Message #237028

[In the Mouth of Madness]

-- The **** fibers from the fin showed a distinctive shrinking to about 1/3 the original size when heated in water to 63 degrees C, and gradually reelongated upon cooling. This unique hydrothermal behavior is characteristic of elastoidin (Kimura, Fujii, and others 1978, p 68).

-- Electron micrographs of the tissue showed numerous parallel protofibrils, along with a particular banding pattern that is characteristic of shark elastoidin. Micrographs also revealed a major periodic striation pattern of 450-500 angstroms, which is shorter than typical collagens, but which was previously observed in basking shark elastoidin (Kimura, Fujii, and others 1978).

-- Earlier gas chromatography analysis on the **** fibers gave results consistent with shark tissue (Sasaki 1978)

Kimura, Fujii, and others (1978) concluded that the composite tissue sample studies indicated that the **** fiber was essentially identical to known basking shark elastoidin in both its morphology and amino acid composition. They remarked, "If the **** fiber was pulled out from an animal belonging to other classes except Chondrichthyes [sharks and relatives], it should be significantly different...These results strongly suggest that this unidentified creature is a basking shark or closely related species (Kimura, Fujii, and others 1978, p 73).

http://paleo.cc/paluxy/plesios.htm