Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.

We need to have a conversation about wombats

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats

Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.

Great to see someone having some fun writing an article.

ODE TO THE WOMBAT

As you pound along the track

Eyes wide open and ears pinned back

You may have noticed those queer square turds

And thought, if not expressed in words,

The pain of such defecation

Baffles the imagination.

But it ain't done to entertain us—

The wombat has an oblong anus.

So if at night you hear pained cries

Outside your tent, feel no surprise.

With eyes shut tight, teeth clenched with pain,

A wombat's gone and crapped again!

> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."

The other article [1] quote:

> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”

Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-bui...

I'll leave now...

My kids can't stop laughing

Wombat Song by Noam Hassenfeld

Ending of Vox Unexplainable Podcast on Wombat cube poops

[0]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-abstract/17/3/475/708006/Int...

[1]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-supplement/708006/mov/d0sm01...

Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?

I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day

and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?

...written directly above a photo of the subject matter that clearly does not have sharp corners (which is all for the best, I guess, poor wombats!), not even sharp edges, just flattened sides.

the article itself is paywalled, I wonder how did they get the wombats to dissect.

  Spit it out man! It means CUNT.