Rare things that have been documented much better than UFOs

The Carolina Panthers just won the NFC South Division Championship and will be in the NFL playoffs -- even though they have a losing record (three teams in the Division finished with 8 wins and 9 losses, the tie breaker for a three way tie put Carolina on top and into the playoffs.)

Only a few teams have achieved this strange distinction, Carolina becomes the first team in NFL history to make the playoffs with a losing record twice.
External Quote:

Here's a look at all four, including how they qualified and how they fared in the postseason:

2022 Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Won NFC South at 8-9, lost in Wild Card Round
2020 Washington Football Team: Won NFC East at 7-9, lost in Wild Card Round
2014 Carolina Panthers: Won NFC South at 7-8-1, lost in Divisional Round
2010 Seattle Seahawks: Won NFC West at 7-9, lost in Divisional Round

In the strike-shortened 1982 season (which purists don't fully count -- JM), the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions reached the playoffs with 4-5 records. They then both lost in the Wild Card Round.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/sports/nfl/nfl-teams-make-playoffs-losing-record/3741083/

Pretty rare, but pretty fully documented! :p

(Imagine me sitting here making Panther noises. Rarrrrrrr, etc. Keep pounding!)
 
How does it work exactly? Is the bait being skated near the surface (as with the dapping method used during Mayfly season on some Scottish and Irish Loughs), or is it more to achieve distance?
 
RTM said:
How does it work exactly?
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It's basically using the kites as extremely long outriggers when trolling, or just carry the bait "over yonder" if for some reason you think the fish are over there bot don't want your boat over there. There is generally a downrigger clip holding the fishing line, which is a separate line from the kite line, which releases when a fish takes the bait.

Kite fishing originated in the islands and SEA coastlines of the Pacific, often used to carry bait/hook out away from shore. Here's a old-school kite-fishing kite from Indonesia, made out of leaves. There is some argument over whether these kites fishing leaf-kites might have preceded kites showing up in China -- I have no opinion on which came first, but I think it likely that kites were independently invented in both places. (Mostly that may be because I have kite friends from both cultures, and I always stand with my friends!)

20260109_141055[1].jpg
 
There's four different Wolverines currently active in the 616 continuity. Especially considering that Marvel - oh we're talking about the actual mustelid aren't we?

Fun fact: Michigan is the Wolverine State, but there's very little evidence that there was ever an actual population here, certainly not within the last 2-300 years. Only one confirmed sighting has ever been recorded in the state, a lone female somehow made it almost all the way to Bad Axe, where a coyote hunter's dogs incurred her anger. She was occasionally sighted around the Minden City State Game Area until 2010 when a hiker found her body. Nobody ever figured out how she got so far from any known habitat but she had a long lonely life eating roadkill when she got here.

The species as a whole is least concern but the population in the continental US is endangered. About 300 live in the Rocky Mountains and probably fewer than that scattered from there to Ohio... And none in Michigan.
 
Tool use by cows.

v.jpg


When I first heard of this I thought "Pull the udder one... someone's milking this", but the video's pretty convincing.
Link to video:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj0n127y74go
BBC News, Science & Environment, 20 January 2026

External Quote:

Scientists are rethinking what cattle are capable of after an Austrian cow named Veronika was found to use tools with impressive skill.

The discovery, reported by researchers in Vienna, suggests cows may have far greater cognitive abilities than previously assumed.

Veronika, a cow living in a mountain village in the Austrian countryside, has spent years perfecting the art of scratching herself using sticks, rakes, and brooms.
Word of her behaviour eventually reached animal intelligence specialists in Vienna, who found Veronika used both ends of the same object for different tasks.

If it were her back or another tough area that warranted a good scratch, she would use the bristle end of a broom.
When a softer touch was needed, such as on her sensitive underbelly, she would use the smooth handle end.

This kind of tool use is rarely seen in the animal kingdom and has never been documented in cattle before.

Dr Antonio Osuna-Mascaro of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna said: "We were not expecting cows to be able to use tools, and we were not expecting a cow to use a tool as a multipurpose tool. Until now this has only been consistently reported in chimpanzees."
Written up in "Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow", Osuna-Mascaró, A.J., Auersperg, A.M.I., 2026, Current Biology 36 (2), Cell Press.
PDF attached below.

For those who are interested in the anatomical complexities involved, "Flexible use..." has a useful diagram,

Screenshot 2026-01-20 213025.jpg

(admittedly I've removed it from its context, but I think it's funny).
 

