(Source: natgeo-gifs)
The Guillemot is a seabird that lays its eggs on a bare rock ledge on a cliff face. When an egg is accidentally dislodged, its shape causes it to spin in a tight circle, which prevents it from falling off the ledge into the sea. (Springwatch - BBC)
(via ecdysozoa)
Dinosaur Feathers Trapped in Amber
A large treasure trove of ancient amber deposits in Canada has given insight into the evolution of feathers from dinosaurs to modern birds. Amber is essentially fossilised resin that preserves anything unlucky enough to become trapped in it, and researchers have found feathers preserved from the Late Cretaceous Period—70 to 85 million years ago. 11 distinct sets of feathers from 4,000 amber deposits filled in gaps in the fossil record, showing the progression of feathers from hair-like filaments to the branched, structured, flight-capable plumes of modern birds. “We’re finding two ends of the evolutionary development [of] feathers trapped in the same amber deposit,” says Ryan McKellar, the study’s co-author. The specimens were so well-preserved that researchers could even see the pigments that once coloured them—the feathers ranged from transparent to mottled to bright. Some had even become specialised, not for flight but for diving underwater, and some may have come from China’s 125-million-year-old Sinosauropteryx prima, the first dinosaur fossil discovered with feathers intact. The find suggests that dinosaurs were not all the scaly, drab creatures that we often imagine—a wide array of brightly-coloured creatures roamed the earth too, perhaps right up to the dinosaurs’ extinction.
(Image Credit: National Geographic)
Poll from Votelr.com : What do you believe in?
Fruit fly with optical spider illusion
This Rhagoletis fruit fly is a living optical illusion!
Here’s how its markings might look to a spider:
And here’s what that spider would probably think it sees:
A bigger spider might still attack, but smaller ones are unlikely to risk it.
take your creationism off my spider blog yo
COOL MAGGOT FACTS:
1) Under normal conditions, fly maggots are always what eliminates most of an animal carcass on land. The recognized stages of decomposition are dependent on their presence.
2) Many humans find everything about a maggot abhorrent, but it wouldn’t be such an efficient scavenger if it differed in any way. They are pure utility, stripped down to the bare minimal anatomy for scavenging!
3) Blowfly maggots can technically be considered “aquatic,” as they will spend most of their life submerged head-down in the fluids of decaying meat. Like water-dwelling insects, they breathe by “snorkeling” through pores near their anus!
4) Maggots have a pair of tusk-like hooks to help get a grip on rotting tissues, but no means of biting or chewing. Like adult flies, they secrete a digestive enzyme and suck up the liquefied food.
5) Maggots actually greatly reduce bacterial levels around them, as they are competing with the microbes for food.
6) Most insects still have six true legs even as larvae, sometimes just greatly reduced. Not so for fly maggots, who lack even an internal trace of appendages.
7) Not only do they lack jaws or limbs, but fly maggots are among the only insect larvae without “head cases.” Other insect larvae have fully developed heads and jaws, protected by a skull-like exoskeleton similar to the head of an adult insect. Except for its hooks or barbs, a maggot is squishy and naked from end to end!
8) Maggots function like organic drills. Cone shaped, with the mouth at the small end, their undulations work them corkscrew-like into meat.
I’ve posted this photo before and I’ll probably post it again. It was the first time I ever got to see what a maggot’s face actually LOOKS like, and I fell in love instantly. I mean, I already liked maggots, but that was before I knew they were hot-dog walrus puppet monsters in parkas. That’s also a bacterium hanging out in the upper middle - the entire maggot head that we’re seeing here is barely visible to the naked eye.
Air-breathing fish that can hop and walk across the floor on their fins hint that walking may have evolved underwater before such animals began migrating on to land, scientists find.
Eurypterus
- Sea Scorpion
When: Late Silurian ~ 430-420 million years ago
Where: In ancient relatively shallow seas, swimming over what is today North America and Europe. They are very common in the eastern US, and are the state fossil of New York.
What: Eurypterus is the most well known member of the Eurypterida. Okay that probably didn’t help much! These animals are arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans, etc) and in the group that incudes the horseshoe crabs, spiders, and scorpions. They are not actually scorpions, though they are closely related to them. Like a lot of living arthropods, they grow by successive molting and can become very large, in fact the largest arthropods known were eurypterids! Most fossil are small, just a few centimeters, but the largest one is over 4 feet (120cm) long from head to tail tip! They moved both by swimming though the water with their large paddles arms and walking on the substrate with their smaller legs. They were carnivorous and most likely at the top of the food chain in their day - jawed fishes were just starting to appear. Its possible the evolution and migration of these fishes is what lead to the extinction of the sea scorpions.
(via gogoatz)
(Source: crosseyedcupid, via gogoatz)
