6/11/2023 0 Comments Prehistoric kingdom animals![]() ![]() I picked Diplodocus, and one less than thrilling stanza remains indelibly etched: “Diplodocus plodded along long ago, Diplodocus plodded along.”ĭinosaur love is so entrenched in our culture (especially our childhood culture) that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t always this way. In one of my first school memories, my second-grade classmates and I read a book of poems called Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast, then received the thrilling assignment of choosing a poem to memorize. Everyone loves dinosaurs, from toddlers playing with plastic Triceratops to adults enjoying the Jurassic Park franchise, and I am no exception. The classic dinosaur book hurries through an account of how life evolved in the ocean, diversified into some interesting forms, then finally made its way onto land, where the story really gets started. And that generally meant books about dinosaurs. Whenever I sought answers to the questions I’d carried since childhood about their ancient kingdom, I found myself once again limited to one or two pages, this time in books about prehistoric life. In the intervening time, several wonderful cephalopod books had been published, but none about the creatures’ heyday as monarchs of the sea. After six years, I left Monterey with a doctoral degree and a conviction that I was better suited to science communication than science generation. I also learned that while I never got tired of explaining the latest squid science to anyone who asked and many who didn’t, I often got tired of producing the science myself. I learned how to slice up a piece of squid skin thinner than paper with a glass knife and how to write a computer program that eats up decades of data and spits out a map. I learned how to drive a boat and cast a net, how to fish with rod and reel in California and with 300 feet (100 m) of hand line in Mexico. Though few people other than marine biologists have heard of this marine laboratory-the second-oldest in the United States-it shares a fence and a friendly professional relationship with the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium.Īt Hopkins I spent six years studying the reproductive habits of Humboldt squid. Eleven years after my first visit, I returned to Monterey, this time as a graduate student at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University. I learned to scuba dive (thanks again to my father, who learned alongside me so I’d have a buddy) and took every available marine biology class. Related Article Cephalopods Are Coming To A Town Near You! When did octopuses and squid rule the seas? What did their kingdom look like? And why wasn’t it around anymore? Cousteau, however, left such pursuit aside and returned to the ever-entrancing study of living cephalopods. Questions hurried on the heels of this new information. It was in this book that I first encountered mention of cephalopods as long-ago “monarchs of the sea.” I discovered only one exclusively cephalopodic book- Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence, by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diole. In the 1990s, that meant checking out books from the library on sea life and poring over the one or two pages that mentioned cephalopods. I devoured all the information I could find about these amazing animals. ![]() Shortly after returning home, with my father’s patient support, I procured a secondhand saltwater aquarium and became known at school as “the girl with the pet octopus.” At the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, I stood mesmerized by the rippling skin, the undulating arms, and the intimate eyes of a giant Pacific octopus. I met my first cephalopod on a family road trip when I was ten years old. I myself was in that camp for quite some time. Some folks in the uk and Europe honor the word’s ancient Greek heritage with a hard “C”: kef-ah-lo-pod.) Even those who are familiar with these curious creatures usually know only the living ones-squid and octopuses-not their long-extinct ancestors. (The accent is on the first syllable: sef-ah- lo-pod. Nevertheless, most people know a bit about dinosaurs, while they’ve never heard of cephalopods. Dinosaurs weren’t around for nearly as long as cephalopods. I could just as easily have been describing dinosaurs, except for one small hint: the stupendous length of the animals’ tenure. Of course, I’m talking about cephalopods. Only a humble few of their descendants survive to keep us company today. During their 400 million years of glory they diversified to fill every niche, from voracious predator to placid grazer-and then a global cataclysm almost completely wiped them out. Some grew to monstrous size, the largest animals the earth had ever seen. Long before humanity was even a twinkle in the eye of the first mammal, our planet was ruled by strange and fearsome creatures. ![]()
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