GET OFF THE INTERNET, TELL YOUR BOSSES YOU ARE SICK, GO HOME AND WRITE!

Oh, Lord, yes. Seriously. Do this. Sick, family emergency, something. Just go the hell home and get started.

Also, THAT FUCKING ROCKS!

[link]

Dinosaur fish pushed to the brink by deep-sea trawlers

After surviving for millions of years, the coelacanth is threatened by commercial fishing fleets

It is not every day that you come face to face with a dinosaur dating back 400 million years, but for the fishermen in Kigombe on Tanzania's northern coast it has become almost routine.

In the middle of Kigombe, a village of simple huts on this breathtaking edge of the Indian Ocean, a young fisherman stood proudly before a large green plastic container. Ceremoniously he reached inside and hauled out a monster of a fish, slapping its 60kg (132lb) of flesh on a table, where three children gawped at its almost human-like 'feet'. This is a living fossil, a fish with limbs, a creature once believed extinct: a coelacanth.

Now it seems that man may have discovered the fish just to eradicate it, as ever deeper trawling throws up serious fears for the already dwindling populations of the fish, which lives at depths of between 100 and 300 metres (328ft to 984ft).

The appearance of these creatures off the Tanzanian coast is a dramatic and as yet unfinished chapter in the extraordinary story of the coelacanth, an ancient fish that was 'rediscovered'. The coelacanth evolved 400 million years ago - by contrast Homo sapiens has been around for less than 200,000 years - and was believed to have gone the way of the dinosaurs until one was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

The fish has a remarkable physiology - it has no backbone, but an oil-filled 'notochord' and four limb-like appendages, with stubby fins. It has a double tail and gives birth to as many as 26 young at one time. It is believed to gestate for 14 months and may live for more than 80 years. The young develop inside the mother, attached to the outside of a huge yolk-filled egg of about 100mm (3.9in) in diameter.

Poor coelacanths.

Awesome Allyson! Lots of write-ma!

Go Allyson! Write Allyson!

Eeek. I remember reading a book about the (Western) discovery of the coelecanth and the piecing together of its enormous significance when I was a kid -- it may even have been a pre-crapping-out-Scholastic book. I probably read that book twenty times in the fifth grade; a detective story, with scientists and Asian marketplaces and a dinosaur fish -- it had every thrilling thing I wanted out of a book, except for the sad lack of swordfights, archery contests and talking lions.

Please, please, someone, the universe or the Universe or someone, be smarter than us and please let us not add the coelecanth to the painfully long list of spectacularly cool and improbable things we've stumbled on and then fucked up.

coelecanth

Good god, you just can't take us anywhere.

I am deeply ashamed.

Go Allyson , Go!

Write the shit out of that thing, Allyson!!! And I concur with the calling out sick. Everybody gets sick after being on vacation, right? From the bad airplane air?

it had every thrilling thing I wanted out of a book, except for the sad lack of swordfights, archery contests and talking lions.

New SciFi Channel Saturday night movie - Coelemanth! A genetically-engineered combination of human/coelecanth DNA. It swordfights Mansquito.

This photoshopped pic makes my eyes hurt: [link]