abominable snowman - a bear tale

The Abominable Snowman (aka. Yeti) has some history behind it. It's a creature that is supposed to inhabit the Himalayas at about the level of the snow line. Pre-19th century there were pre-Buddhist beliefs of some Himalayan people which involved worshiping a "Glacier Being" as a God of the Hunt.

Over the 19th and 20th centuries, many reports have been made of finding large footprints or seeing a creature in the distance walking on its hind legs.

In the 1950's, there was legitimate belief that a large ape like creature actually existed in the Himalayas. This is not really a particularly far fetched sort of idea. These weren't claims that aliens were visiting or that ESP was real, so there were expeditions sent out to try and find the creature.

As a random bit of trivia, it's funny that in 1959 James "Jimmy" Stewart reportedly smuggled the remains of a supposed Yeti in his luggage when he flew from India to London. This is the so called Pangboche Hand. Go ahead and click on that one. It's kind of a surreal story.

Ultimately, all analyzed hair samples claimed to be from a Yeti have turned out to be some other animal. However, the tracks might actually be real tracks created by bears. Britannica claims that at certain gaits, bears place their hind-foot partly over the print of the forefoot thus making a large imprint like an enormous human footprint positioned in the opposite direction.


I wasn't able to find any examples of overlapping prints making prints in the opposite direction, but this page gives a variety of examples comparing prints made by overlapping bear tracks.

bear - something about pic-i-nic baskets

Brown bear

The family Ursidae--aka. bears--are closely related to dogs and raccoons. They are the most recently evolved carnivore, although not all bears are carnivores (e.g. Spectacle bears eat mostly plants). There are many types of bears that I hadn't heard of. Besides Brown, Panda, Black, and Polar, there are also Asian Black bears, Sun bears, Spectacled bears, Indian Sloth bears, and Syrian brown bears.

Asian black bear

Sun bear

Spectacled bear

Indian Sloth bear

Syrian brown bears

A few other notes. Bears use their feet like humans in a plantigrade fashion with heels on ground. They are good at climbing and swimming. Most enjoy honey and sleep through winter, but this apparently does not count as true hibernation. They live 15-30 years wild, but longer in captivity.

beard worm - These are the giant tube worms guarding our heavy water.

The beard worm (Siboglinidae) is a marine invertebrate that lives in tubes on seafloors throughout the world. The members of that family used to be known as the giant tube worms (Pogonophora). The worms never leave their tubes and are usually about 1 mm in diameter, but 10 to 75 centimeters long. The tubes are composed of chitin and are secreted by the glandular forepart of the worm.

The image above is actually of the Worms of Death from the classic 1980's cartoon G.I.Joe. Below you can see what a beard worm actually looks like:

The blu-ray IMAX Under the Sea 3D has some beautiful video of a field of worms living in holes and moving with the water in unison. They aren't tube worms, but they are sort of similar. I wasn't able to find a video clip from that movie, but here's one I did find:

Opah - hot stuff

The Opah is the first and only fully warm blooded fish currently known. There are others that can warm parts of their body, but the Opah is alone in being able to warm its whole body to temperatures exceeding the surrounding water by about 5 degrees Celsius.

We don't know much about it because it lives its whole life in the open ocean at meopelagic depths.

This is a recent discovery, so I obviously didn't read about it in my encyclopedia. But, I thought it was so awesome that I had to mention it.

Celebes black ape (photographer extraordinaire)

This fine looking fellow is a Celebes black ape (aka. Celebes crested macaque).

Britannica indicates that these beautiful creatures are arboreal monkeys from Celebes and surrounding islands in Indonesia. It also mentions that certain tribes see it as an ancestor. I'm assuming that this is not a scientific belief in evolution, although it may be something sort of like that. It's hard to say because wikipedia doesn't mention this and searching failed to turn up anything but other references to Britannica.

If anyone has details of tribal beliefs regarding this creature, please post and let me know!

Perhaps most notably, a Celebes black ape launched a huge discussion about copyright when it took the so-called monkie selfie. Strangely, despite having the decision come down on the side of less copyright, I'm not really satisfied. I personally have a strong belief that copyright should be short and far less intrusive than it is now. Yet, in this case it feels like the photographer got screwed.

In the future I assume he'll use a wireless trigger to take the photos while the monkeys handle the camera.


On a related note, spell check tells me that it is "monkeys" and not "monkies". Also, the musical band is "The Monkees".


MISC:

• Cegled
• Hungarian town. 2 famous speeches were delivered here. The first in 1514 by Gyorgy Dozsa and the second in 1848 by Lajos Kossuth.
• ceiling
• Exposed ceilings led to structural systems (e.g. pipes) which were attractive on their own.
• ceilometer
• Adevice which measures the height of cloud bases using UV light which reflects off of the clouds.
• Celaenae
• City of Phrygia (now Turkey) which was the starting point of the march of 10,000 under Cyrus in 401 BC against Artaxerxes.
• celandine
• poppy flower with poisonous orange sap. Once known as wartweed because it was purported to remove warts.
• celastrales
• Plant order, mostly trees. Has 12 families, 147 genera, and about 2000 species.