Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 19, 2019 • 6:33 am

It’s Tuesday, February 19, 2019—the 50th day of the year—and National Chocolate Mint Day. Across the pond in Bulgaria, it’s the day of Commemoration of Vasil Levski.

Note that Maajid Nawaz was attacked last night—not by Muslims, who detest him for his liberalism, but by a white person, who apparentl detested him because of his “Pakistani-ness” (he was born in England to a Pakistani family).  I cannot stand all the hatred that emanates from many corners, and violence is never on (unless you’re Dan Arel).

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld just died at 85. I wonder who will take care of his pampered cat Choupette, who had two maids. As Wikipedia notes:

She has two “beloved” maids, Françoise and Marjorie, who tend to Choupette (a task that includes taking care of her hair and other beauty jobs) and keep a diary of her activities and moods for the reference of Lagerfeld and an on-call vet. Of the two maids, Choupette is said to prefer Françoise

On this day in 1847, the first rescuers reached the Donner Party, stranded for four months by snow in the Sierra Nevada. Of the 87 pioneers who left for California, only 48 survived; the party is infamous because they ate the bodies of the dead, but I see nothing wrong with that.  On February 19, 1878, Thomas Edison patented the phonograph.  On this day in 1913,  Pedro Lascuráin became President of Mexico, but for only 45 minutes; this is the shortest duration of any head of state in history. The backstory from Wikipedia:

On 19 February 1913, General Victoriano Huerta overthrew Madero. Lascuráin was one of the people who convinced Madero to resign the presidency while he was being held prisoner in the National Palace and claimed that his life was in danger if he refused.

Under the 1857 Constitution of Mexico, the vice-president, the attorney general, the foreign secretary, and the interior secretary stood in line to the presidency. As well as Madero, Huerta had ousted Vice-President José María Pino Suárez and Attorney General Adolfo Valles Baca.  To give the coup d’état some appearance of legality, he had Lascuráin, as foreign secretary, assume the presidency, who would then appoint him as his interior secretary, making Huerta next in line to the presidency, and then resign.

The presidency thus passed to Huerta. As a consequence, Lascuráin was president for less than an hour; sources quote figures ranging from 15 to 56 minutes. To date, Lascuráin’s presidency is the shortest in history, even briefer than that of Venezuelan politician Diosdado Cabello in 2002.

On this day in 1942, 250 Japanese warplanes attacked the Australian city of Darwin, killing 243. I am not sure whether this was the only direct Japanese attack on Australia, but readers can fill us in.  On February 19, 1949, just ten months before Professor Ceiling Cat was born of a virgin, Ezra Pound was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in poetry. At the time he was confined in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., assumed to be mentally ill as well as a traitor. Both accusations are partly true, but he was also a great poet. Here’s his mug shot when captured by the U.S. Army:

On this day in 1963, Betty Friedan’s pathbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, was published, launching second-wave feminism in America. The book grew out of Friedan’s survey of her classmates at Smith College, finding that many of them were dissatisfied with their post-college lives. Finally, on February 19, 2002, the Mars Odyssey space probe began mapping the surface of the red planet. It’s still orbiting Mars and sending back data.

Notables born on this day include David Garrick (1717), Svante Arrhenius (1859), Carson McCullers (1917), Lee Marvin (1924), Smokey Robinson (1940), Will Provine (1942), Karen Silkwood (1946), Amy Tan (1952), and Seal (1963, real name Henry Olusegun Adeola Samuel).

Those who joined the Choir Invisible on February 19 include Ernst Mach (1916), André Gide (1951), Knut Hamsun (1952), Leo Rosten (1997), Stanley Kramer (2001), and Umberto Eco (2016).

And just yesterday, George Mendonsa died, a veteran of World War II. He’s famous for being the sailor in this iconic picture, celebrating the end of the war with Japan in Times Square, New York City. The jubilant sailor kissed a woman without her consent, and would be court-martialed today.  The date: August 14, 1945. The photographer: Alfred Eisenstadt. For many years after the photo was published in Life magazine, the sailor and woman in uniform (a dental nurse, it turned out, and it was her 21st birthday) were unidentified. Historians figured it out. . .

