they are still enigmas, their behaviour illuminated only by the occasional lucky video or the presence of scars on animals they fight with. For…