An Ordovician Orgy

[Loddfafner]

Horseshoe crabs are a survival from the Ordovician era but unlike most living fossils, they can be found in normal places like New Jersey instead of bumfuck Australia. They fall between trilobites and spiders in the tree of life. At this time of year, they crawl onto beaches in huge numbers and fuck Paleozoic style, leaving great quantities of little blue-green eggs. Sea birds flying from Brazil to the Arctic have evolved to munch on them to refuel for their lengthy migration.

If I were to see the full orgy I would have to have gone out last night with a flashlight, but there were enough of them still on the beach today, a few still going at it as birdwatchers checked various colorful gulls off their life lists and great-breasted rednecks chugged beer and chilled.

[Osweo]

Damn, I thought this was going to be an article about some new discovery in North Wales, where the Ordovices once lived, the Celtic 'Hammer Fighters' of pre-Roman times. :cry2 :p

Anyone know the latest ideas on the trilobite extinctions, while I'm here? Always puzzled me...

[Loddfafner]

Anyone know the latest ideas on the trilobite extinctions, while I'm here? Always puzzled me...

The great Permian extinction remains a mystery. There are candidates for asteroid craters but nothing definitive unless I've missed some geological memo. Whatever it was hit the ocean more thoroughly than land. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_extinction), 96% of ocean life was exterminated and only 70% of land animals disappeared. Massive vulcanism in Siberia is another possibility.


Damn, I thought this was going to be an article about some new discovery in North Wales, where the Ordovices once lived, the Celtic 'Hammer Fighters' of pre-Roman times. :cry2 :p


You have officially outgeeked me.

[Jägerstaffel]

I never knew they weren't actual proper crustaceans.
Learn something every day.

[Wölfin]

I'll ask my cousin in Cape Cod to hunt down some mating grounds and will come prepared next year.