imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow
you have a beautiful imagination
obsessed with tumblr giving me a banner to celebrate ten reblogs on my post with *checks notes* …a million notes
anyone else remember being like 13 years old and watching that scene in how to train your dragon (2010) where hiccup carefully navigates the maze of lines toothless has drawn between them without breaking or stepping on any of them and with his back to toothless and eyes shut to demonstrate how he’s willing to put total faith in him not to harm him or run away and to show humility and a desire to establish a natural bond of mutual trust instead of the arrogance to try to force toothless to submit to his will and hearing the music crescendo and fade into silence as he finally crosses the last obstacle so that they’re standing mere inches from one another, tension built on years of bad blood between their two races, so immense it’s almost like a physical barrier, separating them, and after what feels like forever toothless presses his nose gently into hiccup’s outstretched palm and it fits perfectly like it was made solely for that specific purpose, and feeling all the hairs on your neck stand up and a stifling sensation that brought actual tears to your eyes rise in your throat as it touched something profound and full of unspeakable yearning inside you
i recently found out the funniest thing about big horses recently which is that for centuries humans have sworn that the feathering on big horse’s legs has been bred in there for a reason, and the reason given is usually something to do with how it helps keep the joints warm and safe when the big horse is doing hauling work in fields.
the thing is: it doesn’t appreciably do that, because the feathers wick up water and mud, which cancels out any insulation advantage they might hypothetically confer, and also it wasn’t even put there on purpose.
the Leg Get More Hair gene is just linked to the Bones Get More Big gene. when you breed any lineage of horses to have bigger bones–not just taller, but chunkier–the leg hair just happens anyway. so every single breed of draft horse has feathered legs, and even carriage horses like friesians get feathers once they hit a certain threshold of lorge.
when you supersize your horse, mother nature throws in a free pair of booties. how cool is that?
Ahhh, what a great example of linked traits! And also shows why evolution gets so complicated