It was kind of a dick move to create animals that require air, then confine them to the freaking ocean
If you are talking about dolphins they used to be wolf like creatures that due to scarcity of food they had to hunt in water so they slowly evolved into water mammals, dolphins still have claw bones but they are unnecessary and dolphins will get rid of them with time and will develop abilities to breath under water
Thank you so much!!!! Ancestral creatures are Gorgeous, Valid, Perfectly Reasonable things with legs.
In regards to the first comment, most things in the ocean perform gas exchange anyway so it isn’t that bold of a move – in some respects it’s kind of a fool’s move of terrestrial animals to leave the saline bath that life started off in, since we now have to lug our dumb bodies around, full of carefully balanced metaphorical-saltwater, because our cells are just Like That
regarding the second comment on this thread, dolphins are probably fine mostly as they are, and I would not expect them to “lose” attributes to demonstrate their “evolving/progressing away from their origins.“ People think that evolution is like an unstoppable escalator that either kills you or forcibly moves you from primitive things to sophisticated things, but it isn’t. Things don’t become More Thingish with Time, that’s not how evolution works.
There is no particular evolutionary pressure on dolphins to lose traits that suit their lifestyles perfectly well. Most of the high-pressure challenges that wild dolphins face today – fishing activities, pollution, habitat destruction, food network disruption and climate change – are not going to exert evolutionary pressure on remnant bones; and the act of breathing appears to be as natural to dolphins as, well, breathing.
For example, being able to breathe surface air means that dolphins and whales can move through water that has very low quantities of oxygen (such as highly polluted water) where fish cannot survive, because there is not enough oxygen diffused in the water to maintain a constant supply for fish; whales and dolphins can simply surface to take a gulp of air.
With enormous lungs that are adapted to holding breath for incredibly long periods of time, whales and dolphins can essentially scuba-dive to areas of the ocean that other animals cannot access, as well as eying up things above the surface of the water. In a rapidly changing environment, with food/climate/water all doing things they’ve NEVER done before, this offbeat mammalian funkiness may even be the key towards sticking around and surviving a weird period of history.
Anyway, these are Valid Historical Legges, and evolution is not a straight line from Bad Animals to Good Progressive Animals. As evidenced by how excellent and powerful these ancestral beasties are. They may be ancestral but they are MAGNIFICENT
pictured: a good girl, valid and perfect in herself, a stage of someone else’s evolution but also perfectly complete in herself, somebody’s daughter and somebody’s ancestor but also just somebody in her own right, perhaps not as good at swimming as the cetaceans of the future, but perfectly acceptable in her moment of history, and in all other moments
Sweet princess, if through this wicked witch’s trick, a spindle should your finger prick… a ray of hope there still may be in this, the gift I give to thee. Not in death, but just in sleep, the fateful prophecy you’ll keep. And from this slumber you shall wake, when true love’s kiss, the spell shall break.
It doesn’t matter how terrifying or monstrous or deadly you make your eldritch monster, there’s gonna be a person who hauls themselves out of the sewers to tell you that they will personally fuck it.
This post has so many notes and it’s mostly people calling out their friends for being sewer-dwelling awful cryptid fuckers and I love it. Expose them.
“The older I get, the more I feel that all great books are written from a position of urgency and, unlike Sontag, I believe they must have emotional power. Emotional flatness does not endure because, however much we may admire a book’s textual gymnastics or sagacity in the moment, it is affect that consolidates memory and keeps a novel alive inside us. It does not follow from this, however, that such an emotional response requires “well-rounded” psychological characters, or that literary somersaults or high jinx are forbidden, nor does it mean that great prose fiction has a single emotional register. The force of irony should not be underestimated. Think of Greek tragedy. Think of Don Quixote. Humor may partake of distance, but the belly laugh is memorable. […] Human beings like to feel their art. Feeling is the source of all primal meanings and colors all experience.”
— Siri Hustvedt, “Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later” in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (via atreides)
kototyph 