I've been reading Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, in the frantic minutes between stopping work on my Owlcon round and falling into a desperate sleep. It's an excellent book about the evolutionary origins of human anatomy, aimed at the layman.
Why is facial anatomy so complicated for doctors in training to learn? Because various parts of the face arise from the first and second gill arches, which have migrated from their simple place at the top of the neck all over the face, dragging nerves and muscles behind them to mark their path.
Neil Shubin is the lead discoverer of Tiktaalik, the fish with wrists you may have heard about last year.
One of Shubin's points about Tiktaalik is that it's scientifically important because it's so completely unsurprising. That is, Shubin's discovery went something like this:
- We know about Eusthenopteron, a Devonian lobefin fish from around 385 mya, with a humerus, but nothing else armlike about the fin.
- We know about Icthyostega and Acanthostega, umambiguous tetrapods (amphibians) from the Devonian about 365 mya, with full legs and feet.
- We're pretty sure, based on Jenny Clack's work on the limbs of the 'stegas, that legs evolved to help move around shallow water, so you want to look in river deltas and floodlands.
- So we want to look in Devonian rocks formed in river deltas and floodlands around 375 mya, and we'll find a lobefin who's turning into a tetrapod.
The oil geologists have surveyed the whole world, so it's pretty easy to just look up "375 mya river sediments", and off to the Arctic went Shubin and his team, where they found Tiktaalik, a shallow water lobefin fish with an arm and a wrist, but not a foot.
It was exactly what they expected, exactly where they expected to find it. Practically boring, but precisely because of that, it's a triumph for science.
To quote XKCD: Science. It works, bitches.
Three Oz books I will probably not write:
- Dorothy in the Frozen South of Oz: The Wizard sends Dorothy, the Tin Soldier*, and the Glass Cat to explore the new fairyland he's discovered at the South Pole, where they have many adventures with the creatures and tyrannical ruler of Uq. Featuring Ominable the Snow Monster and Franklin, the cast iron man with a stove in his belly.
- The General of Oz: The General of one of the militaristic little subkingdoms of Oz (Battleburg, possibly) gives Ozma, the Princesses of Oz, the Wizard, and Glinda, gifts (diadems and the like, with emeralds, rubies, sapphires, topazes, and amethysts to symbolize the four regions of Oz plus the Emerald City) that control their minds. Soon he is engaged to Ozma and ruling Oz. It's up to Omby Amby, the Soldier with the Green Whiskers, to find allies, start a rebellion, and save the day.
- The Warlock of Oz: Ozma grants a charter for a Good Witch of the West, so Nick Chopper (the Tin Woodsman, King of the Winkies) starts a competition to find someone for the role. A boy disguises himself as a girl (or transforms himself into a girl) in order to take part in the competition. Harry Potter, Oz-style, slash The Apprentice, as the winner will become a trainee under Glinda and/or the Wizard. There's room for some reprise of the denouement of The Marvelous Land of Oz, too, original or reversed.
*Not the Tin Woodsman, but another guy who had the same thing happen to him. It's not as rare as you think.
It wouldn't be a horrible idea to merge the first two of these, either. The takeover in Oz strands Dorothy in Uq since the Wizard isn't available to retrieve her. The ruler of Uq becomes friends with the General and they plot the takeover of other fairylands. Dorothy is able to escape, hook up with Omby's team, and save the day. Thematically, bringing in Queen Zixi of Ix and King Evardo of Ev would be appropriate. At the end, tease the fairylands of Aj and Yk.
