I love bats

and moles

Did you know that the smallest mammals are bats (by volume, apparently the Etruscan Shrew has the smallest mass on average (1.95g compared to the bat's average 2g), but who's weighing all these bats and shrews?) 

 

But not this guy

this is a paniki or kabog, known in the west as the giant golden-crowned flying fox

it's so large and furry

finally a bat big enough to hug

I would like to go to the Philippines to hug this guy

Also you must notice that it has large ears and eyes

and they look like very normal and mammalian. The nose is snout shaped like other mammals (dogs)

This guy does not echo locate. You know this because of its normal mammal face. They use their large eyes and ears to sense stuff and do not bounce sound waves

This is the smallest bat

It is also the smallest mammal 

How cute!! but i cannot hug this one (it might die)

WHat the heck??? so cute!!

This bat is also south east asian and it is called Khun Kitti Bat or Kitti's Hog-nosed Bat named after zoologist Kitti Thonglongya. 

They have a classic fucked up bat face that echolocators have

You can see that their nose/mouth area is looking kinda messy. These are leaf nosed bats that have that structure to make calls to echolocate. As such, they have small eyes compared to good eyesight bats.

So far it is believed that all bats come from the same common ancestor and different mammals did not convergently evolve to become flying mammals. This makes a lot of sense and evolving into a powered flight animal seems very unlikely.

No one knows what was the common ancestor to all the bats. They assume is some sort of flappy glidey mammal like a sugarglider but no fossil has been discovered here. It was like suddenly bats arrived and even the oldest fossils of bats look so much like current bats

It's possible that their ancestor lived in a particular geography that did not present good conditions for fossilisation, but as soon as flight was gained, the bats were able to leave and go literally anywhere and more bats in more places = more fossils

See, like this diagram hypothesises that their common ancestor is a non flying mammal, that branched off into phylogenies that gained flight at different times. I think this is probably not the case

I think it's probably more like this where 1 "species"* of bats gained flight and then went on to be the common ancestor of all bats

obviously it's not impossible but it would be pretty shocking that the same mammal went on to have separate lineages that independently evolved flight

i guess if the environmental pressures were the same?

But it's unlikely that we will ever know. The flappy glidey mammals probably did not fossilise well so we won't know what came before the bats

*species is a useful term but it is contextual.. it is not solidly defined (because biology is messy and unpredictable) as it has to be used in a case by case way. there are always exceptions

hi everyone

 hello friends

let me tell you all about my latest obsession in lieu of doing my desk job (technically i am on lunch break it's fine). it is related to tannu tuva. tuva is today a republic inside the russian federation, but for a brief moment in time was a country of its own bordering mongolia and the ussr. i think the republics of russia in siberia and central asia (and the caucuses too but that's besides the point) are super fascinating places. they are essentially their own countries with their own very long and distinct histories inside the modern country of russia. there are many different peoples that we basically never hear about in our parts of the world because they don't have their own nation states - tuvans, buryats, etc. the groups inside this part of the world have connections all over the place because all people are interconnected. there are many turkic groups distantly connected to the people of turkey and azerbaijan, there are groups of uralic peoples with distant ties to finland, estonia and hungary, and most cool there are the yeniseian people (today just the ket i think) who are demonstrably related to indigenous north americans!! they are today decently inland in siberia but their language is related to the languages of alaska, canada, california and arizona/texas. there's dna evidence backing up this connection too. that's crazy to me.

anyway sorry that's a tangent. the thing i am super into atm is the tannu tuva national anthem. it is called the tuvan internationale. i think i have heard every rendition of it on youtube so here's maybe the best one (imo):

 

how good is it!! not what you traditionally expect from a national anthem. the throat singing. the key change. the female choir in the second verse. the pacing of the drums. i legit cannot get it out of my head. i keep finding myself singing it to myself.

here is a version by huun huur tu, a famous ""world music"" band from tuva. the album is called 60 horses in my herd which i think is a really good name for an album. when i eventually get a record player i will seek out a vinyl copy of this album.

in general like every single tuvan song is a banger. there are no misses.but this one in particular just really gets my heart.

...but anyway yes we all fall down the central & north asia rabbit hole at some point in our lives right. you guys have felt the call of the steppe too right? daydreaming of sunsets and golden grass and mountainous horizons and taking pride in your herd of horses instead of sit at computer all day bullshit? (yes i am very aware that that lifestyle that i am imagining does not exist, probably never really existed, and is a very glorified propagandised image. nationalism produces embellished imagery. but the image is extremely alluring to dream about, real or not)

thank you for listening to my ted talk ig. i hope you also enjoyed the tuvan internationale

rererip daft punk

rerip daft punk

did yuo know

 that spanish has two words for mountain ranges.

the word 'sierra' is for a smaller grouping of mountains, whereas 'cordillera' is for a large mountain range. groups of mountains inside a cordillera can be called a sierra. 

i just think it's neat that there's a geographical classification that exists in spanish and not english (or italian, which is strange because it's usually very similar to spanish). 

(and also that spanish has other distinctive geographical categorisations different from english that isn't "the americas is one continent")

thank you for reading my blog post.

rip daft punk

thank you blogger

 for sending me an email saying that last post from 2011 was flagged as community-restricted and then 5 minutes later re-emailing me that the post has been re-instated, in the process changing the timestamp of the post so that it shows at the top of the feed

wth lol it's a 11 year old post whose body is "....."

is an intern at blogger training the post detection algorithm or something here what's going on like this is not the only time this stuff has come up recently

Trials.

...

song of the year 2022

not even kidding

i unironically love skip-hop but like

but it's so hard to defend when like. big boys in the scene bliss n eso (remember the sea is rising) put out a music video where one of them unironically says the line 'catch these rats like pickle rick did' (2:50 in the video) while wearing joker makeup

i mean i dont heaps listen to bliss n eso. i am not the target demo of a white guy who smokes weed and watches basketball. but still

hey remember 2009

oh no rude they blocked it.please go through to youtube it's good i promise

Great song

Fight ! Kikkoman

happy january

 it is january

happy october

 it is october