I ♥ turtles, even the goat sucking ones.

It's true. Every since I was a wee lad, I've had a soft spot for chelonians. Perhaps it had something to do with a group of adolescent, transmogrified, "reptilian" practitioners of an unconventional martial art style. Or maybe it was just because the order Testudines is chock full of really (anatomically) odd, really cool critters. Shame on me, once again, for so far excluding an entire clade of organisms here at Superoceras. I'll use the recent publication of a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology to change that, straight away.

... and such a let down.

2:00PM EST. I've been waiting all day for this. Whatever the news, I want to hear it. So I click the link. The link that NASA has been teasing me with all week. The page opens, the NASA TV video player appears and then...

Such a tease...

At 2:00PM EST today, NASA has scheduled a conference on an "astrobiological finding that will impact the search for extraterrestrial life". When this was announced on Monday, the first thought that occurred to many was that life had been discovered somewhere else in the Solar System. Looking at the list of participants, I have to admit I thought it was a possibility. An extremely optimistic one, but a possibility nonetheless. There are several planetary moons in our solar system that have been proposed as potential hosts for life (Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Titan being two of the most prominent). But in my humble opinion, if NASA had discovered life elsewhere in the Universe, they wouldn't have waited a few days to tell everyone.