From Rare Historical Photos:

Decades later the unknown couple was identified as the American sailor George Mendonsa and nurse Greta Zimmer Friedman. Greta Friedman was 21 years old on August 14, 1945. After reporting to work at a dentist’s office, she heard the news: Japan had surrendered, and World War II was coming to an end. She wandered into Times Square when a passing sailor locked her in an unexpected embrace. “I did not see him approaching, and before I know it I was in this vice grip,” she told CBS news in a 2012 interview. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and grabbed. That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me”.

The kisser was the 22-year-old George Mendonsa of Newport, Rhode Island. He was on leave from the USS The Sullivans (DD-537) and was watching a movie with his future wife, Rita [JAC: !!!!], at Radio City Music Hall when the doors opened and people started screaming the war was over. George and Rita joined the partying on the street, but when they could not get into the packed bars decided to walk down the street. It was then that George saw a woman in a white dress walk by and took her into his arms and kissed her, “I had quite a few drinks that day and I considered her one of the troops—she was a nurse”.

Friedman died at age 92 on September 8, 2016, in Richmond, Virginia. She is buried beside her husband, infantryman Mischa Elliott Friedman, at Arlington National Cemetery.

Here’s Mendonsa, deceased yesterday) with his Photo of Fame:

Credit: Connie Grosch/Providence Journal via AP.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is. . . well, let Malgorzata explain: “She is looking to the west (geographically), checking whether everything is in order. But she cannot resist the temptation to show off: ‘Look, I know the world’s literature!'”

A: What are you observing so intently?
Hili: It seems that all is quiet on the Western Front.
In Polish:
Ja; Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Wygląda na to, że na zachodzie bez zmian.

A picture from reader Merilee:

And one from reader Moto:

A tweet I found showing a stupendous pass in the NBA All-Star game on Sunday.

From Gethyn, who along with his partner Laurie has just become the staff of two black kittens. Here’s a black allotment cat in Birmingham objecting to the city’s plans:

From reader Barry, who says he’s impressed because “a dog figured out two things”:

https://twitter.com/wawinaApr/status/1097444376425328640

I guess “gender reveal” parties are a thing now, and reader Nilou found a particularly impressive one:

From Heather Hastie, a newborn kakapo chick. This thing is unrecognizable as a parrot!

Tweets from Matthew.  Thanks to Neil for this first one, which I can’t resist out of self-aggrandizement:

A Cambridge University physicist has a Senior Moment:

The impressive results of kin selection in H. sapiens:

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1097267973914611712

Tweets from Grania. The first one is hilarious: an autotuned cat! This gets the Tweet of the Week Award. Needless to say, turn the sound up.

A brain-dump from our “President” about dogs, transcribed and tweeted by the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star:

Grania loves those bodega cats; this one is apparently on a bread and water diet:

Mom triggered by anatomically correct toy lion with a willy

February 18, 2019 • 1:00 pm

I can’t brain today, and have to go downtown, so this is what you get!

This story, from Metro.co.uk, is pretty funny, and I’m not quite sure why this mother is shocked. Click on the screenshot:

An excerpt and some photos from the piece:

Tanya Husnu, 33, was shocked after her daughter Aylah, three, ran up to her and asked her about the ‘willy’ on the doll.

She had bought it from a Kmart store in Melbourne, Australia, for her son Hakan, four, who then showed it to his sister and twin brother Osman.

Mum-of-five Mrs Husnu immediately looked at the toy and discovered it did indeed have a depiction of male genitalia hidden under the tail.

The other two toys she bought on February 8 for Osman and Aylah did not have the same. Mrs Husnu, a professional blogger from Melton, said: ‘We were planning a trip to the zoo and I thought it would be really great if the kids could take some animal toys with them on the day.

