HOME |
RSS | 
A 20-million-year-old bat fly was discovered in a mine in the Dominican Republic, the first fossilized fly of its type ever found. Its descendants are still around, sucking blood from modern bats, but scientists did not know how far back these parasites existed. But what’s even more enlightening is that this fly carried an ancient strain of bat malaria, of a species new to science. George Poinar, Jr. of Oregon State University found the fly, and also found the malaria while examining the fly under a microscope.
Before he became a specialist in ancient diseases inside equally ancient bugs, Poinar had worked on attempting to extract DNA from insects trapped in amber—work which author Michael Crichton has acknowledged as part of his inspiration for Jurassic Park.
But no ancient bats will be reconstructed from this specimen, even if it were possible.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Poinar said, “this specimen is so rare that we wouldn’t want to attempt to try it.”
Read more about the bat fly at National Geographic News. Link
Sometimes it’s too hard to actually get your kitty in a costume. Fortunately, with a simple cardboard box and a marker, you can make your little one the coolest geek kitty in town. Click the link to see the picture even bigger.
Link Via I Can Has Cheezburger
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, these kitties want to show us just how to celebrate the upcoming holiday. Isn’t love beautiful?
Getting ready for a big move is tough, especially when you have a cat. Fortunately, this video shows you just how to box up your kitty so you the move to your new house is quick and smooth as possible.
Photo: Image: Daniela Ceccarelli
It may be a dog-eat-dog up here, but down in the oceans, it's a shark-eat-shark world. Daniela Ceccarelli of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies snapped this photo of a tasselled wobbegong shark eating another shark:
Link - via NotcotWobbegongs usually lie in wait on the sea floor for a passing fish or a tasty invertebrate to swim by and then ambush their prey. This one got lucky with a brown-banded bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium punctatum), and was in the process of swallowing it whole and head first. The wobbegong's appetite for large meals is helped by its dislocating jaw, large gape and rearward-pointing teeth.
While wobbegongs eating sharks has been recorded before from stomach contents, this is the first time it has been photographed in action.
It
looks like an insignificant spec of dust, but if scientists are right,
it could be the ancestor of us all.
Meet Otavia antiqua, a microscopic, sponge-like African fossil that could be the earliest known animal:
The creature, Otavia antiqua, was found in 760-million-year-old rock in Namibia and was as tiny as it may be important.
"The fossils are small, about the size of a grain of sand, and we have found many hundreds of them," said study leader Anthony Prave, a geologist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K.
"In fact, when we look at thin sections of the rocks, certain samples would likely yield thousands of specimens. Thus, it is possible that the organisms were very abundant."
From these tiny "sponges" sprang very big things, the authors suggest. As possibly the first muticellular animals, Otavia could well be the forerunner of dinosaurs, humans-basically everything we think of as "animal."
Read more at National Geographic: Link (Photo: Anthony Prave/University of St. Andrews)
You don’t really need to “teach” a baby goat to jump, but the interaction looks like a lot of fun for both teacher and student! -via reddit
Even the sweetest pooch can get serious when it comes to competitive ball. Pet photographer Seth Casteel captured funny underwater images of friendly dogs looking ferocious while diving for balls.
Jordan Correa, a developer on the Microsoft Robotics Team, built a robot to interact with his dog, Darwin, while he was away at work. It’s got a lot of neat features. Geeks that don’t even have dogs would enjoy having one of these around! -via The Daily What Geek
I don’t know about you guys, but I have never had a dog that actually enjoyed baths, especially one that pretty much laid back and soaked like this one does. I can tell you it would be a welcome change though.
Via Cute Overload
This Valentine's Day, tell your sweetheart that your love will never die - in fact, it will survive a nuclear holocaust, just like a cockroach.
This Valentine’s Day, the Bronx Zoo wants to start a new lover’s tradition: giving the gift of a cockroach.
You won’t actually get a pet cockroach; rather the gift will be in name only. For $10, you can name a Bronx Zoo roach after your beloved. For $15 more, you can commemorate the occasion with a dark chocolate roach. Though the chocolate roaches are lifelike, they don’t actually contain real roach. Proceeds benefit the Wildlife Conservation Society and its five parks in New York.
Unless there is a huge demand for the name-game gift, don’t worry about the zoo running short on supplies. There are more than 58,000 Madagascar hissing cockroaches in the Bronx Zoo.
