Notices by neville park (nev@social.coop), page 44

"We want to own the goddamn servers, OK?" At Slate, Casey Fiesler writes about the origins of the fanfiction platform AO3, what sets it apart from previous sites, and why its Hugo nom is welcome and deserved: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/archive-of-our-own-fan-fiction-2019-hugo-nomination.html

Announcing a new species of Mastodon: Mammut pacificus, found on the west coast of the US! The holotype is Max the Mastodon of the Western Science Center in Hemet, CA, who is quite active on social media despite being extinct for thousands of years.

The paper and 3D specimen models are open access, and research was partly crowdfunded.

Invu with researchers: https://blogs.plos.org/paleocomm/2019/03/27/mastodon-surprise-an-interview-with-alton-dooley/

Paper: https://peerj.com/articles/6614/

🐘

“I believe that cats, descended from semi-social or asocial wild cats and having lived domestically with humans for probably less than 3,000 years, have no concept whatever of a rightful hierarchy of social or moral authority. It does not occur to a cat that any other being has any right, other than might, to its obedience, which is offered only out of immediate self-interest or personal affection. Cats are intensely opportunistic, practical anarchists.”

— Ursula K LeGuin

Reply to this with your current favorite weird nature fact!

Today I learned that sharks don't have a true upper jaw/maxilla; instead they have a bar of cartilage that's not fused to the rest of the skull.

I'd like to follow more plant biologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and environmental scientists. Searching hashtags isn't getting me anywhere. Recommendations?

americans got the A-Team in the ’80s, while here in Canada, due to CanCon rules, we got a CBC production called the Eh-Team