What, no threads about the thing found by the Chilean Navy?
I’m all confused. First the reports said that a whale carcass was found nearby. Then this guy starts talking about giant octopuses and decomposing whale flesh.
So what’s the deal? Did a whale barf its guts out? Or is it a mollusk? Can’t we just sort of plug the DNA-sampler iPod into it and read its pedigree?
There are two threads actually… one is http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=194990 <there.
DNA sampling doesn’t really work like that, does it? I thought you needed to have a general idea of what genus you were dealing with… I know there’s an SD column about it.
I’m thinking it’s the democratic party’s collective backbone. Let’s hope they can clone it and grow a new one of some sort. Both science and the democrats will benefit from such an effort.
It is a dead (fortunatly so) shoggoth that washed up from from Antartica. Trust me, I am an expert in this type of stuff.
You’re probably thinking about this one:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mdnaanalysis.html
Here’s the other thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=194839
I’m sorry I missed those other threads in my search. Perhaps this one should be left to decompose on the beach.
Just wait until it gets hit by a lightning bolt, reanimates, and proceeds to destroy downtown Santiago.
But I betcha it’s a blob of whale snot.
*Gimme that thang
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Gimme that gimme gimme that
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Zenster,
Keep your political pot shots out of this forum.
Do not do this again.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
…the stars are right.
It appears to be a giant squid .
I thought it was a reasonably witty comment that enhanced my enjoyment of the thread, its readability and my interest in it.
What can be done is to chop up DNA from the creature (presuming we can get enough) and run it over a whole bunch of appropriate hybridization arrays. Then those can be analyzed.
Unfortunately, that will be extremely tedious and will only give us some very rough information, like “It’s got cytochrome C” and “It’s not a plant”.
However, we can also sequence a megabase or so and then go database fishing to see what it seems to be closest to.
It is time for those genetic taxonomists to shine!
I tend to find that the results of these tests tend to get much less coverage in newspapers and on cryptozoology websites, because they usually show that the unknown carcass is a recognised species.
This is probably whale…
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Hmmm, I believe the “one found in the United States” referred to in that article was the putative giant octopus found in Florida in 1896.
As for genetic matching… how hard would it be to make a karyotype, so they could at least figure out its chromosome number (and thus quickly eliminate some known species)? The more I think about it, that might require that you “catch” it in mitosis, which seems unlikely…
Seems the easiest thing to do would be take a tissue sample, amplify the 18S rRNA gene (using a universal eukaryote primer), and run a neighbor joining tree on it and a wide (phylum-level) sample of 18S sequences from genbank. It would likely come back as clustering with a mollusk, in which case it’s a squid or an octopus; a vertebrate, in which case it’s a whale; or as an outgroup, in which case it’s some funky, unknown, multicellular, city-destroying blob from outer space.
I am ith the last bit, it washed up (a long way from home) from its originating place, lost R’yleh. Not far from where I am actually.
Aren’t you going to tell us what a shoggoth is?
bryanmcc, I suspect that test isn’t exactly something I can do with a box cutter, a garden hose, and some Easter egg dye.
Can you give me some idea of how difficult it is to perform this test, how long it might take, and how accurate the results usually are?