Ben Babbles

What is this strange little beast? It’s a velvet worm! Velvet worms are members of the order Onychophora, a group of animals closely related to arthropods and tardigrades (aka water bears). True to their name, velvet worms are soft and squishy, with skin covered in tiny lumps called papillae. Each papilla ends in a sensory bristle that helps the velvet worm sense its environment; it’s like being covered entirely in whiskers! They’re not completely squishy though, since they have retractable claws on each foot, as well as a pair of mandibles hidden inside their mouths.

As you can probably guess, velvet worms are predators, mostly eating insects and other small animals. But they don’t just chase down their prey, they lasso it. On either side of a velvet worm’s head is a special structure called an “oral papilla.” Inside each one is a network of slime glands that can project long strings of sticky slime that’s used to trap prey.

See how the velvet worm is waving its papillae around? That helps the slime strings form a sort of crude net, allowing it to trap prey more effectively. Velvet worms are also surprisingly smart about how they use their slime; they will aim for the legs, rather than the bodies, of their prey, and have even been known to target spiders’ fangs to prevent them from biting!

Velvet worms don’t just use their braininess to hunt though. They also form surprisingly complex social groups! Velvet worms hunt and live together in “packs” of around a dozen or so, lead by a dominant female. She maintains her position by being the biggest, toughest, and meanest of the group, and she always gets first pick when it comes to food, followed by the other females, then the males, and then the babies. Despite their surprisingly aggressive behavior with one another, velvet worms are never aggressive with juveniles, and will let the babies climb all over them. In a lot of ways, their social structures mimic those of mammals, which I personally think is really neat!

No letter is pronunced the way it should.

fucking look at this shit though

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass.  They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that.  And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that.  One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking.  Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

Bill Nye now:

“he’s clearly in the background of this golf photo! that proves he wasn’t at the crime scene!!”

as opposed to, like

“this guy in prison sent us his cool golf fanart but we didn’t want to promo a serial killer, so we looked into his case and thought it looked pretty flimsy and probably racially motivated”

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