A Good Day For Science

We had a bit of a two-fer today.  First, female chimpanzees making spears...and almost certainly using them to hunt bush babies.  The evidence is only preliminary and the link between tool and ultimate action is still somewhat tenuous, but I'm trying to figure out a different reason to strip down long sticks, sharpen the end of them and then pound them into tree hollows.  It's certainly an intriguing first step and suggests that early hominid were probably using tools for quite awhile before moving into the medium of stone.  It also threatens to turn the regular hunter/gatherer paradigm upside-down.

...initially I had a joke about women, violence and PMS, but decided it just wasn't all that funny.  I'm sure someone else will come up with it independently, though.  Maybe their version won't flop before lift-off.

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And for all the cephalo-philes out there (and LJ seems to have a lot of them), the first intact specimen of a Colossal Squid, the Giant Squid's larger, beefier brother (who also has large hooks on his tentacles).  They've got it on ice in the trawler that caught it, and I'm looking forward to more pictures in the near future.

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Finally, just for kicks, another National Geographic film clip about Ornithological Courtship Behaviors that tries very hard to be amusing.  If you enjoy science stand-up comedy* listen to the narration, otherwise, just enjoy some fairly striking feather-dance.


*What is it about science and humor?  A good 2/3rds of my science teachers, right up through college, thought themselves to be the next Robin Williams...or perhaps Henny Youngman.  The other 3rd were pretty much devoid of all sense of humor and quite possibly lit chalk-dust scented candles to relax at the end of a hard day's lecturing.