Ancient trilobites had eyes made of crystals

Kind of? Just is one. While the video may be neat I am not giving traffic to that asshole.

8 Likes

Kansas is mostly Cretaceous seaway. You definitely want Permian (or ideally older) rock to look at.

2 Likes

I really hope that’s some sort of deep sarcasm there. Flagging just in case.

Yeah, I know. We do got some Mossasaurs! And out west Pteronadons. (SP)

I mostly find crinoid stems and shells.

2 Likes

And Xiphactinus!

Back to trilobites, upstate New York’s a pretty good place to go looking, though I didn’t find any myself the last time I was there.

1 Like

Interesting video, but the Oxygen Revolution occurred almost two billion years before the Cambrian Explosion and was therefore not the cause of it. Seems like a fairly basic mistake for a trained chemist interested in paleontology to make.

1 Like

Depending on the makeup of the design team, the eye could arguably be cause for some promotions and some firings; albeit in a way that makes it even more unsuited to the purposes of creationists.

You’ve got one part mind-boggling stupidity( designing sensor array from scratch? route the cabling through a big hole in the middle and haphazardly in front of the senors!) combined with one part surprisingly effective optimization of the initial terrible plan (sensor array has nasty blind spot? implement signal processing sophisticated enough that many users don’t even know they have one!).

This is about the last thing you’d expect from an intelligent designer handed a blank sheet of paper; but much closer to what you’d expect from ongoing prodding at an insane legacy system you aren’t allowed to rip and replace.

5 Likes

I think in part why creationists make that mistake is the fact they don’t know how human sight works. We think our eyes are perfectly still until we’re drunk or very tired then we notice the saccading of our eyes. So it’s kinda funny considering that perception of our senses is mostly a glorified VR experience where we take tiny slices of information and then fill out the rest in our brain.

2 Likes

Yeah, creationists definitely aren’t thinking “insane legacy system with individually impotent engineers.” No matter how well you work around the flaws, it’s still worse than if you didn’t have them, and all those pointless nonsense elements are going to get an engineer fired. One can look at other eyes that don’t have those fundamental flaws and ask, “Well, shit, why didn’t you make it like those?” (And given that it’s supposed to be the same engineer, it raises serious questions about their mental stability.)
Though come to think of it, a bureaucracy of individually impotent engineers working with insane legacy systems is a version of creationism seen in comedy, for good reason.

3 Likes

6 Likes

I would love to go to Oklahoma and collect. I see some nice specimens from there.

My usual trip for trilobites is to the Marble Mountains in the Mojave desert. Great way to spend a day wandering about, It’s peaceful and quiet out in that part of the desert.

I also know a great place in Colorado for shark teeth.

1 Like

Now that I have time to make a proper post @AndreaJames you are aware the maker of the video is a MRA/Gamergate darling?

ETA And he has been called out here before.

8 Likes

I think the octopus eye is the right way round, so obviously God loves them more. Octopus Jesus was probably better too.

3 Likes

Milkshake ducked!

2 Likes

Nature is fucking lit.

have you seen his videos? the ones where he claims sarkeesian phoned in bomb threats against herself for the publicity?

he has a bro knows best take on feminism and women’s rights. and he doesn’t try to hide it.

i don’t know if anyone knows for sure why twitter suspended him. twitter is not well known for their transparency. nor do they always do the right thing in response to harassment and hateful speech.

my point in citing twitter was to point out he has a history. there doesn’t seem to be a reason to embrace his hate. trilobites or no trilobites.

2 Likes

Is this guy really the best we can do for a science video about trilobite eyes. It’s like posting a video from a guy who did dozens of videos screaming at squirrels, like, his science could be impeccable but I’m not a scientist and I don’t have time to pick the corn out of his shit when I could read a book instead.

2 Likes

I feel the same, though apparently “at least he cites his sources!” justifies his behavior, at least that’s what most of the responses I got said. :roll_eyes:

2 Likes

I ended up hooking up with a guy who works at a museum in CO (I can’t remember the name, I think it is outside Colorado Springs.) He gave me a tour and showed several of the flying reptiles he himself found and named, mostly pulled out of western Kansas. As well as some really big fish. In the back room I got to see the prep work on some, including this 6+foot Coelacanth they were going to send to a museum in Korea.

2 Likes

He does good science youtubes for money, so he’s okay?

3 Likes