Biblaridion's review of 'Wildlife on the planet Furaha'

 Yesterday, Biblaridion published a YouTube review of The Book, in part based on an interview with me. I guess most readers will know about Biblaridion because of his large and long-running video series called 'Alien biospheres', in which he methodically discusses the subtype of speculative biology that deals with life elsewhere than Earth. He has a whopping 155,000 followers, so I was very happy that he wanted to pay attention to the Furaha project. We have met several times in person at TetZooCons and DinoCon. 

I supplied Biblaridion with various images, most of which had not been published before. However, these unpublshed images are not new ones in The Book, because people should have a reason to buy that. I made a few new animations for Biblaridion, mostly of rusp skeletons. Rusps do not have a fixed length because of how the 'rings' in each segment are connected to neighbouring rings. Those connections functionally resemble springs at four connection points, so the rusp skeleton as a whole resembles a harmonica a bit. 

Here is a video showing 'torsion' of the rusp skeleton. Biblaridion shows another one depicting lengthening of the rusp skeleton. But before that one causes any misunderstandings I hasten to add that rusps do not become significantly longer or shorter. The mean distance between neighbouring segments stays the same, so if the left margins of two segments approach one another, the right ones will tend to move apart. The reason for this is that the overall volume of the beastie does not change and neither does the circumference of the segments. Think of an earthworm that becomes thinner when it becomes longer. If hat worm, for some reason, could not become thinner, it couldn't lengthen either. I exaggerated the harmonica effect in the animation for Biblaridion's video to clarify how the skeleton works, not as an illustration of how rusps would actually move. Rusp lengthening is however large enough to make it difficult for students at the Institute of Furahan Biology to measure rusp length... 

As an aside, human vertebral colmns do not have fixed lengths either. Our intervertebral discs become flatter during running or during the day and longer at night, adding up to a one or two cm difference.     

For those new to my blog, please have a look. The search function allows you to find items on many SpecBio subjects. 

Furthermore, there's my YouTube channel and an Instagram channel. If you wish to know how to order The Book, look here. If you order directly from Crowood and mention 'TCP10', you get a 10% discount. I'll also ask the publisher when the book becomes directly availble in the USA and elsewhere.