My money says that’s what plesiosaurs were like: fast underwater, extra padding for buoyancy, long neck. Look at their skeletons!
It’s just like this:
They’re basically large horizontal penguins with a long tail and spiky teeth.
OH SHIT THEY PENGUINS!!
OH SHIT PLESIOSAUR PENGUIN!!!!!!!!!
This is the inherant problem with most reconstructions. It’s just unknown how much fat the animals really had.
Except it’s not, always, and we do have ways to infer or estimate. While shrinkwrapping, yes, has been a problem in palaeoart before, we are doing better. Many modern palaeoartists, such as Mark Witton and Emily Wolloughby, are far more mindful of representing proper body mass and soft tissues.
Things such as fat distribution, body shape, and mass, can be calculated by studying bones, or even seen if we happen to get a well preserved specimen with soft-tissue evidence. We actually do have some soft-tissue fossils of plesiosaurs!
A penguin-shaped plesiosaur is unlikely for a few reasons. For one, plesiosaurs and penguins swam in very different ways. Secondly, the widely accepted hypothesis for the very long neck of plesiosaurs, is to reduce their profile in the water and allow them to ambush shoals of fish - hence why they are usually reconstructed with such thin necks.
While ideas like this are fun for a bit of a laugh, don’t dismiss the very real science that goes into palaeontological reconstructions.
Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus by Mark Witton, showing a non-shrinkwrapped idea of what plesiosaurs may have looked like - including a tail fluke not often found in popular reconstructions.
“Most of what you think you know about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is wrong.
This is the model that we all learned in psych 101 is wrong [image of Maslow’s pyramid is shown] where our basic physiological needs are at the bottom of the pyramid and achieving one’s full individual potential is at the apex.
What you may not have known is that Maslow spent 6 weeks with the Blackfoot First Nation in the summer of 1938. He learned about their worldview and the Blackfoot Tipi, appropriated and misrepresented their perspective to establish his own Maslow’s hierarchy, and then didn’t give them credit.
[Image of Maslow’s pyramid and Blackfoot tipi shown, described below]
According to the Blackfoot Tipi, self-actualization is at the bottom of the pyramid. In the middle we have belonging and community actualization, where people take care of each other and help each other with their basic needs. And at the top, we have cultural perpetuity, which is teaching each other how to live in harmony with the land and achieve community actualization through generations.
It makes so much sense, right? Taking care of oneself is not enough. We need to take care of each other and our community.
This is why we need to decolonize psychology.”
If anyone wants to learn more about this I suggest watching the late Narcisse Blood’s interviews on Maslow and the influence of Blackfoot worldviews on his work thru the Blackfoot Digital Library, they’re very in-depth
Eldon Yellowhorn also discusses Maslow and Blackfoot ways of knowing but I forget which interview it’s in
Also this is good if you’re interested in a very short introduction to tipi construction and their use as homes and visual records of important knowledge:
I much prefer the Siksika model to Maslow’s. It places the individual at the base of the tipi, and the existential objective in that model is literally cosmic in scale. A self-actualized individual can better contribute to the community, and a self-actualized community and culture can perpetuate itself through time. The goal is so much larger than the realization of your own self, it’s about being a part of a greater whole and ensuring it lasts into perpetuity.
The story depicted a human astronaut, a representative of the Galactic Republic, visiting the planet Cybrinia inhabited by robots. He finds the robots divided into functionally identical orange and blue races, one of which has fewer rights and privileges than the other. The astronaut decides that due to the robots’ bigotry, the Galactic Republic should not admit the planet. In the final panel, he removes his helmet, revealing himself to be a black man.
Apparently the Comics Code Authority tried to prevent the author from making the main character black.
Boy did they! It took the writer (and the company) threatening the CCA with a lawsuit and telling the guy to fuck off (literally) to get this thing printed:
Comic Historian Digby Diehl recounted in Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives:
This really made ‘em go bananas in the Code czar’s office. ‘Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us’, recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. ‘I went in there with this story and Murphy says, “It can’t be a Black man”. But … but that’s the whole point of the story!’ Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. ‘Listen’, he told Murphy, ‘you’ve been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business’. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I’ll sue you’. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. ‘All right. Just take off the beads of sweat’. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. ‘Fuck you!’ they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form.[18]
You know, it’s times like this that I am deeply comforted, knowing that history isn’t just everyone being nice and polite and better than the current generation. Sometimes it really is just people bellowing swear words over the phone to get shit done.
OH WOW
And by the same token, the past was not a flat, monochrome landscape of bigotry. This comic came out in 1953. That is a full year before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, meaning not only was segregation the law of the land, but the process of dismantling it hadn’t even begun. Integration wasn’t even a political topic yet, because there was no integration actually happening, and as far as everyone in 1953 had reason to believe, there wasn’t going to be any any time soon.
And yet, in 1953, two white Jewish guys from Brooklyn not only wanted to put out this comic, but were willing to swear at the Comics Code Authority and threaten to hold a press conference – which, by the way, was enough of a threat that the censors did back down; they didn’t laugh and say “Who would care about your press conference?”
And, not only that, but in the end they did put out the comic, this comic that at the time all but explicitly said the United States of the day would not be fit to join the Galactic Republic.
