Science Made Cool

The Man Who Gave Us Vampires

October 25 marks the 254th anniversary of the death of Dom Antoine Augustine Calmet, a theologian and historian who inadvertently spawned the entire cultural phenomenon of vampires. Sparkly Edward, sexy Lestat, scary Dracula -- they owe it all to him.

Dom Calmet was a Benedictine monk who devoted his life to Biblical scholarship, and if you look in the Catholic Encyclopedia, that's what he's best known for. But in 1746 he tossed off a little treatise called "The Phantom World" about spirits, apparitions, and other cool Halloween-themed topics. It was a best-seller in its day -- because, let's face it, if given the choice between reading a thick tome of Biblical exegisis or some cool stories about ghosts and demons, which are you going to pick?

In Part II of his treatise, Dom Calmet collects a number of legends from eastern Europe about . . . vampires. This was apparently the first major exposure western European readers had to the rich vampire lore of the east. And Calmet's creepy anecdotes hit the memetic jackpot with the birth of the Gothic novel. John Polidori's Byronic bloodsucker Lord Ruthven made the vampire a mainstay of Gothic fiction, and a century later Bram Stoker's Dracula made vampires one of the Big Three monsters of the horror world (along with the Werewolf and the Ghost).

Scientists and scholars are often best-remembered for what they consider minor work. I've written before about how Johannes Kepler was really excited about his "Mysterium Cosmographicum" theory of nested Platonic solids, while the Laws of Planetary Motion were just a bit of data analysis. But poor Dom Calmet has it even worse: a Godly man who accidentally inspired a fictional subgenre which has become outright glorification of accursed bloodsucking monsters.

In honor of Dom Antoine Calmet, have a sip of Benedictine this Halloween, and get the stakes sharpened.   

 

The Case of the Nine Dead Icthyosaurs

Mark McMenamin is not a crazy guy. His sanity (and excellent taste) is proved by the fact that he was among the first people to buy a copy of BONE WARS. So when he (and his dynamic spouse Dianna Schulte McMenamin) start talking about ancient giant icthyosaur-killing squids, people pay attention. Lots of people: the story is all over the Web today.

Here's the scoop. Out in Nevada there's a fossil bed with the remains of at least nine great big shonisaurs, a type of icthyosaur. Those were fish-shaped air-breathing reptiles of the Triassic era, and based on their teeth modern scientists believe they ate Triassic squid, much as sperm whales do today.

The mystery about these remains is how come there are nine dead icthyosaurs, all at least forty feet long, all in one place, and all laid out in the same direction?

There have been several suggestions: a mass stranding in shallow water (but the surrounding rock looks like old ocean bottom, not beach); or mass poisoning by some kind of aquatic plant toxin (but that wouldn't normally make the animals all drop dead at the same place).

Mark McMenamin has decided that this is murder, and someone's responsible. His candidate for the killer: Cthulhu.

Well, not quite Cthulhu, but pretty darn close. His theory is that the remains are a deep water garbage midden, left by a very very big cephalopod (100 feet long) which preyed on shonisaurs. This kind of preying on each other relationship exists in modern oceans between sperm whales and giant squids. If you're a sperm whale, sometimes you eat the squid and sometimes the squid eats you.*

For extra creep factor, McMenamin noticed that the disarticulated vertebrae of the shonisaurs seemed to be arranged in neat lines, like pieces of a puzzle. He thinks the cephalopod did that, too.

Cast your mind back to the black abyss of the ancient Triassic seas, where a giant tentacled monster sits atop the bodies of the foolish vertebrates that dove too deep in search of food and fell victim to something greater. The monster rasps the meat off the bones with its beak, and then plays with the left over bits, lining them up and caressing them with its arms in the dark.

Good thing there's nothing like that around today, right? Right? 

*Or not. As our reader Danna Staaf points out, the squids may sometimes make the whales fight for their meals, but they don't eat them. At least not on a regular basis. Presumably because the giant Triassic super-cephalopods lurking on the seafloor chase them away.

Flying Fish, Sort Of

A fish out of water flops – everyone knows that. But while most fish flail in place when they’ve got no water to push on, a few species can flip into a controlled long jump that sends them flying several times their body length in one direction. How far can these fish jump? Take a look at this mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) in flight.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/acg/video/Gambusia_affinis/Gambusia_affinis.mov

Pretty cool, eh? Understanding that jump is the subject of a paper published today in the Journal of Experimental Zoology by Alice Gibb, Miriam Ashley-Ross, Cinnamon Pace, and my former grad school officemate John Long. They noticed that these jumps looked a lot like the movements a swimming fish makes to escape predators _­– called a “c-start” for the characteristic letter-shape the fish bends into – and they figured that the fish were co-opting their aquatic escape behavior for moving efficiently on land. But when they looked more closely, they found that there were some important differences.

                    

For one, on land, the fish don’t bend their tail and head toward the middle of the body evenly as they would in a watery c-start. Instead, they swing head toward tail, bending the body in a sharp curve before a push from the tail launches the fish into the air. The difference seems small, but it implies that the fish are using the same set of muscles differently on land and underwater. So if one of these fish gets stranded on land, the same muscles that produce a rapid-fire snap-and-dart in the water can shift to a slower rhythm that gives the fish a better chance of getting back in the water. 

Research paper: Gibb AC, Ashley-Ross MA, Pace CM, Long JH Jr. 2011. Fish out of water: terrestrial jumping by fully aquatic fishes. J. Exp. Zool. 313A: DOI 10.1002/jez.711

(And more videos at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/acg/video.html)