For some reason, when biologists want to describe “the assemblage of morphological features shared among many members of a phylum-level group” we say bauplan. Which is German for “body plan.” But even if you don’t speak German you say “bauplan” anyway. So this is a very hilarious Social Media Discourse from someone who has forgotten that the word “bauplan” is an instant giveaway that you are actually a biologist and that makes it fantastic it’s like when robots try to pretend that they’re human but better
Collected from the Egyptian desert in March of 1846, the Helix desertorum specimen was sent to the British Museum, where scientists thought it had expired in transit. It was glued to a cardboard display card shortly after.
One day four years later (there is conflicting information about whether it was four or five years), curators noticed something strange about their catatonic mollusk: the shell seemed to have moved from its glued position and a trail of discoloration followed it.
Archivists removed it from the card to give it a bath, with a suspicion the snail might have in fact been slumbering.
After just a few minutes of exposure to moisture, the snail’s head poked from its shell and surveyed its new home with four eye stalks.
As the snail adjusted to active life again, it became a minor celebrity and sat for a portrait by the museum’s zoological artist for inclusion in a book on mollusks, seen below:
“this baby came out of you but im not 100% sure its yours”
Funny thing – a woman who applied for welfare after her husband left her hadto supply DNA evidence he was actually the father. The results: he was definitely the father, but she wasn’t the mother. Her children were removed from her custody and she was sued for fraud, even though she insisted they were her children.
Turns out, she wasn’t a surrogate or a kidnapper (the two most obvious explanations) – she was a chimera. As an embryo, she fused at a very early stage with her twin, forming one individual. Her ovaries apparently developed from cells that had originally belonged to her vanished twin. Later on more tests showed that while the woman’s skin and hair DNA did not match her childrens, DNA taken from her cervix did.
WHAT THE FUCk
This went from stupid to really interesting in point 5 seconds.
There’s multiple cases of this very thing
Idk weird stuff man
Science doing random shit to fuck with your head
We don’t actually know how many human chimeras there are because most of the time you can’t tell.
However, some cases of intersex and even some trans individuals may be chimeras that result from the fusion of two embryos that have different genetic sex. This may also explain why some female athletes fail a sex test. (Other possibilities include genetic transcription that resulted in the loss of the SRY gene from the Y chromosome. The SRY gene is the actual switch that results in the development of a male phenotype).
Chimerism is also seen in animals.
This is Dunbar’s Gold. As you can see he looks like a brindle dog.
At one point he was bred to a mare called Sharp One, who also had the same brindle pattern, in the hope that they could breed more brindle horses – which are vanishingly rare.
Both horses are Quarter Horses, and the breeder sent in a gene sample from the foal for typing to allow him to be registered.
The test showed that the foal was related to neither his sire nor his dam.
They even did the test twice. Most cases of failed genetic testing are a sample mixup (either the hair or the semen used to produce the foal).
It turned out Dunbar’s Gold had had to be tested three times to get a good sample – and the third time was a blood test not the hair follicle test normally done. On top of that, when they looked at his gene type again they realized something rather important to a stallion was missing – he had no Y chromosome.
It was eventually established that both horses were chimeras and that in Dunbars Gold two different gene types existed in his skin and coat (one male, one female, just to prove that happens). Each gene line had a different set of color genes, but both matched properly to his parents. His foals, of course, all matched to the male gene line.
When they tested Sharp One’s other foal they discovered she was producing eggs from both of her gene lines. (Something which could also happen with a human chimera).
You know, in all those “humans are the creepy/fucked up alien species” posts I can’t believe we haven’t touched on organ donation yet.
When they heard that the human general had fallen ill to a disease of the organ known as the liver the troops began to hope that it might turn the tide of the war. Research indicated that such diseases could be fatal after all. The organ did something similar to the flagulaxin in that it filtered out toxins so when it stopped functioning the human would slowly be poisoned to death by his own body. Or so they believed.
But then he came back.
A foot soldier was captured and answers demanded. Was it a medication? Had the sickeness been a ruse to fool them?
“Nah, man. This kid on a motorcycle wiped out on the I9 freeway so they gave the general his liver since they were a match.”
“They…what?”
