Nopeland Discovery: the Blog

 A few days ago, I was "corrected" on social media by a gentleman who explained to me that tarantulas and trapdoor spiders weren't actually spiders, but belonged in a different order of Arachnids. While his unfailing confidence (a quality often found in people incorrectly correcting others) forced admiration, that gentleman was unfortunately very wrong. Although not "true spiders", tarantulas truly are spiders In fairness to him, though, he was not the first, nor the only one to make that mistake. Common names are often a source of confusion , and there's no finer example of that than "true spiders", the English common name of the infraorder Araneomorphae. It seems to imply that tarantulas, trapdoor spiders and the like, which aren't part of that group, are some sort of "false spiders" that are similar and related, but not bona fide spiders. It's not the case, though. Let's talk basic spider taxonomy. Spiders, along with sco

" Whatever your dream, your fantasy is, there's a scientist somewhere who's busy ruining it" Boulet , 2009 A common misconception about fossils is that in prehistoric times, animals were much larger than their modern counterparts. There are several reasons why:  1. A question of probability: even based on a model where biodiversity would be constantly increasing since the emergence of life on Earth, extinct species that came and went in the last 600 million years (including those we don't know about, i.e. the vast majority) necessarily outnumber those that are around today. The biodiversity living alongside us at the present is only a tiny slice of the long history of life on Earth, one thin page in a book that has billions of them. This makes it all the more likely for "extreme" forms, in a given taxonomic group, to have existed at some point in time and eventually gone extinct, than to exist today (particularly if that group has a long and

And more importantly: What is Nopeland?  Originally, Nopeland is an Internet meme about animals, defined by the Urban Dictionary as "the place where Nopes live". So Nopeland is a place. A place full of Nopes. But what are "Nopes"? Nopes are animals. A specific category of animals: those that generally elicit strong feelings in most people, and reactions of the following nature:  Most often, animals widely categorised as "nopes" look like that: A Nope. Twelve centimetres of Nope An eight-legged Nope As you can see, the definition of a "nope" is quite loose, and varies from person to person. Snakes are seen by many as an object of fear and disgust, but some find them adorable. Some people are terrified of birds, and to them, sparrows and pigeons are just as "nope-ish" as spiders, scorpions or snakes.  That's precisely because the definition of "Nope" is vague, that I chose to name that blog, and my business as a freelance ar