Simple question: a kindergartener friend is an appallingly good reader and obsessive about dinosaurs, and somewhere (on TV or in a book) he ran across a creature he calls a squidmesisah. He says it’s something that lived underwater and has spines, but nobody’s been able to figure out what it could be. Does anyone have any ideas? If he were a China Mieville fan I’d think it was a squid messiah, but I don’t think that’s it.
Perhaps a Coelacanth? The article here also has names for other prehistoric fish.
Predates the dinos (and reptiles in general) by quite a bit, but the first thing that came to mind to me was Hallucigenia.
Spines as in backbones? Possibly a belemnite.
Spinosaurus or Seismosaurus maybe?
Seismosaurus is just a Diplodocus, but Spinosaurus has spines and is though to be aquatic by some (living in water, not under it, but we’re talking about a 5 year old here).
Perhaps a predecessor of the vampire squid? They have “spines.” Apparently many members of the order are now extinct.
Could it be that he found a description of the Sea Monk?
ETA: Never mind. Read the OP as Squid messiah in stead of mesisah.
I’m thinking he may be half-remembering a Burgess Shale type fauna critter, like Wiwaxia, but I can’t pull up in my memory one whose name can be mangled enough to match. (I have not been following the discoveries much over the past fifteen years so I might not be aware of something a bright kindergartener stumbled across.)
One of the Burgess Shale critters was called Anomolicarus, which means “odd shrimp”. (I’m living up to my Dopername on the spelling!)
I read “squidmesisah” as “squid messiah” and was prepared to warn you that the child is clearly a servant of Cthulhu.
I did too, in fact wouldn’t have caught it if you hadn’t pointed it out.
I appreciate the ideas! I think that he heard it on a show, not read it in a book, but I’m not sure; in any case, the name is something along the lines of squidmezzizah (changing the spelling to avoid the messiah confusion!) It’s probably not something ending in -saurus, as he’s very familiar with that suffix.
Maybe he heard something about a squid from the Mesozoic era?
Maybe it’s a squid nailed to a doorpost - a squidmezzuzah?
Searching for a “spined fish”, I noticed that there’s a family of spined fish called the Scorpaeniformes, including such things as Scorpaenopsella Armata and Scorpaenopsis Macrochir. That’s as close as I saw to something like skwidmessisa.
Taking these two quotes together, I think belemnite is the likely answer. It was squid-like. It was Mesozoic. It could well have been explained as “kind of like a squid, from the Mesozoic.”
Young kids prefer the word squid, I’ve noticed. Growing up, I heard other kids as well as TV shows and cartoons referring to an octopus as a “squid.” For kids who may be thought too young to learn a word as advanced as cephalopod, the concept can be gotten across by saying “squid” as the cephalopod name most familiar to kids.
He probably heard about it on The Dinosaur Train, a favorite of the younger Magills. I’ll poke around their website and see what I can come up with.
Here are the featured species from their “Dinosaurs Under the Sea” series of episodes:
Cretoxyrhina- An ancient Shark - Picture
Elasmosaurus- A plesiosaur - Picture
Michelinoceras- A mullosk that reminds me of a nautilus - Picture
Pliosaurus- A big ol’ aquatic reptile - Picture
Of these, my guess would be the Michelinoceras, which looks vaguely squid-like, and being hard for a five year old to say, might get corrupted to “squidmesisah.”
Awesome, Maus–that could well be what it was. Thanks!
When you talk to the kid, say, “I have a hypothesis: Your ‘squidmezzizah’ is a Michelinoceras,” and show him a picture.
If you’re right (and he heard about it from The Dinosaur Train) your esteem in his eyes will increase a hundredfold.