I was sent this story of Russian workers in Chelyabinsk discovering a 5-foot long monster prehistoric fish that attacked them and that they had to kill with their equipment. Does this look like a horrible monster to you? Does it even look like a fish?
I could tell at a glance that neither was the case. I got a quick confirmation from our expert invertebrate taxonomist down the hall, Tracey Anderson, and I can assure you that it is a branchiopod crustacean, a poor abused tadpole shrimp. Even the photography tells you that this was a little guy, with a length measured in, at best, inches not feet.
Those Russian construction workers must be real wimps that they were frightened by a tiny crustacean. Other photos show it being crushed by some metal object, with nothing in the field of view to show the scale…unlike this photo.
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I bet that the dime is the size of Pentagon.
I grew those at home for my daughter. Definitely not the scariest things in the world. But pretty cool.
Ah, good old Triops cancriformis. Probably 5 cm long, though it could be 10...
Superficially, when viewed from above, it does look like an anaspid vertebrate or the like. I guess that counts as a "fish" in the widest sense...
This was Chelyabinsk. They threw old nuclear reactors in the local reservoirs in the bad old days: those things could easily be 5 feet long and have an appetite for workers. Or the workers could have been completely bent on contaminated vodka.
Kill them with their equipment. Fnar fnar.
Ah, look at all those mutated people
I think that is actually Dinesh D'Souza.
Hey PZ I love your blog, I read it everyday and have your rss alert my blackberry with new posts lol - you're an interesting person and so keep it up -
I heard about you from Richarddawkins.net/ and am GLAD I DID!
Cheers from central north america lol-(oklahoma sounds better that way)
Hey Pz, I love your blog, am addicted! The RSS alert for my blackberry is cool. Keep up the scientific education!
You've got a broken link to the crushed-by-metal photos, PZ.
It looks to me like some variant of a horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) - from the underside at least, and except for the tail. The size would be about right, in terms of the body of the beast. They are not the handsomest of creatures, but they are not at all aggressive.
These guys are common in the canyon country of the southwest. We love to watch them in ephemeral pools and water pockets. The first time I saw them was in a pool on Moab's Slickrock Trail while taking a break from with a mountain bike group. There are plenty of uranium mine and mill tailings in the area and I've yet to see one much larger than 4cm, carapace-to-tail. When you live your entire life in a shallow ephemeral pool, bulking up wouldn't be an effective strategy even if I'd like to see hoardes of giant glowing tadpole shrimp eat ATV riders and their vechicles.
Bah, I got my hopes up with images of Cthulhu in my mind. Damn those Russian workers for dashing my beautiful dream of horror and madness. It'll serve them right if they're abducted by Deep Ones.
Cool critter though, even if it's small. Size doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't. Stop laughing!
@#2:
Me too. And they are quite cool to watch.
The problem we had is that they kept disappearing. We'd come down in the morning and find one fewer Triops in the bowl. No corpse, no debris, just gone. We suspect that they make tasty cat treats, but we were never able to catch the cat in the act (or even evincing interest).
I used to have a 20 gallon aquarium filled with those critters. I've longed dreamed of sticking a luciferase gene into 'em and loosing them on the world. They'd be even cooler if they glowed in the dark, no?
They are sold to kids as "Aquasaurs", too.
That reminds me of Matthew Nisbet.
I tried hatching some in my wabi-kusa last week, but the temperature in my apartment is too low :-(
I <3 triops.
The guy at mytriops.com has a pic up, with the description that this is "a biggie" and the largest he's ever seen... and it's nowhere near that 5 ft. mark!
http://mytriops.com/articles/images/Triops_numidicus.jpg
Sure PZ, we believe you. We know all about the vast conspiracy from you Education-Entertainment elites to suppress and discredit any Cryptozoology sightings. This giant, Slav eating mutant armored fish will just join the ranks of the disappeared; locked up in some secret zoo right next to the Jersey Devil, Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster.
the actual text on that page is a scream:
"They were puzzled who is there? And caught one thing up then in big panic stepped away cause it tried to bite them so they had to kill it with some equipment and here are the remains of it. It was around 5 feet length. Nobody of them got any idea of what's that"
panicky indeed.
YUCK !
If I had a list of most disgusting creatures, this one would be certainly in the top 3.
I have no clue why I consider the image of lots of slimy, segmented, wriggling legs inside a concave carpace so particularly revulsing. I mean, the poor creature surely does not deserve that from me.
