An Otter Cafe

"My parents went to France without me!!!"

Head tilts galore.

Bowling trick shot-- hitting the 3-7 spare and then knocking over the 10 in the neighboring lane.

Criminals are amateurs at violence. Marines are professionals.

Fighter pilot unimpressed by amusement park rides.

Rapid pothole repair.

Poor dog spends his days in a hospital staffed by babies.

Bad babies.

Sneaky fake-sleeping baby.

Feed me.

What in the Noah's Ark?

Swimming with a juvenile jaguar.

Basically a cloned cat.

Confirmed: The ship that Moby Dick was based on, the Essex, was sunk by a sperm whale's head butt.

A "Moby Dick" Shipwreck Survivor Had a Theory About How a Whale Sank His Ship. 200 Years Later, He's Been Proven Right "This wasn't originally our hypothesis, it was Owen Chase's," one evolutionary biologist said of the whaler who first called the animal's forehead a weapon

* Researchers confirmed sperm whales can use their massive foreheads as weapons, validating a theory from the 1800s

* Drone footage captured sperm whales headbutting, systematically documenting the behavior for the first time

* A sperm whale's head can deliver a blow with the force of a bus traveling 40 mph

More than two centuries ago, a teenage boy watched a sperm whale sink his ship. Now, the theory that grew out of that disaster has been confirmed as accurate.

On Nov. 20, 1820, 15-year-old Thomas Nickerson was aboard the whaleship Essex, a specialized vessel designed for hunting and processing whales, when a massive sperm whale sped toward the vessel and struck it head-on. According to BBC Future, the whale swam roughly 900 feet away, turned and charged again, striking the bow. The Essex sank, stranding 20 men some 1,300 miles from land in what became one of the most infamous survival ordeals in maritime history and the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Now, 175 years after the novel's publication, researchers have confirmed how a sperm whale can take down a ship several times its size. The answer, it turns out, was predicted by Owen Chase, the Essex's first mate, who argued that the whale's enormous forehead was a weapon.

"This wasn't originally our hypothesis; it was Owen Chase's," retired evolutionary biologist Dave Carrier told the outlet. "An 18th-Century whaler argued that the forehead was a weapon, and we set out to test that." For two centuries, Carrier said, biologists had largely dismissed the whaler's account, but "the whaler's intuition and experience were probably correct."

...

"Whales are mammals, closely related to animals like deer and rams, where males compete by ramming," he said.

Well, and dolphins and orcas ram things too, and they're first cousins of whales.

A tree after being struck by lightning.

Harrowing: A truck's brakes fail on a mountain road.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:10 PM

| Access Comments