I got terribly distracted today while lunching at one of scores of river or canal restaurants in southern Bangkok. I was fascinated by the mudskippers just below from where I was sitting. They are common enough to the locals but to me, they set my mind imagining various ways such creatures as this could be seen as the evolutionary link between sea and land fauna.
I will have to rely upon someone else’s uploaded video for this one.
And there are some more fascinating videos following on from the one above. It was cute the way some of them would simply fall over all the time as they tried to walk on the mud. You can see that happening in the video above and in some ensuing ones. And I once let myself fall for the line that “legs” or “wings” or “eyes” etc would have to “work perfectly” the very first time or the creature would never survive. Balderdash.
And that back fin. I could not but help recalling from my childhood fascination with dinosaurs that image of the dimetrodon. For one of the first dinosaurs we know of it sure looked a rather dumb and boring thing compared with the T Rex.
Neil Godfrey
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Shalom & Boker tov, Neil…Dimetrodon was not a member of Dinosauria…
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STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח”ם בן אברהם
Torah אלילה Yehu’di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher
לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג
THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT
Ah, if only Muddy Mudskipper was still on.
I had one in my childhood collection of plastic dinosaurs, but yeah, it’s technically not a dinosaur.
Dimetrodon wasn’t remotely a dinosaur. It was extinct before the first dinosaurs appeared, and belonged to a different group of reptiles, the one ancestral to mammals.
The name means, roughly, “two measures of teeth”, referring to its having teeth of two different lengths. Most reptiles have teeth of all the same length. Dimetrodon’s teeth presaged the differentiation of teeth typical of mammals.
Those bags of plastic “dinosaurs” typically included a pterosaur and a plesiosaur, also not dinosaurs.
Here’s a bit of science history trivia that I think is interesting. Darwin thought the tetrapod lung developed from a buoyancy bladder like those of teleostean fish. (Teleosteans are the group that includes most modern fish.) He had it backwards. It is now thought that tetrapods and teleosteans are both descended from lungfish, so the lung came before the buoyancy bladder.