I raised those for pocket money last year. I did convince my RA that they were fish so I could have them in the dorm, but somehow I don't think that counts.
What a bunch of liars, there's no way that thing is 5 feet long. Unless they have some funky-ass viscous water up there in Russia, the photos under the first one make it obvious that this thing is pretty small.
Or at least his brain parasite. THIS IS SETI ALPHA FIVE!!!
cool, I'm gonna get me some of those.
#21: there's so many more disgusting creatures in the world! That's just a cute little invertebrate. how about the velvet worm? It shoots glue out of its face to catch prey! I love those. what about the slimy hagfish?! That is just the best...
and then there's the glorious windscorpion, aka the "camel spider", famed in snopes for misdirected macro-lenses.
how about making us afraid of flowers?
Looks like my ex-husband. And at two inches probably similarly endowed.
Not bitter or anything.
Reminds me of the movie "The Tingler."
Hey, PZ, what's that on your neck? GAH!
Imagine what they would have done if they were confronted with a child-eating horseshoe crab!
Oi, the violence is unneccessary! Why do humans have the bizarre need to crush arthropods and spill their hemolymph across the very lands they call home? How disgustingly chauvenistic; the triops are but a kind species to the ecology of Russia.
It's amazing how freaked out people can be when they see an animal they don't recognize. It's like "WHAT?!?!?! I thought I KNEW all the animals in the world.... this must therefore be a MONSTERRRRR!!!!!1!!"
It's like that mangy bear that folks thought was a bigfoot. Stupid people.
sure... sure... it may RESEMBLE the tadpole shrimp, but we all know it's really the larval form of the Kyshtym Dwarf
Chelyabinsk is a hotbed of extra-terrestrial activity.
You can tell its scale if you just look at the background of the photo. Those are just the normal pits in concrete. If the "fish" were 5 feet long, those would be huge craters.
That site (englishrussia.com) has a history of being used to push bogus stories.te
Well, it does kinda look like certain ostracoderms, but they were pretty small too.
Tadpole shrimp are very cool; used to see them a lot hunting garter snakes around Susanville, CA.
Looks like a George Bush up-armored Humvee to me.
Weren't these things sold for years in the back of comic books right next to the Sea Monkeys? I still think you can buy them at most toy stores...
Heh. In the last picture of the set you can see in the curvature at the edges of the water due to surface tension. That could count as something against which you could estimate the size of the critter.
As Hollywood people know quite well, water doesn't scale well. The puddles in the photos don't provide scale the same way a dime would, but it looks to me that there are enough visible surface tension effects to estimate that the shrimp is on the order of centimeters long, not meters.
Hey, that's an Aquasaur (TM)! We used to have some of those!
The dorsal view does look superficially like a galeaspid or tremataspid osteostracan, two types of Paleozoic jawless fishes. Every time I see a branchiopod I get my hopes up, only to have them dashed by their chitinous exoskeletons and numerous jointed legs.
You can buy these as "triops" just like "sea monkeys". Cool thing is that they are freshwater so you can keep them in a freshwater fish tank so long as it's with very peaceful fish.
After it got large enough I put my sons in with some tetras. Unfortunately these were too aggressive for the shrimp once it molted. The 2" tetras ate the 1" triops. So nothing to be feared.
If you want to get some freshwater fairy shrimp (which look like the saltwater brine shrimp "sea monkeys") there are usually a few that hatch out along with the triops.
These little guys are terrific fun, and I have some more eggs and the little aquarium thing they grow in at home right now. Ordered off Amazon with some ridiculous name. Way more fun than SeaMonkeys. It pisses me off that someone would, as you say, abuse an interesting critter in the name of awful nonsense. I wish one would grow really big and infect their weenos.
Apart from not looking like one in detail (or rather, in the "tail"), the nearest sea is a few thousand km away, and that's the Arctic Ocean...
Must be the cognitive dissonance. Slimy?!? This is an arthropod!
Having one on one's hand (link in comment 18) must tickle, though. :-S
Its kind of cute. Looks like it was designed by HR Geiger.
It was obviously intelligently designed. Just look at the tail.
It looks to me like some variant of a horseshoe crab
Does it look designed to you, too? Since you were already told that it's a triops, and it obviously is a triops, perhaps you should put a lot less faith in how things look to you.
