TGIF Bonus: What is that kid drawing?

Something brilliant...


Even better if it had been an octopus.

More like this

As boneless, gelatinous bags, octopuses rarely find themselves preserved as fossils but just this week it was announced in the journal Palaeontology that three new 95,000,000 year old octopus fossils have been discovered. These are the oldest on record. So what does an octopus fossil look like?…
There's a great octopus story coming your way tomorrow. For that reason, I thought it was about time to republish this - the first ever post I wrote for Not Exactly Rocket Science, about the ever-amazing mimic octopus. This article was a game-changer for me. I submitted it to the Daily Telegraph's…
In yesterday's Friday Cephalopod, I asked, "Where are the tattoos?" I guess I was being too obscure — I was referring to the latin name of the animal, Octopus maorum, which just means Maori octopus. Anyway, sometimes being too oblique pays off, because Ryan and Sean replied by sending me photos of…
Maybe with a little butter and garlic. This article makes a troubling point: if cephalopods are so smart, shouldn't we feel some guilt about eating them? I think I actually agree with some of the ethical issues raised, and probably should hesitate to kill and eat something like the octopus. However…

Does anybody else find it ironic that its a whale?

would it help Craig if you thought of it as a cloud of octopus ink...?

What's japanese for 'yummy'?

This one sorta hit home for me. I have a four-year-old son who is obsessed with deep sea creatures. When he plays in a sandbox, he doesn't make castles, he makes hydrothermal vents. He wants to be a tomopterid for Halloween. This stuff is not considered "normal." LOL!

Louise, you son is the coolest 4 year old in the world. My 2.75 year old not far behind. When I gave a choice between Wonder Pets, Backyardigans, Berenstain Bears or Planet Earth. He always wants to see Planet Earth! Or this Jeff Corwin DVD we have with lots of different animals. He loves the seasonal forests episode of Planet Earth as well as the deep sea and shallow seas episodes.

Well, KZ, now you see why I found this great blog! I actually have to do "research" in order to answer my son's questions. His favorite videos are Blue Planet (he's seen "The Deep" part probably 30 times), Planet Earth (the "Ocean Deep" section), and two things I taped for him off PBS: "Oceans in Glass: Behind the Scenes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium" and "Kings of Camouflage" (about the cuttlefish). We recently took him to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, and instead of wanting to see the dolphin show or the beluga whale or the penguin stuff, he wanted to see kelp, coral, and moon jellies.

We got him that Claire Nouvian book, "The Deep," and he's just started to become interested in prehistoric sharks, so we got a book for kids from the library called "Paleo Sharks" and he loves it. It's kind of funny to have a four-year-old who knows who Mike DeGruy is--LOL--but I think the kid got interested in prehistoric sharks after watching "The Perfect Shark" during Shark Week. It was really the only thing he could watch because I try to keep him away from the fright/gore stuff for now.

I recently asked my son, "If you could be any creature besides a person, what would you be?" He thought for a second and said, "Unidentified species."

Louise, you get mom of the year award here at Deep Sea News!

My son also likes Attenboroughs Life in the Undergrowth and Microcosmos, highly recommend. Nothing gets rolling like watching monkey though. He laughs hysterically when a chimp beats the crap out of an intruder from another troop. Not sure what to think about that actually... He's just too young to understand they are not playing around and wrestling lol.