Since it’s April Fool’s Day, and Tumblr is sending images of lizards screaming across all our dashboards at hyper-light speeds, I thought it would be a good time to talk about a lizard who April Fooled the entire paleontological community, long before the Mop/Wretched Tooth divide threatened to send our sociopolitical infrastructure crumbling to the ground.
Is it a tenuous connection? Yeah, but I was gonna make this post anyway, so live with it!
Longisquama lived during the Triassic Period, 235 million years ago, in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. It might have been a lizard, as I asserted above, but its place within Reptilia is actually quite uncertain; the only thing known for certain is that Longisquama is a “diapsid reptile”, meaning it could be a squamate, a rhynchocephalian, a crocodilian, or a pre-dinosaur.
Longisquama is distinguished by the row of strange appendanges growing from its back. The purpose of these appendages is uncertain, and has long been the subject of much paleontological debate.
The most iconic version of Longisquama depicts it with twin rows of appendages, rather than the single row preserved in the only known fossil specimen, and shows it using these twin wing-like structures to glide. While this is almost certainly not the case, numerous supposedly serious paleontologists - including Dougal Dixon, speculative evolution writer and long-time peddler of insane made-up garbage - have espoused the theory that Longisquama is the true ancestor of birds.
This makes absolutely zero sense from an anatomical perspective, and was essentially nothing more than a very convenient way for a bunch of die-hard dinosaur traditionalists to deny that birds were the descendants of dinosaurs. Even so, this debate raged on until the shockingly recent year of 2006.
At that time, new studies of the single Longisquama fossil found that the appendages weren’t part of the animal’s body at all.
one picture that sums up the 27 powerful images I didnt bother to look at
So this is the victory pose that replaced Tracer’s old “over the shoulder” pose and now I questions.
You can still easily see Tracer’s butt. The whole reason that was originally given for the first pose being pulled was because they didn’t want to cause offense after someone complained about her butt. What’s the point of going “I’m sorry you were offended by this character’s butt we’ll replace it immediately” and then replace it with a pose where you can still see her butt but from a slightly less direct angle?
I don’t have any problem with either pose on its own. But it really feels like Blizzard capitulated to whiny “THINK OF THE CHILDREN” moral guardians for no goddamn reason.
And maybe I’m missing something, but why couldn’t she just have both poses? They both looked like they fit the character just fine.
“Nintendo fired their employee because of GamerGate!”
Ya’ll can’t even keep a consistent story.
Which one is it? Is GamerGate weak and powerless to the point where nobody listens to them or does GamerGate have so much reach and support that they can convince a huge multi-million dollar company to fire someone?
I know it’s been said before, but it bears repeating: these people talk about GamerGate the way 1600′s Puritans talked about the Devil.
The Devil is powerless before the might of God and His Church…..right up until Ol’ Scratch needs to be blamed for something. Then all of a sudden he’s the terrifying demon at the crossroads, selling unholy miracles for the low low price of your soul.
GamerGate is over, it won.
The name is legacy branding and a bogeyman for regressive leftist game commentators.
It's the personal blog of Super Llama. This is where I spam people's dashes with music posts and reblogs. And there's probably RP stuff going on, too. Llama art can be found over at the art blog.
