on behalf of isoetes I’m offended, Mr. Senator.
@botanyshitposts so what exactly is a quillwort, and what’s the big deal on this particular one?
imagine if there was a single remaining mammoth species on earth, and it only was able to get by into the modern era by sacrificing it’s status as a huge landscape-changing roaming herbivore to evolve into a small animal the size of a dog. it looks a lot like a dog, actually. people often mistake the tiny mammoth species as a dog, and will just casually say it’s a dog.
small-mammoth enthusiasts, however, will avidly remind people that they are not in fact a dog, and their organs, although shrunken to the size of a dog’s organs, are still wooly mammoth organs. you actually have to seek out special vets for the small wooly mammoths because even though it looks remarkably like a dog to the untrained eye, when you’re faced with the internal anatomy it’s so far deviated from anything living today that it’s difficult to understand and work with.
this is because there is, quite literally, no animal anatomy quite like the small woolly mammoth’s left alive on earth. this means that there’s no living approximation of how their organs work, or what the fuck is going on in there, even though they look like a dog from the outside. the closest living relative of the small woolly mammoth is so far deviated from it’s anatomy that’s literally of no help to anyone to compare the two, because the only thing they have in common is how they reproduce. scientists studying the wooly mammoth’s anatomy are forced to debate with each other constantly about what a certain organ might do, or what it at least used to do based on the fossils of the giant wooly mammoths that once dominated the landscape, but they just…have no idea.
so the small woolly mammoth is not at all like a dog, even though it looks like one. how it works, how it reproduces, how it functions on a basic anatomic level are so utterly and completely prehistoric that they’re not at all like any other living animals. this makes them the subject of infinite fascination to paleontologists trying to approximate the biology and ecology of the giant woolly mammoths that once lived…but it’s incredibly challenging. it’s also incredibly challenging to explain why they’re different to people who just don’t care, or just see them as dogs because they look like them, because the significance of something like it is so easily lost when something looks ‘normal’.
isoetes –Quillworts– are that tiny wooly mammoth. their ancestors lived 400 million years ago and included the giant prehistoric spore-reproducing trees lepidodendron, which made up the bulk of massive prehistoric forests that were eventually compressed into the coal we’re still using today. they’re so old that the roots aren’t roots, they’re leaves, and it took botanists 100 years of bickering to finally confirm this. they’re so old that the change that weeded out all the giant 100+ foot tall members of the lineage was literally the original shifting of the continents, as in, like, when pangea split. they’re so old that it reproduces through ENORMOUS spores contained in spore packets on it’s leaves. they’re so old that we just have no fucking idea how to process it.
quillwort anatomy is, quite literally, that of a comically small 400 million year old spore tree with the trunk squished into a woody structure so small that you could miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for on a dissection. the anatomy of this genus doesn’t function like any other modern plant genus on earth. quillworts have organs and cell structures that we still don’t understand in the year 2019.
quillworts are incredibly valuable finds to paleobotanists because they’re so easily passed over in botanical surveys, and their habitats are constantly being threatened, making a great deal of species endangered. although they’re still around on almost every continent– see the earlier point on them evolving before the continents split– there are a lot fewer of them out there now; like anything, they can be more common in some areas than others, but my state has only found one recorded colony in the past 50 years to give an idea of what we’re dealing with here.
and yes. they look like grasses.
do not let this prehistoric spore tree fool you
XP/98 remix
ok what the fuck
It sounds like some digital boss theme
I had to draw this.
Aziraphale and Crowley fan art where they are TENDERLY KISSING is my newest drug
Scandalous!
Mod m here
Heck YES you can use Asl as your primary language! If that’s what makes you feel best do it! You’re not claiming to be Deaf, you’re just speaking our language!
Hope it works out for you!
pansy-chic27213 asked:
deafaq answered:
Mod m here
Just write it normally as a translation and put __ signed instead of __ said and you should be good
What do I do, do I
Do
With a love that won’t
That won’t sit still?
hey! i made a good omens video to vienna teng’s stray italian greyhound! its all very soppy and mushy, i hope you like it!!
“2.) We have extensive photographic and video evidence from the Apollo missions themselves. How could the lunar module have ascended back off of the surface and returned the astronauts back to the orbiting module which would take them back to Earth? Exactly like the video above shows, from direct Apollo 17 footage. The hypergolic propellant system isn’t based off of a single explosion, but rather a constant thrust of ~16,000 Newtons that was steadily delivered over a timespan of about 5 minutes. There’s no exhaust trail because there’s no lunar atmosphere, but you can track the spacecraft’s accelerated motion for yourself with even basic modern software.”
We’re less than a month away from the official 50th anniversary of the first crewed Moon landing, and there are all sorts of good reasons to celebrate. But for most of us alive today, the final Apollo mission occurred before we were born. Perhaps because of this distance between then and now, there are a great many people who don’t believe that the lunar landings ever occurred. While you might (rightfully) dismiss this position as an uninformed conspiracy, you can also immediately point to a slew of scientific evidence to demonstrate that yes, we did go to the Moon, and here is an enormous suite of data to back that up. From thousands of photographs to suites of instruments and scientific data to an examination of the landing sites today, everything lines up.
read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2FwKirT
by Shaicarus
Aziraphale makes tea and pokes around the flat, the mug clenched in his hands. He cleans up the mess by the door, spares an admittedly soppy smile for the statue from the church, has a private giggle at a very different statue, and coos at the plants for a bit, before he runs out of things to do and has no choice but to let his thoughts start spinning.
Words: 1198, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English
read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2Y9NbGc
by Tennyo
Aziraphale and Crowley spend time reminiscing about the past, and they talk about early misadventures with religious experiences, before… ahem… trying the effect out on each other.
““I should have never told you what I was doing. You’d never known the difference before that.”
“You were! They had! …” The angel’s face was turning colors.
“They had an orgasm, angel. You can say it.”
Words: 1632, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English
pommywhirl