quote:July 20, 2006 - Batman fans will remember Two-Face, the villain with a mug that's half handsome and half gruesome. Recently a Maine lobsterman caught a different kind of two-faced prey—a lobster that looks half raw and half cooked.
Alan Robinson of Steuben, Maine, hauled up this two-toned lobster last week while bringing in his catch near the town of Bar Harbor.
Really, I didn't believe it. I thought someone had just managed to only boil half a lobster. There are several different articles though. Apparantly, it's in the care of a Maine oceanarium.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Wow, how'd ya like to have that walk of your plate at none other than "Red Lobster". Ha I made a funny. Posts: 871 | Registered: Jul 2006
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The human body is also bilaterally symmetrical. There are people with different color eyes, but it is at least theoretically possible to get a human with noticeably different skin tone on the two sides of their body. Like those people in Star Trek who were black on one side and white on the other...
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That is pretty crazy looking. It's weird that the change is so distinct. I would've thought maybe a blending together of colors in the middle and then gradually being red, but evidently not.
quote:Originally posted by Juxtapose: aren't more or less all animals bilaterally symmetrical?
No, not at all. I can't think of a chordate or an arthropod that isn't bilaterally symmetrical, but I also can't think of a molluscan or an echinoderm that is. Radial symmetry is common, and while it's rare, there are completely non-symmetrical animals.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Actually, one of the coolest things I recall from genetics class in college was learning the various genes coding for "body plan." They're basically as ancient as multicellular organisms. And when those genes mutate...watch out!
Great stuff!
And yes, there are just a small number of body plans around these days. If you could go back in time to see the weird critters that were alive during the Cambrian "explosion" (iirc). Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the fossil record in the Burgess Shale deposits (remarkable because the grain is so small that impressions of the soft parts were preserved. Weird critters. LOTS of weird symmetry other than bilateral.
There are plenty of assymetries in molluscs, btw.
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quote:August 16, 2006 TURNER, Maine --Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.
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Michelle O'Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a "hybrid mutant of something."
"It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget," she told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. "We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I've lived in Maine my whole life and I've never seen anything like it."
For the past 15 years, residents across Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night. The animal has been blamed for attacking and killing a Doberman pinscher and a Rottweiler the past couple of years.
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Mike O'Donnell, who is married to Michelle O'Donnell, said the animal looked "half-rodent, half-dog" to him.
It was charcoal gray, weighed between 40 and 50 pounds and had a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs hanging over its lips, he said. It looked like "something out of a Stephen King story."
"This is something I've never seen before. It's an evil-looking thing," he said.
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Wish they'd gotten better pictures of that thing. I also wish that they'd taken some of the picked over remains. I'd like to have a look at the skull.
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quote:Wildlife officials and animal control officers declined to go to Turner to examine the remains.
See, this I don't understand. You'd think there'd be SOMEONE who'd jump at the chance to classify a new species. Granted, it's probably just a hybrid of some kind, but still.
Also, you have to wonder what kind of dog can keep a killing spree going for 15 years.
EDIT - thanks for the biology corrections. I forgot about the very common flounder example, and didn't know about the molluscans or an echinoderms at all.
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After years of flea-ing the scene and tick-ing off the community, it looks as though it was finally collared. It seems the dead body gave the people paws, but they were happy enough to leave it as a mythical tail.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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It's amazing to see the effect of losing the blue pigment in the shell, but I have to admit that I'm dissapointed that it was not, in fact, half-cooked and half-living tissue.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Ow... ewww... I mean, just... ow. (Regarding being literally half-cooked.) I mean, I'm not a vegetarian or anything, but its like that story of the chicken that lived for several years with no head.
As for the evil rodent dog, I'm a little puzzled that it was picked clean by vultures. In Maine? Sounds like photoshop meets Piltdown man.
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