Fun times with the Google and the mermaids

[bironic]

For reasons you may not want to know but can possibly guess, I was just looking into mermaid biology on Google, figuring that if I had a question, other people had probably already done the heavy thinking. There's some cool stuff! Like this anatomical illustration by Brazilian artist Walmor Corrêa (nightdog_barks, you especially might enjoy the companion illustrations), this tongue-in-cheek anatomy lesson (responding to this one), and a blog post that includes a since-deleted Wikipedia article on "The Mermaid Problem."

My favorite part of that post was this bit of etymology:

A French idiom, finir en queue de poisson (to end with the tail of a fish), makes reference to this difficulty [of mating with a creature that doesn't appear to have genitalia]; it refers to a promising start that ends in disappointment. It originates from a line in Horace's Ars Poetica: Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne (the beautiful woman ends in a fish's tail)

Another tangential find was this musculoskeletal wetsuit.

Also, a pretty sexy Little Mermaid femslash fic with inspiration from seahorse mating habits. Reminds me a little of the cloaca that frequently featured in Garak fic.

Comments

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

*blinks*

... holy crow! LOL, I had to go back and look at the "normal" dog a second time to realize it WASN'T NORMAL. NOT AT ALL.

Damn, these are beautiful. For real.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Right?! I'm trying to imagine how haunting & beautiful the rest of that book is. Wow.

ETA that if you haven't poked around more already, there's more if you backtrack to http://www.walmorcorrea.com.br/

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

Awesome work. What a beautiful, brilliant imagination. I just can't help seeing these as real textbooks in some wonderfully divergent AU world.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Unheimlich is the perfect title -- Freud's precursor to the uncanny valley -- not quite normal, not quite entirely other, but eerily in between... I thought his bio/explication was fascinating, where he talked about his dual loves of science/anatomy and art and how he's intertwined them in his entomological, taxonomic, anatomic, and archaeological exhibits. Loved that the text (and impetus) behind those "dissections" comes from his interviews with scientists about how the folkloric creatures could have plausible biology.

And many other adjectives as well.

[zulu.livejournal.com]

Man, reasons I love the internet!

[pynelyf.livejournal.com]

OMG the illustrations, they are made of win. I <3 the internet.