One with everything, to go!

The world tells us not to break ourselves down into groups, not to build partitions between us, and yet sometimes we need to.

For instance, you can divide the English-speaking world into two groups - those who call a dividing wall a "petition," and those who call it a "partition."

Other places where we draw the line are between those who can stand the music of Yanni and those who run from the room as soon as they hear it...those who would willingly eat hummus and those who only keep it around to use as spackle...those who will watch golf on TV and those who would rather have a colonoscopy...and those who love anchovies, and those who don't.

Put me firmly in the anchovy camp. A handful of those bad boys on a pizza and I'm as happy as I can be. But I can understand why some don't like them...they're sort of fishy...and sort of salty.

But maybe the anti-anchovyites know something I don't. Psychologists will tell you the reason our blood pressure goes up and we get all anxious in the face of trouble stems back to the days when we lived among the saber-toothed tigers and had to be ready to beat feet at the first sign of one.

And now comes this news: Anchovies, the fish who populate Caesar salads and pizzas, come from a long line of scarier fish.

ITEM: An international group of researchers recently reported two species of fishes that roamed the seas about 40 to 45 million years ago. The two species had fangs lining their lower jaws, and a single saber tooth on their upper jaws, suggesting that they were predators who hunted smaller fishes.


And they are related to...Anchovies.

Alessio Capobianco from the University of Michigan wrote this to CNN: "This discovery adds an important piece to the broader picture of fish evolution and of how marine environments changed into what we see nowadays."

Fish researchers have studied fossils left behind by two species: Clupeopsis straeleni, from Belgium, was almost two feet long!

And, coming in at about three feet in length, say hi to this old Pakistani fish:  Monosmilus chureloides.

Looking at the fossils, scientists found the teeth and several other anatomical features of these old fish were a lot like our pizzatoppers.

"That was another big surprise for us, as all living anchovies are much smaller than those extinct forms and most of them are specialized to eat plankton and have very tiny teeth," Capobianco says.

Artist rendering (pizza not shown)

He does also say that these two species are not directly related to anchovies, but, were, rather, an "offshoot from the lineage leading to anchovies that did not survive to the modern day. However, because most living anchovies are plankton-feeders with tiny or no teeth, the discovery of saber-toothed anchovies poses the question: were the anchovies' ancestors also fanged, fish-eating creatures, and only later they evolved adaptations for plankton feeding?
Or were they similar in habits to the living species, and the saber-toothed forms evolved from plankton eaters?"

He's supposed to be the expert, and he's asking US the questions. However it works, they're related, just like those people who show up for Christmas, Easter, and weddings...no one knows for sure how they fit in with the family, but they do bring those dinner rolls everyone likes.

Next they'll tell us that pepperonis grow wild on trees in Montana.