Here they are with their animals: an elephant, a hippo, and a male lion. We don’t know the genders of the first two, but that lion is either a biological male or a trangender male who’s had hormones and surgery, for it has a mane (and a willy).

There’s more!

 ‘We went into Kmart and my three youngest picked out their own toys. They were all really happy with them.

‘Then one of the twins turned the lion around, and my daughter yelled out ‘look mum, the lion’s got a willy’ and they all started laughing.

‘I thought it was really inappropriate. In this day and age, it’s not acceptable to have things like that on children’s toys. ‘I buy a lot of toys, and my house is full of toys. But I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s so stupid and just plain weird.’

Yes, for we all recognize that although Barbie has breasts, neither she nor Ken have genitalia. I know of no dolls that have genitalia, nor stuffed animals, either. But I think it’s time to change that, for this lion is awesome:

Is this accurate in size and conformation? Here’s the model; you be the judge:

Source

 

Another picture from the story:

To be fair to Mrs. Husnu, in the end she thought it was “hilarious,” but she remains censorious.

‘My kids thought it was hilarious though. At the zoo, they kept lifting up the tail and showing strangers walking past the lion’s bits as they walked past and yelling out “willy!”. It was so embarrassing.’

Mrs Husnu said she wanted Kmart to stop selling the toy, which was aimed at kids older than three, because she felt it  parents should decide when to tell their kids about genitalia.

Fair enough, but remember this: when Grania saw this piece, she responded, “I mean, does she think people’s pets should wear nappies?”

(Note to Yanks: “Nappies” are diapers in the UK.)

It seems to me that all dolls and animal replicas should have genitals. What is gained by leaving them off? What is lost is children’s understanding of natural history, animal morphology, and sexuality. (Thank goodness there are no toy hyenas!)

Dawkins’s Darwin Day lecture for Humanists UK: “Taking Courage from Darwin to Fight the Hubris of Faith”

February 18, 2019 • 9:15 am

Reader Michael called my attention to Richard Dawkins’s Darwin Day Lecture to Humanists UK (HUK). Richard is introduced by Humanists UK President and evolutionary biologist Alice Roberts, who was the moderator when I gave this lecture a few years ago. Richard’s lecture was just posted today, and as I write there are only 194 views. I’ll watch it as I write, and give any thoughts I have.

I was glad to see that Richard limned evolution and religion in an antagonistic light, which is what I did when I talked. After all, this is a talk to humanists, so it’s not hubris to do that, much as accommodationists like to argue that people can have their Darwin and Jesus too.

Ten minutes in, I was surprised at how hard Richard went after theology and religion, and especially after Islam and its obsession with “religious control-freakery” such as breast feeding. The audience likes it, of course, as they’re all a bunch of nonbelievers, but I don’t yet see any connection between the criticisms of Islam and Darwin.

The connection came at about 14:15, when Richard contrasts the certainty of theology with the doubt that’s endemic to science. “We don’t know” is his mantra here, and we should use it more often. At 17:30, he suggests a humorous Gendankenexperiment of the kind he’s famous for: he imagines what science would look like if scientists acted like theologians, operating from faith and revelation instead of evidence. (Note the mention of “SJW State University.”)

A quote:

“It isn’t that theologians deliberately tell untruths: it’s as though they just don’t care about truth, aren’t interested in truth, and demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations such as metaphorical, symbolic, and mythic significance—or simply what feels good.”

Later on, he explains why he’s proud to be a product of evolution—a product with a flexible brain that has vouchsafed to us our ability, unique among animals, to understand our origins—and many other things.

Richard also argues that “the atheistic world view has an unsung virtue of intellectual courage.” To explain that, he introduces the “deep problems” that science might not answer, but that theology can’t, either: these include the “deep problem of consciousness” and the question of “why are the laws of physics as they are?” This leads to his conclusion (40:28) that science (and atheism) help kick ourselves out of the emotional reaction that the “big questions” defy naturalistic explanation—that they defy the scientific assumption that the whole universe arose and evolved through mindless naturalistic processes. As he says,

“However improbable a naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, a theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.”

