How long are sharks’ tongues?
One of the secret, slightly sneaky pleasures of blogging is reading the list of google searches that lead people to your site. Usually they’re sort of predictable, sometimes they’re a little odd, and sometimes they’re just gloriously weird. To which category I’m pleased to add one of yesterday’s, “how long are sharks’ tongues?”.
What I can’t decide is whether it was someone looking for the answer to a piece of biological trivia (since I don’t think sharks have tongues it might be more correct to describe it as biological fantasy) or someone planning a Roman banquet who doesn’t have a strong grasp on the distinction between birds and fish.
Either way, it’s wonderful, and I thank its author for brightening up a rather gloomy morning.
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There’s something to be written here about the gap between our ability to image the natural world and our understanding of it, particularly in the context of the oceans. Certainly there’s an irony at work in the fact that we know so little about what lies beneath the waves, the speed with which we are destroying it and the fact anyone with a computer terminal can now gaze at an exquisitely detailed sonar model of the ocean floor. But all that aside, this is an amazing thing, so perhaps rather than maundering on I’ll just give in to the marvel of the technology for a moment.
city of tongues 