Mar. 9th, 2010

bironic: Neil Perry gazing out a window at night (Default)
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 ([livejournal.com profile] 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.

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