He then returns to Darwin as a good fount of courage to seek naturalistic answers to the Big Problems. After all, it was Darwin who, abjuring supernatural explanations, tackled the long-standing problem of life using purely naturalistic methods—and solved it!

In the end, Richard’s lecture is his version of “Faith Versus Fact,” and though it’s independent of my own ideas, I was pleased to see that he’s banging the same drum about the intellectual vacuity of theology as contrasted to the productive wielding of “the empirical attitude” that underlies science.

This lecture is also paean to the virtues of atheism, which won’t please religionists, theologians, and faitheists. Yes, New Atheism makes a brief comeback in this lecture.

If you’re a nonbeliever, you’ll find the last three minutes heartening, bracing, and eloquent. In the last 13 words, he connects atheism with social justice, though that won’t placate the SJWs who are always throwing shade on Dawkins.

At the end, Alice presents Richard with a “Darwin Day medal.”

It’s Abramek Koplowicz’s birthday

February 18, 2019 • 8:30 am

I didn’t know about this until I was told by Kelly Houle, who recently published a lovely art book containing English translations (from Polish) of Abramek Koplowicz’s poems, written in the Lodz Ghetto before he was gassed by the Nazis. Abramek Koplowicz was born on February 18, 1930, and had he lived he’d be 89 today. But he died at age 14, one of many Jewish children murdered by the Germans.

I’ve written about Abramek and his poetry, the English translations made by my friends Malgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson, and about Kelly’s book, here and here. The art book is beautiful, and you can see it and purchase it here.  (If you’d like to buy copies to donate to the Library of Congress, or places like D.C.’s Holocaust Museum, that would be great. I’m purchasing one for the University of Chicago’s rare book collection.) There’s also a recording of Kelly reading Abramek’s poetry, including the title poem “A Dream”, here.

Abramek’s stepbrother Lolek, who survived the camps and a death march, is still alive and living in Israel at 94. Lolek is the one who found Abramek’s poems in a school notebook among his father’s possessions (Abramek’s father also survived the camps). Lolek brought the poems to the attention of Israeli journalist Sarah Honig, who published the story in the Jerusalem Post, giving a longer version on her blog.  Here’s a bit of the story from that site:

[Abramek’s] father, Mendel Koplowicz, labored at a workshop producing cardboard boxes for the Germans. An ordained rabbi, he became a confirmed atheist after reading many secular philosophy books. Abramek worked at a shoe-making workshop, occasionally showing up at his father’s workshop to entertain the laborers by reciting poetry and satirical skits in verse. The handsome boy delighted his listeners, who unanimously agreed that he was a genius. One of those who heard him was Haya Grynfeld, Lolek’s mother and Mendel Koplowicz’s co-worker.

When the Koplowicz family was taken to Auschwitz, the mother, Yochet Gittel, was immediately sent to the gas chamber. The father and 14-year-old Abramek were sent to forced labor. But as he left for work, Mendel Koplowicz left his son in the barrack in order to protect him from the ordeal. Upon his return, he found it empty. The Germans had come and sent all those inside to death.

Lolek Grynfeld and his family lasted in Lodz even longer. The Germans rounded them up only in October 1944, by which time they no longer deported their victims to Auschwitz. Thus, Lolek – who was a bit older than Abramek –ended up in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and his mother in Ravensbruck. His father was killed early on in the German bombardments; Lolek did his work quota at a ghetto hospital until it was liquidated in 1942.

At war’s end, having miraculously escaped death at Sachsenhausen, he was taken on one of the infamous German death marches: “On the fifth night of the ordeal,” Grynfeld recalls, “they locked us up in an old stable. Several of us conspired to escape. I tripped one of the guards and the others finished him off with their wooden clogs.” Thus, after several hair-raising encounters with the Germans, Grynfeld and his mother managed to survive and both returned to Poland.

And then Lolek met another survivor, married her, and they had children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Abramek’s memory is kept alive by Lolek (who has had a memorial to Abramek built in Israel and a street named after him in the Polish town where he was born), and also by this book.

