You haven't SEEN hostile yet!

^Need to make a new blog for my other muse and just port the name over, rather than try to clean up the mess that it is.

^Except lazy. Ugh.

^I’m not dead, just the muse. Been focusing on the new blog I made early last year.

Innocent teenager the Autobots just rescued: I’m Spike!

Autobots:

What Was It Like When The Cosmic Web Took Shape?

“Although the seeds necessary for cosmic structure were planted in the very earliest stages of the Universe, it takes time and the right resources for those seeds to grow to fruition. The seeds for small-scale structure germinate first, as the gravitational force propagates at the speed of light, growing overdense regions into the earliest star clusters after only a few tens of millions of years. As time goes on, the seeds for galaxy-scale structure grow too, taking hundreds of millions of years to bring about galaxies within the Universe.

But galaxy clusters, growing from the same magnitude seeds on larger distance scales, take billions of years. By time the Universe is 7.8 billion years old, the accelerated expansion has taken over, explaining why there are no larger bound structures than galaxy clusters. The cosmic web is no longer growing as it once was, but is primarily being torn apart by dark energy. Enjoy what we have while we have it; the Universe will never be this structured again!”

When we look out at the Universe today, we find stars bound together in enormous collections known as galaxies, and galaxies clumped together into groups and clusters, which themselves appear to be connected by filaments of matter. This cosmic web took many billions of years to form, though, and the smaller-scale structure formed far earlier in the Universe than the large-scale structure. While it took only tens of millions of years for stars and hundreds of millions for galaxies, it took billions of years for galaxy clusters, and anything you’ve heard about ‘superclusters’ is a mere phantasm.

happy Friday everybody, it’s time for another installment of Weird Biology! and today, you’re going to learn about a goddamn dinosaur.

(yes, I know all birds are technically dinosaurs, but this one is… dinosaurier? dinosaurien? DINOSAURIEST than the rest)

meet the Hoatzin, relic of ages past

*raptor screech*

the Hoatzin is the only member of the family Opisthocomidae, an ancient line of birds that branched off from the rest some 64 million years ago. this would have been just shortly after the event that murdered the shit out of all non-avian dinosaurs. to death. 

Hoatzins are the very last survivors of this ancient line. (I wanted to make a joke here, but that’s actually really fucking tragic)

shit I made myself sad, MORE JOKES

Hoatzins are common pheasant-sized birds that live in the riverside forests of South America, where they survive on a diet of *drumroll* leaves. yum.

seriously, they are one of exactly two known bird species to specialize in leaf-eating, having evolved past their shame trait some 30 million years ago. (the other one is the Kakapo, who mostly just seems confused)

Kakawho?

 their love of delicious delicious leaves gives them a very… distinctive odor, shall we say. this is due to their fermentative digestive process. it has earned the Hoatzin the local name ‘Stinkybird”, which for any Hoatzins reading this, is really more of an affectionate nickname. honest.

but what truly sets Hoatzins apart, and proves their saurian nature, is this. 

HOLY SHIT A DINOSAUR

the hatchlings have fucking claws on their wings. remind you of anything? like maybe, oh I dunno, this guy?

HOLY SHIT A BIRD

Archaeopteryx up there bears a striking resemblance to our Hoatzin friend, which did not go unnoticed by the scientific community (who was actually paying attention this time, they swear). in fact, this uncanny resemblance helped finalize the theoretical link between dinosaurs and birds, which we now know are the same fucking thing. (more or less)

but anyway, the baby Hoatzins use those scientifically-groundbreaking claws to scramble around in trees and avoid predators. also apparently the claws just kind of… fall off?.. when the bird becomes an adult. like, imagine if your fingers all fell off at puberty, how weird would that be? jesus.

(Hoatzins definitely aren’t the only birds with wing claws, but DON’T TELL THEM THAT. they like to feel special.)

“They look nothing li—”

baby ducks act a lot like baby chickens so in the beginning it wasn’t so bad

the main problem is that baby ducks  LOVE water, but baby chickens get very very dead from it,

so you can imagine the mother hens surprise and horror the first time they go by the farm pond and ALL THE BABIES RUN TO THE WATER AND JUMP IN

my grandmother had to come out of the house to investigate all the noise the hen was making

The mother hen was clucking and screeching in distress and running circles around the pond while the duckies were having the time of their lives.

This happened a few more times before Momma hen was like FUCK IT YOU WANNA SWIM SEE WHAT I CARE , and would sit a distance away watching them in the pond.

I scream

You scream

We all scream