THE TYRANNOSAURUS REX
Tyrannosaurus
rex was the Tyrannosaurus rex of the dinosaur world. You don't need
metaphors when you've got a bite force in excess of the weight of an
African elephant. A single nibble from T. rex makes your whole goddamn
species go extinct. The only thing powerful enough to kill and eat a T.
rex is another T. rex. Still, there's one thing that made every T. rex
grow up to develop a nagging inferiority complex, and that's the
relentless teasing all the other dinosaurs gave him about his itty-bitty
arms.
"Dude, it's how you use it."
Hey,
you guys, T. rex is napping -- quick, tickle his ear hole and let's
watch him try to slap it! And then we'd laugh and laugh, and he'd use
those hilariously inadequate arms to rip us clean the fuck in two.
Though
they were only slightly longer than an average man's, you've got to
remember that a T. rex's arms were attached to nine salivating tons of
pure, fabulous muscle. His biceps alone could curl 430 pounds apiece,
and that's not even taking into account the fact that those guns had
backup in the form of the friggin' nuclear weapons that were his chest
and shoulder muscles. Paleontologists think that a T. rex's arms were
powerful enough to help him push his enormous body up from the ground
after sleeping, or to latch onto a female T. rex during mating.
THE SAND CAT
The
sand cat is one of the world's smallest cat species and a skilled
nocturnal hunter who knows how to avoid any potential larger predator.
It's also a desert dweller in Arabia and the Sahara, which means there
isn't much human encroachment on its habitat. And the established
tradition where the sand cat was the Prophet Muhammad's companion means
no one's developed a taste for eating them.
Want to guess why they're going extinct anyway?
"Oh please don't tell my kitten face any heartbreaking news."
If you guessed "douchebag humans who hunt Earth's cutest animals down for no good reason," you guessed right.
Every
other wild cat species is bigger, scarier, and more impressive of a
target, but for some reason, people still hunt the sand cat
relentlessly.
What's
more logical yet still mind-fuckingly evil is those illegal pet traders
going after sand cats. They basically look just like house cats, which
have been in a Cola War-style popularity contest with dogs for
centuries. Just own a normal cat, jerks. Why must you own the endangered
version?
That adorable little nose makes a compelling case, but still.
Oh,
and the similarities between sand cats and house cats are only
fur-deep, because sand cats are shy, feral, nocturnal, and instinctive
deadly hunters of small things. That doesn't scream "docile pet that
sticks around."
If
somebody doesn't do something for the sand cat and all of the other
animals on this list, soon we'll be reduced to looking at the same cute
pictures of human beings over and over again instead of animal pics, and
that's ... a poor substitute?
http://bigcatrescue.org/sand-cat-facts/
THE SQUID WORM
The
deep sea is made almost entirely out of wrong. It seems everything that
lives more than a few thousand feet below the water's placid surface
was concocted by the maddest of the old gods on his worst day. For
example, this little miracle, which takes the worst and most repulsive
features of both worms and squids and concocts something even more
heinous than the sum of its already quite heinous parts.
Discovered
over a mile under the surface of the Celebes Sea between Indonesia and
the Philippines, this 4-inch cutie is technically known as Teuthidodrilus samae, but its friends call it the squidworm. If it had any. Which it obviously doesn't.
Seriously,
look at that goddamned face. Why are there tentacles coming out of it,
why are those tentacles as long as its actual body, and why are some of
them curly? The answer to all of those questions is, of course, a faint,
high-pitched scream.
Apparently one of the Great Old Ones took a selfie.
Well, almost.
Those
face-tentacles actually serve a real purpose beyond ensuring that you
never eat calamari again. Namely, helping the worm to breathe -- with an
extra few tentacles reserved for eating delicious marine snow, which
generally consists of "fecal material, dead animals, and cast off
mucus."
Oh,
and there are also six pairs of feathers buried in that hot mess that
serve as its nose for reasons God forgot just as soon as the glue-high
wore off. Scientists noted that squidworms have both "seabed-dwelling
and free-swimming characteristics," meaning they inhabit the ill-defined
space between the sea floor and the surface. A sort of oceanic
purgatory, if you will. This suggests that the squidworm may be
a transitional species, evolving as we speak toward securing a more
permanent ecological niche, whatever that may be.
We're going to go ahead and assume it's your soul.