Here’s the only existing photo of Abramek (from Honig’s blog); he’s in the center flanked by his parents. His mother was also gassed.

Abramek’s notebook with his poetry (note that it bears the date of 1943 and the fact that it was written in the ghetto):

A painting of a praying Jew made by Abramek (he was talented!):

And Kelly’s book:

Finally, here’s a small excerpt from Sarah Lawson’s introduction to the poems in Kelly’s book:

Between one and two million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust. Most of their names are lost except in the memory of family members and the records at Yad Vashem. They had no time to distinguish themselves on a larger stage. A pitifully few names have come down to us. Anne Frank is the best known example, and there were a few other young diarists and letter writers. Out of a million and a half European children, how many might have had important careers in medicine, science, and the arts? How many would have become parents and grandparents of scholars and diplomats, of writers and musicians? This destroyed potential is unknowable but undoubted. Imagine them all lined up and holding hands. The line would stretch for more than 450 miles.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 18, 2019 • 7:30 am

Today’s set of beetle photos comes from a regular, Jacques Hausser, who lives in Switzerland. His notes are indented. A “cockchafer” is not a woolen undergarment, but a species of brown beetle found in Europe that used to be a pest on grass and crops, especially during its periodic outbreaks.

When I was a schoolboy in the fifties, every third year was a cockchafer year. We used to hunt the clumsy critters at the sunset by shaking the trees – and also more sportingly in flight, with badminton racquets. We were paid by the town: ten cents for a full bucket of the unfortunate insects, then given to the chickens. But, alas, plane-sprayed insecticides (now forbidden) soon suppressed this attractive source of income, and the cockchafers all but disappeared. I think that from the seventies onward, I haven’t seen any here around. Until last summer, that is, when my daughter bicycling back from work discovered she had a large one (about 30 mm) hooked on her pants. Here it is in full glory: a male Melolontha melolontha, family Scarabeidae, subfamily Melolonthinae.

If the cockchafer is now very rare in western Switzerland, other species are still present. Like the cockchafer itself, all of them are a nightmare for lawn owners, their white grubs feeding on grass roots. Here is the slightly smaller (about 25 mm) June chafer, Amphimallon solsticiale, a female. They have a two-year cycle instead of three.

Amphimallon atrum, another species of the same genus.

Serica brunnea, a small species.

 Phyllopertha horticola, the garden chafer, at work on a wild rose, eating pollen (or maybe only the filaments of the stamens: note the discarded anthers on the lower petal of the flower). Note also  that they can fold and hide their antennae when eating. Even if it looks quite like a chafer and has a similar biology (two or three year life cycle, white grubs eating the roots of your lawn) it is usually classified in another subfamily, the Rutelinae.

Same species – with antennae. I like the shadows.

Closely related, but not exactly a chafer (it is called a “Monkey beetle”): although usually classified either in Melolonthinae or Rutelinae, depending on the specialist you consult, Hoplia argentea differs from the other species presented here by having only one claw on each leg and by its cover of scales producing interference colors (pale blue or yellow-green). This one is sharing a wild Angelica with two species of ants. The large one is probably Formica fusca and the small one Lasius fuliginosus, but I’m not sure…

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 18, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday, February 18, 2019, and National “Drink Wine” Day. Again we have the scare quotes, as if we’re only supposed to pretend to drink wine. At any rate, I’ll have to eschew the vino as it’s a fasting day for me.

We have three inches or so of snow on the ground, but the weather report says it’s pretty much done—and there will be no more snow this week. Unfortunately, I left my car on the street and so may have some scraping and digging to do.

Article of the day, from today’s Guardian, and sent by reader Chris. Click on the screenshot to read it:

News is a bit thin on this day. On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated in Alabama as President of the Confederate States of America. Then, in 1885, Mark Twain first published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the U.S., which Ernest Hemingway characterized as the source of all modern American literature.

