I enjoy and have a fascination with existential experience as from that remedy comes all types of information which is free from the bias of egg heads with degrees.
It is not a secret I have been reading a most interesting memoir of an English sailor on an American whaler at the end of the whaling industry in it's pure form of wooden ships and sails, with real seamen knowing knot and yarn. In one of the anecdotes, Seaman Bullen records a prize he made at some time in his career of a shark.
It was in a series recording the yellow striped tiger sharks feeding on whale carrion that he mentions these creatures were 30 feet long. For all the Hollywood hype of Great Whites, these were Great Tigers and while most sharks are dismissed as coward scavengers, it is a reality that not just the white produces an immense carriage.
The reference I make is of interest in something Bullen noted, in he captured a rather small shark of 9 feet in desiring a walking cane made from the back of the shark, but then notes that this shark had once almost been cut in half.
"I once caught a shark nine feet long, which we hauled on board and killed by cutting off its head and tail. It died very speedily— for a shark— all muscular motion ceasing in less than fifteen minutes. It was my intention to prepare that useless and unornamental article so dear to sailors —a walking-stick made of a shark's backbone. But when I came to cut out the vertebra, I noticed a large scar, extending from one side to the other, right across the centre of the back.
Beneath it thebackbone was thickened to treble its normal size, and perfectly rigid; in fact, it had become a mass of solid bone. At some time or other this shark had been harpooned so severely that, in wrenching himself free, he must have nearly torn his body in two halves, severing the spinal column completely. Yet such a wound as that had been healed by natural process , the bone knit together again with many times the strength it had before— minus, of course, its flexibility— and I can testify from the experience of securing him that he could not possibly have been more vigorous than he was."
Frank T. Bullen. The Cruise of the Cachalot Round the World After Sperm Whales
From a medical standpoint, this is beyond some lizard regrowing a tail broken off, for in it, we have the observation that this shark had it's spinal column severed and the entire backbone had thickened to three times it's normal size to a solid rod.
To consider the reality that this shark midway in it's form had been cut in two, and somehow it not only healed, but the spine regenerated itself.
Some sharks do go dormant or hibernate, so it is possible that this animal had enough energy content to live through the repair process in healing, but it beckons to a greater question of what is in the shark anatomy which would allow for what would be for an act of God in humans, the regeneration of spinal tissue in a shark.
That is the interesting part of this for that secret would enable nerve regrowth in humans. For people, two years is the healing process for nerve damage and it is often painful.
Could this have been when the shark was very young and in a more pronounced growing stage for this condition, which would a sort of stem cell growth pattern in sharks out of the womb or egg.
The basis of the story is correct and not exaggerated by Seaman Bullen, so it can not be dismissed. The scar reveals along with the vertebrae fusing, that a severing wound did take place, and what was severed was the spinal cord. That seems impossible and yet the evidence reveals exactly that.
This is one of those things which should be further examined for the treatment of humans suffering spinal injury.
nuff said
agtG
