Six minutes in and very glaring belly. How'd I miss that? Geez.

This is what I'm saying.

Happy belated birthday, aurelia!

I'm not quite ready for the alternative yet ...

Sure. Let your little fear of the Big Dark twist this. Birthdays ... One More goose-step toward the Abyss.

Do people know about this? How come I didn't?

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the Eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30-33 cm. Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are amphibious, spending only their early life and the period of their mating season in their ancestral aquatic environment. Because of the moistness of the rainforests and specialized skin adaptations, they are able to keep from becoming desiccated for prolonged periods of time, but given the chance they would prefer resting in pooled water.

An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusk), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Adaptations its ancestors originally evolved in the three dimensional environment of the sea have been put to good use in the spatially complex maze of the coniferous Olympic rainforests. The challenges and richness of this environment (and the intimate way in which it interacts with it,) may account for the tree octopus's advanced behavioral development. (Some evolutionary theorists suppose that "arboreal adaptation" is what laid the groundwork in primates for the evolution of the human mind.)

Reaching out with one of her eight arms, each covered in sensitive suckers, a tree octopus might grab a branch to pull herself along in a form of locomotion called tentaculation; or she might be preparing to strike at an insect or small vertebrate, such as a frog or rodent, or steal an egg from a bird's nest; or she might even be examining some object that caught her fancy, instinctively desiring to manipulate it with her dexterous limbs (really deserving the title "sensory organs" more than mere "limbs",) in order to better know it.

...

Although the tree octopus is not officially listed on the Endangered Species List, we feel that it should be added since its numbers are at a critically low level for its breeding needs. The reasons for this dire situation include: decimation of habitat by logging and suburban encroachment; building of roads that cut off access to the water which it needs for spawning; predation by foreign species such as house cats; and booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle and sasquatch.

Oh gawd - the image of housecats hunting tree octopuses just cracked me up....

Apparantly this site has fooled a number of people - supposedly some poor students wrote reports based on info at this site.

How in the Hell do you surf in such away that way that you bring up Tommyrot's last?

I love the tree octopus.

Aurelia, I bookmarked that for when I have more active brain cells.

I want a tree octopus.

Gotcha. Take care of your head.

How in the Hell do you surf in such away that way that you bring up Tommyrot's last?

From this blog entry on Catastrophism, which is a theory even more bizzare than the tree octopus.

Oh, I gotta post something from that blog link....

Velikovsky explained the miracles of the Old Testament by suggesting a complicated astronomical scenario. Sometime prior to 1500 BC, an enormous chunk of the planet Jupiter launched itself into space, leaving behind a giant red scar. This chunk of Jupiter would eventually become the planet Venus, but for the time being, careened through the inner solar system as a giant comet.

The comet Venus crossed the path of Earth at least twice. The first passage caused the plagues of Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea in the Exodus story. At this time Venus knocked the Earth off its axis, killed all the mammoths, rained hydrocarbons on the Middle East, which soaked into the ground to become petroleum deposits, rained carbohydrates on the Middle East, which fed the escaping Hebrew slaves, and produced floods, mountain risings, and most catastrophic events described in the mytologies of all peoples. Fifty-two years later, Venus returned again to restore the Earth to its old axis and stop the sun for an hour so Joshua could kill more Canaanites at Beth Horon.

After that, Venus knocked Mars out of its orbit. Mars encountered the Earth a couple times, again adjusting its orbit and axis. Eventually, everyone settled into their current orbits sometime around the dawn of classical Greek history.

When I was in third grade or thereabouts, I read an article about this in Reader's Digest that treated it seriously. Even at that age I knew that this theory was complete bullcrap, and could have pointed out several things that made it impossible....