“They gave him his liver. The kid was dead, and he was an organ donor. And he was a genetic match to the general.”
“They…cut the liver out of one of your young and placed it in an elder and it…worked?”
“I mean, he wasn’t that young. Mid twenties or something. But yeah, that’s essentially it.”
The interrogator and his assistant both regurgitated their most recent meal and ran from the room. Living in places like the “Australia” were one thing, but taking the organs of dead bodies and placing them in the living? What was WRONG with this species?
No wait make it better. A living person can donate a piece of their liver! It doesn’t have to be a dead person.
“You killed one of your own to replace the broken part of the higher ranking human?”
“No of course only a small piece of a one was needed to replace the general’s bad one”
“Who got the bad one?”
“No one! it was thrown away”
“Someone, gave a piece of their organ to someone else to use??? And they both lived???”
“Yeah”
But what if the aliens were like salamanders who can naturally regenerate damaged body parts? And when they find out humans lack that ability they think “We have an advantage over them” then to their shock they discover that we’ve come up with work-arounds for that lack. Also prosthetic limbs. “Wait … You’re telling me that you can’t regrow your leg … So you just BUILD one?!”
Trying to describe a human to a species that had never met one was getting increasingly difficult. To start with, they seemed to exist in every possible state – solid, liquid, gas and crystaline. A core calcium infrastructure with a porous organic compound layered over it, through which fluid and gas travelled under the regulation of a range of organic pipework, pumps and processing plants, all coated in a renewable organic surface layer. That was weird enough.
Then came the discovery that the human was semi-modular. Component fluids could be swapped out and substituted – humanity had built some form of external versions of a range of the organic pumps and processors, and had manual, automatic and remotely operated variants of their core pump processor (the heart). Internal parts could be exchanged, or replaced with suitable originals. Something about needing genuine human compatible parts, known as donor organs, and the voluntary post-life nature of these donations seemed ineffective to many observer species, and postively horrifying to those who held the sanctity of the post-life body. Considering a fallen comrade as an accessible source of component parts was just beyond the pale, and to have an proactive harvesting regime was just unbelievable. What was wrong with these creatures that death should be rejected to such an extent that they would become hybrids of dead and living creatures? Did they think death would bypass them, thinking the component part they carried was already ticked off some post-life database, thus granting them an immunity card in the eternal island vote?
Weirdly though, these quasi-modular humans could not be assembled from component parts. Even the human histories, insofar as the human documentation systems were trustworthy, indicated that efforts to construct a modular human from parts, pieces and high voltage was deemed unwise, and mostly only suitable to be remembered in October in ritual costumes. That said, a human containing sufficient of their original parts could be restored from dead state with a sufficient electric discharge, leading many to suspect that the creatures existed in an energy state alongside their gas, liquid, solid, and crystal forms.
Then of course, was that very human approach to limb loss – construction of alternate limbs from non-human parts. Suffice to say, most sentient machine species are horrified by the process, and many machine worlds are refusing to acknowledge humans are real, and are starting to campaign against the continued discussion of these creatures as organic propaganda.
They may have a very valid point. These things make no sense from a design specification standpoint.
I am not going to tag the name of the bird, because I’m pretty sure I would get tagged as NSFW if I did, but I assure you their beaks are getting longer and it’s probably because of the UK’s obsession with bird feeders.
Do you ever start bullshitting a paper, and then look over it halfway through and think, ’…Wait a minute, I could be onto something here.’
this is the definition of college.
Literally I was writing a paper on Asian salt water crocodiles, like a simple about them paper for a college class, and I started noticing some inconsistencies in the scientific papers I was sourcing and I accidentally discovered that the crocodile has been misdiagnosed as least concerned on the endangered species list when they should be classified as endangered and now my professor is having me write a formal report to the international Red List to have them reclassified and all I wanted to do was write this paper on an animal I thought was cool and now I’m considered an expert on this species…
this is how it works half of esteemed biologists trip and fall into their specialty while pursuing something else. one lecturer i just went to started as a biochemist researching antibiotics and discovered that crocodiles change colors based on environment and now he has 30+ crocs in his yard for research purposes and he’s just like… “wait… i’m a chemist…”
How did so many people end up with crocodiles on accident?????
Steel Phoenix Studios 