M.J. Rose

I have a bet going with some friends that verifiable evidence of Bigfoot will be discovered in the next fews years. It turns out I am not alone in my insanity – there is a “long bet” going here between Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand on this very matter.

In this vein, the news has just offered something quite unexpected, a true “living fossil”:

Found: Whale Thought Extinct for 2 Million Years

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer | LiveScience.com –

The pygmy whale, a mysterious cetacean …

The pygmy right whale, a mysterious and elusive creature that rarely comes to shore, is the last living relative of an ancient group of whales long believed to be extinct, a new study suggests.

The findings, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, may help to explain why the enigmatic marine mammals look so different from any other living whale.

“The living pygmy right whale is, if you like, a remnant, almost like a living fossil,” said Felix Marx, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “It’s the last survivor of quite an ancient lineage that until now no one thought was around.”

For the complete article click here.

This news is from last month, but just in case you haven’t heard: The “immortal jellyfish” can transform itself back into a polyp and begin life anew.

Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

By NATHANIEL RICH

Takashi Murai

“After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”

For the complete article click here to go to the New York Times.

A Miyakejima wedding. (Creative Commons)
Photo by | Copyright: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-n0Xaek_I0c/TQEmx_q2hsI/AAAAAAAAAAw/Hbbn2Tj7XQg/s1600/Gas_Mask.jpg

This photograph struck me. I borrowed it from the excellent website of geographical mysteries, Atlas Obscura. Here are the details…

GAS MASK TOURISM ON THE IZU ISLANDS

“The brave souls inhabiting Miyakejima, one of Japan’s Izu Islands, an archipelago just south of Tokyo, have a unique problem. Here, the land rests atop an active volcanic chain that has erupted six times in the last century. However, the danger isn’t just from volcanic eruptions, but from the highest concentrations of poisonous gasses (primarily sulfur) in the world regularly leaking up through the ground…”

Fore more on this, click here.