There are two aircraft firsts today.  On this day in 1911, according to Wikipedia, “The first official flight with airmail takes place from Allahabad, United Provinces, British India (now India), when Henri Pequet, a 23-year-old pilot, delivers 6,500 letters to Naini, about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) away.” Then, jumping ahead 29 years, it was on this day in 1930 that (again according to Wikipedia), “Elm Farm Ollie becomes the first cow to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft and also the first cow to be milked in an aircraft.”

WHAT? A flying cow? Wikipedia adds this:

Elm Farm Ollie was reported to have been an unusually productive Guernsey cow, requiring three milkings a day and producing 24 quarts of milk during the flight itself. Wisconsin native Elsworth W. Bunce milked her, becoming the first man to milk a cow mid-flight. Elm Farm Ollie’s milk was sealed into paper cartons which were parachuted to spectators below. Charles Lindbergh reportedly received a glass of the milk.

You can read more about Ollie (that’s a man’s name!) at SquareCowMovers.com, where there’s a photo of Ollie about to enter the plane:

Backing up a year, it was on this day in 1929 when a very important event took place: President Hoover signed the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929. Sadly, though this got the protection of waterfowl underway, little money was appropriated for the effort. More was to come. Then, back in 1930, on the day that Ollie was milked in flight, Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh from looking at photographs.  Yes, it’s a damn planet! On this day in 1943, the Nazis did two things: arrested members of the White Rose movement, who were executed, and Joseph Goebbels delivered the famous Sportpalast speech in which he called for “total war”. You can see it below. The “total war” ended a bit more than two years later, with Goebbels’s wife Magda poisoning their children and then Magda and Joseph committing suicide.

It was on this day in 1954 that the Church of Scientology was founded in Los Angeles (sadly, it’s still going), and in 1970 the Chicago Seven were found not guilty of conspiracy to cause riots at Chicago’s 1968 Democratic Convention. On this day in 1972, in the case of People v. Anderson, the California Supreme Court invalidated the state’s death penalty, with all condemned prisoners having their sentence changed to life imprisonment (this included Charles Manson). This lasted twenty years until executions began again.

Finally, it was nine years ago today that WikiLeaks published the first set of documents revealed by the soldier Chelsea Manning.

Notables born on this day include Isaac Casaubon (1559), Ernst Mach (1838), Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848), Nikos Kazantzakis (1883), Wendell Willkie (1892), Toni Morrison (1931), Yoko Ono (1933), Cybill Shepherd (1950), John Travolta (1954), Vanna White (1957), Matt Dillon (1964), and Molly Ringwald (1968).

Tiffany designed what I think are the world’s most beautiful stained glass windows. Here’s one from the Tiffany site:

Those who expired on February 18 include Fra Angelico (1455), Martin Luther (1546), Michelangelo (1564), J. Robert Oppenheimer (1967), Harry Caray (1998), Dale Earnhardt (2001), and Alain Robbe-Grillet (2008).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is crowding Andrzej out of his chair:

A: You are taking more space than I.
Hili: Are you surprised?
In Polish:
Ja: Zajmujesz więcej miejsca niż ja.
Hili: Czy to cię dziwi?

A photo contributed by reader Merilee:

And a catty meme from Facebook:

A tweet from reader Barry, who says, “I’ve never seen a cat mesmerized like this before.” Indeed. And I may have posted this lovely video before, but it’s worth seeing again:

https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/931474634037497857

Interspecies love from Heather Hastie (via Ann German):

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1096254149719613442

Tweets from Matthew. The first has a cleverly camouflaged spider in it, but Matthew says he can’t spot it. Neither can I!

And, well, live and learn. This is great:

Matthew wouldn’t retweet this (neither would I) because he wasn’t sure whether the monkey was trained. I’m sure it was: a wild primate simply couldn’t get on a tiny bicycle and ride it. And if the monkey is trained, it’s sad. . .

https://twitter.com/Mr_DrinksOnMe/status/1095769043066208256

Now if you know the Beatles, you’re going to appreciate this a lot more than other folks. Did you have any idea? (And name the song!)

