👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully weird and frankly rather nebulostic little bit of English –'"
chnoanoflagellate like.
'". Immediately, I feel the need to preface this by saying there isn't a formally recognised meteorological study on it! Instead, we are venturing into the delightfully murky territory of descriptive shorthand. Essentially, when you describe something as, let’s just say... "chnoanoflagellate like," you mean…
…you mean that thing somehow, in some utterly oblique and probably un Googable way,
resonates with a colonial, somewhat slimy, rhythmic wiggle of an ancient, free-swimming flagellum. 1. It is vaguely unsettling because the flagella are, frankly, the most efficient evolutionary move we've ever seen!
Let me unpack that. We, as humans (who have largely given up on flagellations and now just furiously tap at our screens) feel a prickle of something when confronted with this…
chnoanoflagellate like...-ness
. It’s the equivalent of a really bad beige wall, but instead your subconscious is screaming, "WAIT! THERE. IT. SWIMMING, I TELL YOU! 160,000,000 years ago that was how it got to be here!"
The whole thing is based around a weird historical footnote in paleontology, concerning the early Precambrian and a relatively obscure colonial protist called the choanof