Attachments

John J. said:
Tool use by cows.
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And for those who don't get the secondary joke:
Cow_Tools_cartoon.png

img url: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Cow_Tools_cartoon.png
via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
External Quote:
"Cow tools" is a cartoon from The Far Side by American cartoonist Gary Larson, published on October 28, 1982. It depicts a cow standing behind a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption "Cow tools". The cartoon confused many readers, who wrote or phoned in seeking an explanation of the joke. In response to the controversy, Larson issued a press release clarifying that the thrust of the cartoon was simply that, if a cow were to make tools, they would "lack something in sophistication".[1] It has been described as "arguably the most loathed Far Side strip ever" while also becoming a popular internet meme.[2]
 
John J. said:
Written up in "Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow",
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Lol....this reminds me of a ridiculously lengthy argument, I forget whether it was here or at Michael Shermer's skeptic site, may have been both, about whether elephants could become a space-faring species. The context was my argument that only humanoid shape could do so. To this day, I still can't believe some actually argued for space-faring elephants.
 
Scaramanga said:
Lol....this reminds me of a ridiculously lengthy argument, I forget whether it was here or at Michael Shermer's skeptic site, may have been both, about whether elephants could become a space-faring species. The context was my argument that only humanoid shape could do so. To this day, I still can't believe some actually argued for space-faring elephants.
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Well as the elephants developed culture and civilization, more nutritious crops would put downward selection pressure on body mass. One or two mutations to the trunk to allow for tool use and you get something like this ...

https://www.amazon.com/Footfall-Larry-Niven/dp/0345323440
Footfall.png
 
Scaramanga said:
Lol....this reminds me of a ridiculously lengthy argument, I forget whether it was here or at Michael Shermer's skeptic site, may have been both, about whether elephants could become a space-faring species. The context was my argument that only humanoid shape could do so. To this day, I still can't believe some actually argued for space-faring elephants.
Click to expand...
Which reminds me, it's been too long since I read Footfall.
Gary C said:
Well as the elephants developed culture and civilization, more nutritious crops would put downward selection pressure on body mass. One or two mutations to the trunk to allow for tool use and you get something like this ...

https://www.amazon.com/Footfall-Larry-Niven/dp/0345323440
View attachment 88032
Click to expand...

I came so close to posting that. A personal favorite.
 
Gary C said:
Well as the elephants developed culture and civilization, more nutritious crops would put downward selection pressure on body mass.
Click to expand...

I did read that years ago. Niven used a similar concept in The Flight of The Horse. IIRC, the time-traveling protagonist ends up going sideways in time to an alternate reality where the intelligent bipedal inhabitants have evolved from bears (ursidae) instead of apes. Kind of a forerunner to Ewoks I guess. Though there are far more good close up photos of Ewoks than of UFOs.

1769394909862.png
 
The weird thing about any species developing civilization is that nature keeps remaking its greatest hits like a film studio that ran out of ideas a billion years ago. Pretty-much-whale terrestrial tetrapods have been returning to the seas since the jurassic, pretty-much-penguins have evolved three separate times just in modern birds, things so much like crabs that it was a shock to figure out they AREN'T all just crabs have evolved five separate times and that's nothing on how many times flight has independently evolved.

And on the topic of flight, not only did theropods alone evolve flight at least two (and possibly three) times, many of those flighted lineages went back to flightless bipedal forms. Some of them re-evolved flight and at least one went back to the ground a third time, because raptors in both senses of the word are both some of evolution's biggest hits so why not just keep doing them until another asteroid makes you stop.

But only one lineage got to the point hominins did. We aren't a crazy Michael Bay reboot of some other tool using pursuit predator. As far as we can tell we are a brand new IP launched out of a widely unimpressive and mundane line of smallish social mammals.

We don't really know why but one theory is that we fell into an evolutionary trap - we weren't really great at anything but we just just enough brain to solve problems ourselves and not rely on evolution to do it. This created a feedback loop of becoming less physically capable for the sake of building that big wrinkly brain to do evolution's job for it, with the end result being that we aren't just good at using tools, we are dependent on it, having lost our teeth and claws along with most of our strength.

And if that's the case the biggest barrier to most species doing what we've done isn't language or culture or even intelligence. It's that they're good at what they do to survive. If we want to find the next civilization we might have to look for species that suck at pretty much everything.
 
