stand up for REAL science

Those of us of a certain, um, ~~age~~ ~~generation~~ life experience remember "Saturday Night Live" of the 1970's.

Ah . . . those were the heady days of Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, candygrams . . . and

LANDSHARKS!

[snapping back to the present]

Chevy Chase as
Landshark

Phooey on the claim that the SNL skits were parodies of the 1970's "Jaws" movies. In my Kansas-centric way, I'm convinced that the SNL writers, in their infinite wisdom, had heard of the great Cretaceous-era finds in western Kansas.

Now, those were sharks which make Peter Benchley's creatures look about as threatening as Disney's Nemo. A monster like that would have chewed up that boat it breached, digested the humans, and used the boat splinters as toothpicks as it sauntered sneeringly through the shallows with a pack of ciggies in its rolled-up shirt sleeve.

In the Wikipedia graphic below, the green shark is a modern Great White shark and the red shark is Carcharocles megalodon:

Image from
Wikimedia
Commons

The good news is that our next Science Cafe in Hays is coming up fast - next Tuesday, the 20th, 7pm-ish, at Cafe Semolino's as usual. The better news is that we'll be entertained this time by Mike Everhart, author of "Oceans of Kansas" and National Geographic's "Sea Monsters: Prehistoric Creatures of the Deep." Mike will open our minds to thoughts of ancient seas in this now-arid land with "Mosasaurs, Plesiosaurs, and Sea Monsters: Oh My!"

Oh my indeed. Lucky for Dorothy she only had to worry about lions, tigers and bears, 'cause if she'd met up with Carcharocles megalodon her little dog, too, would have been just big enough to qualify as a snack.

Join our Facebook group, Science Cafe Semolino's!

P.S. - Hays' Science Cafe is sponsored by Kansas Citizens for Science and the FHSU Science and Mathematics Education Institute.

edited for . . . oh, it just didn't read right.