Looks like it was designed by HR Geiger.
Uh, no.
used to see them a lot hunting garter snakes around Susanville, CA.
Aren't they a little small to be hunting garter snakes?
I used to have triops. But they died a few weeks after I got them so I resorted to sea monkeys. They're much better than triops.
Um, typo. Should be Giger. I knew that.....or did I? At any rate its a dead ringer for the face hugger thingies out of Alien.
That's nothing! A couple friends of mine were once attacked by giant arthropods - and they have video evidence:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-828076470184247942
Truth Machine, what was the point of that link? It still looks pretty Giger-ish to me, even after browsing through some of his work. Except maybe too cute. (Chibi Giger art! Wait, what?)
Reminds me of the magazine that published a picture of a 'Martian Monster' It was an elactronmicrograph of a Barely-Visible-to-the -Unaided Eye tardigrade (waterbear)
I'ld be careful keeping these girls in a tank with fish - they're entirely capable to eating each other, for one thing.
Or as we used to scream back in NJ, "DEM! DEM! DEM!!"
I love how the Russians used a piece of American currency. I'm surprised it wasn't a Euro-cent, though, in this economy.
@Sven DiMilo (#35):
that's what i thought it was on first glance. got all excited. saw the underside, and went "oh, crustacean."
hmph. if it doesn't shoot glue out of its face, it aint nothin as far as i'm concerned.
"I love how the Russians used a piece of American currency. I'm surprised it wasn't a Euro-cent, though, in this economy."
The good folk at the BCMHA (Boulder City Museum and Historical Association) will be surprised to find they've become Russian.
BTW, why does the US do such a crap job of minting its coins?
used to see them a lot hunting garter snakes around Susanville, CA.
Aren't they a little small to be hunting garter snakes?
Yes, and how the tadpole shrimp got into my pajamas, I'll never know.
That's "Ceti Alpha V". Fifth planet in the system of the star Alpha Ceti in the constellation Cetus (the whale).
http://mytriops.com/articles/images/Triops_numidicus.jpg
Nice. Ignoring the tail, it gives one an idea what trilobites might have looked like (we're used to seeing a dorsal view on fossils, and forget that really, that's just the shell and it had all those wriggly-legs underneath).
a 5' long man-eating Triops in some far away land?
Can't you all see that you are looking at the very beginning of an urban legend? It's like watching history being made. It would be like being there when the young people drive away from necking with a hook on the door.
Truth machine @#47-
I can only go on how it looks since that's all I have. That's all anyone posting here has. It's probably a triops, true, but the tail looks a lot longer (relative to the body) than most triops I've seen (and I have raised them). All I was saying was that, if the size was right, it looked like it might be some variant of a horseshoe crab. I grew up on the FL Gulf Coast, where horseshoe crabs are as common as gulls.
Geez. Give a gal a break.
@#26:
there's so many more disgusting creatures in the world! That's just a cute little invertebrate. how about the velvet worm? It shoots glue out of its face to catch prey! I love those. what about the slimy hagfish?! That is just the best...
that link to the hagfish brought up something far more interesting than a silly tale of a tadpole shrimp done up as a maneating monster.
did you note that even the frickin' HAGFISH is being considered for management because of overfishing???
the HAGFISH!!
I knew things had gotten bad, but overfishing hagfish?
yikes.
Nice hoax article btw.
Take a look at http://mytriops.com/ for all you want to know about real Triops. :-)
This is no prehistoric fish
Also - that's no moon, that's a space station.
"overfishing hagfish"
Cause people just loves them an eelskin wallet.
Ah, good old Triops cancriformis. Probably 5 cm long, though it could be 10...
Superficially, when viewed from above, it does look like an anaspid vertebrate or the like. I guess that counts as a "fish" in the widest sense...
Apart from not looking like one in detail (or rather, in the "tail"), the nearest sea is a few thousand km away, and that's the Arctic Ocean...
Must be the cognitive dissonance. Slimy?!? This is an arthropod!
Having one on one's hand (link in comment 18) must tickle, though. :-S
I was in Chelyabinsk this summer and my friends caught a strange fish. It wasn't 5', more like 6-8". It was something these guys who have been fishing in the same river for decades have never seen.
Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccfgXAM3IEE
Is this one of your branchiopod crustaceans? Or, due to the high level of industrial and radioactive contamination in the area be causing genetic mutations to some other animal?