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NorCal Dave said:
IIRC, the time-traveling protagonist ends up going sideways in time to an alternate reality where the intelligent bipedal inhabitants have evolved from bears
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Wolves, I think.

The joke in those stories was that since
time travel is Fantasy, our hero goes back to fantasy time. In that story the wonky science is telling us a werewolf story...
 
Hevach said:
...
We don't really know why but one theory is that we fell into an evolutionary trap - we weren't really great at anything but we just just enough brain to solve problems ourselves and not rely on evolution to do it. This created a feedback loop of becoming less physically capable for the sake of building that big wrinkly brain to do evolution's job for it, with the end result being that we aren't just good at using tools, we are dependent on it, having lost our teeth and claws along with most of our strength.

And if that's the case the biggest barrier to most species doing what we've done isn't language or culture or even intelligence. It's that they're good at what they do to survive. If we want to find the next civilization we might have to look for species that suck at pretty much everything.
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Well put. Survival at the species level is about the time it takes to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Biological species each adapt the time scale of their reproductive cycles. DNA transmits survival data from one generation to the next. We've replaced genetic information transfer with electronic versions. We've expanded our data storage capacity from what can be stored in a cell to the net capacity of the global network of networks.

This exposes additional flaws in historical UFO tropes regarding alien abductions and biological interventions in human biology. A technologically advanced species would have been able to collect all the human genetic material it wanted as soon as it arrived here. They don't need hundreds or thousands of abductees. They need a few cell samples, no probing required. To them it's just data.
 
Hevach said:
The weird thing about any species developing civilization is that nature keeps remaking its greatest hits like a film studio that ran out of ideas a billion years ago. Pretty-much-whale terrestrial tetrapods have been returning to the seas since the jurassic, pretty-much-penguins have evolved three separate times just in modern birds, things so much like crabs that it was a shock to figure out they AREN'T all just crabs have evolved five separate times and that's nothing on how many times flight has independently evolved.

And on the topic of flight, not only did theropods alone evolve flight at least two (and possibly three) times, many of those flighted lineages went back to flightless bipedal forms. Some of them re-evolved flight and at least one went back to the ground a third time, because raptors in both senses of the word are both some of evolution's biggest hits so why not just keep doing them until another asteroid makes you stop.

But only one lineage got to the point hominins did. We aren't a crazy Michael Bay reboot of some other tool using pursuit predator. As far as we can tell we are a brand new IP launched out of a widely unimpressive and mundane line of smallish social mammals.

We don't really know why but one theory is that we fell into an evolutionary trap - we weren't really great at anything but we just just enough brain to solve problems ourselves and not rely on evolution to do it. This created a feedback loop of becoming less physically capable for the sake of building that big wrinkly brain to do evolution's job for it, with the end result being that we aren't just good at using tools, we are dependent on it, having lost our teeth and claws along with most of our strength.

And if that's the case the biggest barrier to most species doing what we've done isn't language or culture or even intelligence. It's that they're good at what they do to survive. If we want to find the next civilization we might have to look for species that suck at pretty much everything.
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The idea that we have been able to reach that exit and forge off on our own, seems in some ways analogous to the development of a generalized AI from what we have now. Perhaps a crow could fly through that exit too, with certain mutations and selective pressures.

We are the product of the biosphere of the Earth, having evolved in a complex system of genetic and ecological conditions, so credit should be given to the system as a whole.
 
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Hevach said:
And if that's the case the biggest barrier to most species doing what we've done isn't language or culture or even intelligence. It's that they're good at what they do to survive. If we want to find the next civilization we might have to look for species that suck at pretty much everything.
Click to expand...
I disagree, and not just because "species that suck at pretty much everything" are the species most likely to go extinct. I think that the sheer physical ability to transmit information from one creature to another (ie, complex language) is perhaps the most significant feature in the evolution of humans, and is a skill unmatched in any other creature. And, like all genetic modifications, the ability to speak is a mutation, an accident. The environment could not possibly give us that capability; we are the product of pure dumb luck.
 
@Ann K, @Hevach @Gary C

I was going to chime in, but thought a new thread might be fun for this subject. I'll try to have one up by the end of the day. Unless one of the mods splits this current thread, I'll just quote you guys, if that's ok, to start an OP on Evolution, Humans and Aliens. Because just humans isn't any fun.
 