Tweets from Grania. Like the squirrels, this cat wants its dinner, but it’ll have to be satisfied with cat t.v.:

Check this out. Should we be scared?

https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1096387965222305792

Okay, somebody find out if this is normal pangolin behavior:

Sound up on this one, of course.

https://twitter.com/castellanosce/status/1095533417154994178

 

 

A weird tarantula with a honking big horn on its back

February 17, 2019 • 2:05 pm

So they’ve discovered a tarantula with a very strange “horn” on its back. Reading the paper below, which recounts the discovery (access free; pdf here), one discovers that these “foveal horns” are uniquely large and weird; as the authors say, “no other spider in the world possesses a similar foveal protuberance.” Now other species in the genus Ceratogyrus do have smaller horns (see below), but not like this one.

Here it is, with captions taken from the paper. Look at that big thing sticking up off the cephalothorax!

Figure 3. Ceratogyrus attonitifer sp. n. paratype, cephalothorax. A retrolateral view B dorsal view C ventral view. Scale bar: 10mm (A).

But wait! There’s more, including a defensive posture:

Figure 2. Habitat, burrow and live habitus of Ceratogyrus attonitifer sp. n. in south-eastern Angola. A Aerial view of habitat at the type locality showing a dambo (wetland) amongst miombo (Brachystegia) woodland. The expedition campsite is to the right of the dambo. Specimens were collected primarily along the margins of the wetland area B live habitus, dorsal, showing full size of the foveal protuberance in life C specimen in defensive posture typical for baboon spiders; background is white sand at the type locality D burrow entrance amongst grass tussocks; entrance approximately 2cm wide.

 

The species, C. attonitifer, got its name this way:

Etymology

The specific epithet is derived from the Latin root attonit–, meaning astonishment or fascination, and the suffix –fer, bearer of or carrier, and refers to the astonishment felt by the authors at the discovery of this remarkable species.

And the formal description of the horn:

Fovea strongly procurved with prominent, elongate protuberance extending over dorsal aspect of abdomen, as long as or longer than carapace length, anterior part extending from carapace sclerotized, remainder soft and membranous, bag-like in living specimens, becoming shrivelled when preserved, dark in colour.

As I said, other species in the genus have foveal “horns”, like C. darlingi below, but they are much smaller:

Photo from Wikipedia

However, as the authors say (my emphasis):

Members of other theraphosid genera from the Neotropics, namely Cyrtopholis Simon, 1892, Sphaerobothria Karsch, 1879 and Umbyquyra Gargiulo, Brescovit & Lucas, 2018, also possess similar foveal structures, as do some species of the ctenizid genus Stasimopus in South Africa, and several aganippine idiopid genera from Australia (M. Rix pers. comm.). The protuberance of C. attonitifer is unique in its length, as well as being soft, whereas this structure is fully sclerotized in all other genera where it is known to occur.

But what are these horns used for? Wikipedia (which we must now take with a grain of salt), says this:

C. marshalli features the biggest horn, where it stands straight up about 1 cm. There are several probable functions for this horn: according to a study by Rick C. West in 1986, it provides an increased surface for the attachment of the dorsal dilator muscle, which aids in drawing in liquefied food into the sucking stomach at a faster rate; this way, the spider can retreat to a safe place faster. It also increases the area for the midgut diverticula to expand during times of nutrient and water availability, analogous to a camel’s hump, helping it to survive in its arid habitat during droughts.

Okay, so that’s speculation: “probable functions.” But this big floppy horn? Who knows? The authors don’t even try to speculate. Note that every specimen of C. attonitifer they found, however, was a female, so it’s imperative to see what the males look like. That would tell if it has some kind of sexual function.

In the meantime, speculate away!

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Midgley, J. M. and I. Engelbrecht. 2019. New collection records for Theraphosidae (Araneae, Mygalomorphae) in Angola, with the description of a remarkable new species of Ceratogyrus. African Invertebrates 60:1-13.