~PousazPower

No, really. I'm just kidding. Info and ideas for Gossipiboma are available for everyone, but I am disclosing a lot of my stuff from this small online audience ! So far I have:

10 Maps
Over 108 sculptures, ranging in size from 4 to 30 centimeters.
139 vertebrate species for the continent of Quellaka alone
14 plates of non-notopeltid taxa
3 plates of notopeltid skeletons
Innumerable plants
And much more is coming.

However, a lot of these, including the vertebrates of Quellaka, are merely penciled sketches and lineart in a sketchbook ( knows what I'm talking about ). I organize my ideas continent by continent, working out the various fauna in individual sections, for instance, the Gordle Woods of southern Quellaka, and in that region, I devote a page to each major community or taxonomic group, like canopy life or mammals (yes, those exist too!).

After I've worked out all the major taxa of animals, I figure out how to put them on a cladogram. I find that this method is a heck of a lot more fun and challenging, seeing how it mimics the way actual taxonomy works on a planet like Earth. You have to figure things out and make discoveries, and when new stuff comes along, you have to work that into the grand scheme of things, rather than having a godlike "master plan" for everything.
I've also been thinking about how notopeltids reproduce (this is very interesting and insect-like), how their eyes evolved, and other anatomical details.

I have officially reached a level of artistic content usually reserved for frumpy taco porpoises! The big Five-O was originally going to be my complete cladogram of Gossipiboman animals, which I will be posting eventually, but my lack of sufficient pictures of neostome calcaripods has restricted that. Instead, it's a picture of a bunch of random mini sculptures I've made, several of which are examples of my huge accumulation of small critters I've made over the years, which number in the thousands.

Anyway, I have a taxonomy question that has been rattling around in my brain: Why are phyla so sacred?
When people discovered that birds evolved from reptiles, and later when they began to accept cladistics, nobody bothered to get rid of the class Aves and merge it into "Reptilia", but when they realized that the phylum Echiura was actually a clade of derived annelids, they had to lump it in as a family of Annelida. Why do phyla and genuses have to remain monophyletic, while classes can be paraphyletic. I suppose the fact that phyla like Echiura and Acanthocephala are so obscure allows them to be absorbed, but it's still a bit annoying. In the words of Garrison Keillor, "I don't know, I...just don't know, you know?"

Also, I now "have to" post this in my journal because I did it:

Leave a comment and I will:

a) tell you why I friended you,
b) associate you with something - fandom, a song, a colour, a photo, etc.,
c) tell you something I like about you,
d) tell you a memory I have of you,
e) ask something I've always wanted to know about you,
f) tell you my favorite pic of yours,
g) in return, you must post this in your journal.

YES!!! It is finally sunny here in this dreary area of the country, and school gets out in two days! Most of my finals are over, but I still have a biology test, and we're allowed to use notes, so it shouldn't be too hard, but I need to remember what happens during the various phases of meiosis.

Unfortunately, as school goes, so does my friendly neighborhood scanner, so expect a lot more sculpture and writings. I am going to scan a bunch of stuff tomorrow, so I'll have at least some 2D stuff to last through June and early July.

That includes a cross-section of the Quellakan rainforest, plates of the phyla Hydroantha and Plicostomata, and illustrations of Gossipiboman amphibian skeletons.

At the request of , I am going to talk about what I saw on Tuesday.

First of all, here in Seattle, I feel like I'm in Australia or Argentina, or anywhere else on the other side of the world. It is currently raining and in the 50s right now, and on Tuesday, it was dumping buckets of water. And we were going on a field trip to Me Kwa Mooks Beach in West Seattle.

We piled onto a bus, some of us already soaked from walking to school, and arrived at the beach about 25 minutes later. The tide was especially low that day, and the rain finally let up when we got there. Although we did have an assignment, we kind of forgot about it.

We saw:
Pisaster ochraceus [link] One of these huge sea stars was stuck to my friend's hand after he picked it up.
Cucumaria miniata [link]
Evasterias troschelli [link]
Pycnopodia helianthoides [link]
Some kind of burrowing tunicate. had fun sticking fingers her in inhalant siphons.
Lined chiton [link]
Cancer productus [link] picked up one of these giant crustaceans, which promptly bruised her with its claws. After she dropped it back in the water, it crawled over the feet of someone else, prompting many screams.
Pugettia producta [link] These guys are POINTY and they HURT!!!!
Anisodoris nobilis, the sea lemon [link] These guys are supposed to smell like lemons when picked up, but I didn't notice. My first NUDIBRANCHS!
Moon snail [link]
Innumerable limpets and aciculate polychaetes [link]
Tubulanus polymorphus [link] This one broke, as nemerteans are wont to do.
A small brooding mother shrimp with eggs.
A terrebellid polychaete [link]
Goeduck [link]

Anyway, it was fun.

I'd like to start off this journal entry by writing down all of the coolest biological names and terms in existence. This section will be updated every time I remember, discover, or rediscover the Most Awesome, Strange, and Weird names in all of the science of Life.
1. Nyctinasty
2. Mimetaster
3. Suchomimus
4. Loligo (try saying that ten times fast! Come to think of it, say "tidepool tadpole" ten times fast.)
5. Amblypygi (Hi there, kids! I'm Ambly the Piggy!)

Anyway, here's something somewhat related: Although I do consider molecular systematics to be more trustworthy and sensible than basing everything on morphology, I've been reading about annelids lately and Articulata versus Trochozoa. Although Trochozoa is definitely a monophyletic taxon ( ), I have suddenly come up with a bunch of evidence that may support Articulata as a subtaxon of that great group of squids, leeches, Bonella, and sipunculans. The Polychaeta have long been considered the ancestors of arthropods, and the two groups have many possible homologous structures between them, like the presence of segmentation (obviously), ventral nerve chords and dorsal hearts, tagmosis, a slightly different cuticle that might be made chitinous by carb deposits, and of course parapodia. This last point was the most interesting one for me to look at. The generalized arthropod, such as an ostracod or trilobite, has two leg branches, the endopod on the bottom for walking, and the exopod on top for swimming and/or breathing. Similarly, the parapodia of polychaetes are divided into two top and bottom bits, the notopodium and the neuropodium, both of which are used for swimming. In addition, one taxon of polychaetes, the Phyllodocidae has developed its notopodia into gills, much like arthropod exopods. Although this does not indicate direct descent, it's pretty cool. If I got anything wrong here, and I probably did, or if you can provide more evidence that supports arthropods as ecdysozoans, and you probably can, be my guest; I'm just stating some things I realized recently,not start an argument.

On another lophotrochozoan note, I had a really awesome speculative biology idea for the Septibranchia [link] and [link] These derived lamellibranchs have turned their gills into little diaphragms for sucking water and crustaceans through their ginormous inhalant siphons and crushing them in their stomachs. Anyhoo, what if a certain group of nectonic marine predators went extinct and these awesome little clams started getting bigger and inhaling squid and stuff, and they could, like, swim by beating their shell valves like scallops, and Ooh! They could evolve really complex eyesight, like, cephalopod style, and like eat stuff, and, like, jet backward with their exhalant siphon and could have, like, a vestigial foot and ok I'm done now.