Ann K said:
I disagree, and not just because "species that suck at pretty much everything" are the species most likely to go extinct. I think that the sheer physical ability to transmit information from one creature to another (ie, complex language) is perhaps the most significant feature in the evolution of humans, and is a skill unmatched in any other creature. And, like all genetic modifications, the ability to speak is a mutation, an accident. The environment could not possibly give us that capability; we are the product of pure dumb luck.
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I think both you and @Hevach have good points. It's complicated. Surely we are a product of an incredible luck, and surely every species, except in a small lineage of hominids, mostly extinct, is quite good at survival without needing technology.
 
The World Snooker Masters tournament held a couple of weeks back, competed for by the top 16 seeds in the world (so pretty much anyone is capable of winning on a good day, no walkover matches, in theory), had a freakish first round where *all 8* first round matches ended 6-2 (some for the underdogs).

Even if you create the most conducive probabilities for a 6-2 result (namely that the stronger player has a 74.3% chance of winning each frame), you still only get P(6-2)=0.2367. And the chances of 8 matches all ending with that score are the 8th power of that, which is a whisker under 0.001% (one in 100,000).

With the more likely scenario of the frame probability being closer to 50%, it's up to 20 times rarer. For example, if P(stronger player wins a frame)=0.5745, P(eight 6-2 results) is 0.0001% (one in a million).

Of course, you could say there's nothing intrinsically special about 6-2, as any eight identical scores would also have garnered attention. So, again, chosing the least freaky possibilities, all 6-5 or all 6-4 (unsure why they'd be identical, could be freakish coincidence - what are the chances of that!??! - or could be a bug in my code - what are the, oh, don't go there), P(6-5)=0.246094 and P(8 of them)=0.0013%.

So even most charitably, this kind of thing is a one-in-tens-of-thousands occurance.
 
NorCal Dave said:
@Ann K, @Hevach @Gary C

I was going to chime in, but thought a new thread might be fun for this subject. I'll try to have one up by the end of the day. Unless one of the mods splits this current thread, I'll just quote you guys, if that's ok, to start an OP on Evolution, Humans and Aliens. Because just humans isn't any fun.
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I'd love a thread not just on arguments, but on how people reach their 'rational' conclusions. If there's one thing the 'space-faring elephants' saga taught me it is that people can't even agree on what is rational.

One of the things I observed, and it is very typical, is that once people had decided that space-faring elephants were rational they doubled down on it, and no amount of genuine rationality would dissuade them. Or rather, they'd see comments such as ' how on Earth would an elephant ever build a rocket ?' as themselves irrational and it was opponents who were being irrational.

I've seen this sort of thing many times on this forum. So....one of the rare things that has been documented less than UFOs is people actually agreeing on what is rational.
 
Scaramanga said:
I'd love a thread not just on arguments, but on how people reach their 'rational' conclusions. If there's one thing the 'space-faring elephants' saga taught me it is that people can't even agree on what is rational.
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I don't know if it's rational or not, but there is a thread. It didn't get much traction yet, and I was going to post some more to it after talking to my anthropologist son some more. Just haven't had time.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/humans-aliens-and-evolution.14718/
 
Scaramanga said:
One of the things I observed, and it is very typical, is that once people had decided that space-faring elephants were rational they doubled down on it, and no amount of genuine rationality would dissuade them. Or rather, they'd see comments such as ' how on Earth would an elephant ever build a rocket ?' as themselves irrational and it was opponents who were being irrational.
Click to expand...

One thing I'm observing right now is a complete disregard for the posting guidelines by paraphrasing, neither quoting nor linking, and presenting claims without evidence ("very typical" is a statistical claim, we're gonna need to see numbers if you're going to try to stand by that - otherwise you're probably committing the fallacies of nut-picking and hasty generalisation).
 
FatPhil said:
One thing I'm observing right now is a complete disregard for the posting guidelines by paraphrasing, neither quoting nor linking, and presenting claims without evidence ("very typical" is a statistical claim, we're gonna need to see numbers if you're going to try to stand by that - otherwise you're probably committing the fallacies of nut-picking and hasty generalisation).
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On reflection, I feel I may have been getting sloppy about that. I'll keep an eye on it.
 
FatPhil said:
External Quote:

Every first round Masters tie finishes 6-2

https://www.bbc.com/sport/snooker/articles/crmlvrv114ro

I'm wondering what you think you've improved with your pointless pettiness?
Click to expand...

Well, I don't think I was the one being pointlessly petty. You're asking me to link to a site that has been closed for years. It is simply not possible to link to said thread. Does that mean I should not be able to relate my experience ?
 
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