
and from my body
grow the trees
you chop down
with you careless acts
I am ocean
for from my womb
all beings are birthed
I am desert
my long, voluptuous dunes
now burnt to drought
by August sun
my blood
the dyeing rivers
you pollute
with discarded greed
and selfish denial
my breasts
are sacred mountains
climbed for your egos sake of reaching the top
your summit
my nipple
without soft, tenderness of touch
that is required for such a holy journey
you, who call me home
I am not something to be bought or sold
I am alive
and in the eyes of every living creature
you will find me
their mother
mirrored back to you
do you dare look?
can you hold my gaze?
while you run your fingers through my sunlit hair of wheat at harvest?
that same nourishing grain you paint with poison for your benefit?
and do you care?
when you stain the path of this delicate wrist as you wind your way along my enchanted forest of pine?
you, my child,
who call yourself king
have scratched my skin raw
etching your name across virgin land
dark bruises mark my thighs
as you drill into the deepest marrow of these bones
searching for more gold
more silver
more of my life giving waters
you continue to ask for more
more of my precious milk
more of my cherished stone
you always want more
and I give it
again and again and again
I give
but now, my pets
I have run dry
I crack, I moan and I quake
I break open in pain
I am rain
I burn, I flame, I heat
I erupt with the force of my grief
and then
I cry
for days and days and days
I cry
and you, my dears
still look to my husband’s heavens
asking why
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>