Link | Bronx Zoo's Name a Roach web page
What says "I love you" more than Madagascar hissing cockroaches? Perhaps only the Love Rats from the NeatoShop.
This is why the Internet exists. The long march of human progress has finally ended; we have reached our destination. Rest and rejoice in our accomplishments. Then:
1) Take a piece of bread
2) Cut a hole approximately 1 inch larger than your cat’s head. This trips some people up. Remember: the bread has to fit around not just the cat’s head, but it’s ears, too.
3) Gently place the bread around your cat’s head.
4) Take a picture & post it! We love Cat Breading!
Wikki wikki wikki what. Go Frenchie, it’s your birthday.
Via I Has A Hot Dog
The person who submitted this photo to Black and WTF took the picture himself in the 1950s. Link -via Buzzfeed
Zookeepers at the Tama Zoo and the Ueno Zoo, both in Tokyo, undergo annual training in what to do if an animal escapes. Although the training is serious business, it appears ridiculous to onlookers because they cannot use real animals. This year’s escaped animal drill at the Ueno Zoo featured a papier mâché rhinoceros. It appears to be the same fake rhino they used for the drill in 2008. Link -via Arbroath
See also: the Ueno Zoo’s zebra drill and the tiger drill at the Tama Zoo.
Of course, I’d hate to see this Dovahkiin actually slay the equally adorable elder dragon.
Link Via Geekosystem
The short answer, according to speculation by veterinary medicine professor Alan Beck, is that it would be a disaster. Cats play a critical role in keeping the rodent population down. If there were no cats, we’d be overrun with rats:
By killing mice and rats in barns and grain storage areas, cats are vital for keeping those pests in check. In India, Beck said, cats are believed to play a significant role in lessening the amount of grain loss caused by consumption or contamination by rodents. In other words, it may be true that humans feed cats, but without cats, humans would have less food in the first place. [...]
And if the rodent population shot up, this would of course trigger a cascade of other ecological effects. On that same island in New Zealand, for instance, ecologists observed that, as rat numbers increased in the absence of cats, the population of seabirds whose eggs rats preyed upon declined. If the approximately 220 million domestic cats in the world all bit the dust, seabird populations would likely fall worldwide, while the populations of non-cat predators that prey on rats would be expected to increase.
Link -via @AlexisMadrigal | Photo: Flickr user wapico
A cat makes a great listener, and therefore makes a great sidekick for pop culture characters. How well do you know feline sidekicks from movies, and TV? The challenge at today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is to match 10 kitty sidekicks with the main character he/she goes with. I only got half of them correct. You will do better! Link
Not just “a” raven, but “the” raven that inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write the poem The Raven, is on display now at the Free Library of Philadelphia as part of their Dickens collection. The bird, named Grip, was author Charles Dickens’ pet, and was enshrined in more than one classic work of literature.
The raven appeared as a minor character in Dickens’ book Barnaby Rudge, which Poe reviewed and criticised for the bird’s small role.
Four years later, in 1845, he penned his immortal and haunting poem The Raven.
It told of a talking raven visiting a distraught man whose lover had just died, arriving ‘as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door’. The paragraphs then trace the man’s slow descent into madness.
The carefully preserved and stuffed raven is one of the more unusual items in the Philadelphia library’s valuable Dickens collection.
Link -via The Daily What
The Free Library of Philadelphia is celebrating Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday all year long. Link
A mysterious box appeared in a parking at Erie Community College campus in Amherst, New York, Friday afternoon. The state police bomb squad responded and took an x-ray of the sealed box, which showed a cat inside! Police turned the cat over to the local SPCA. Gina Browning of the Tonawanda SPCA says the cat is okay.
“The cat was not malnourished, not dehydrated, didn’t need any kind of veterinary care. So, it had a happy ending. What concerns me is the people capable of doing this might be capable of doing something worse,” Browning said.
Just who would put a cat in a taped up box and leave it in a parking lot remains a mystery at this point.
Capt. Camilleri said, “Right now it doesn’t appear there’s really much to follow up on. It didn’t have any identification on the box or anything like that.”
The upside to this is that the cat, named “Truffle,” is fine, healthy and back with her owner. Tracking down the person responsible is unlikely, if not impossible.
If found, the persons responsible could be charged with animal cruelty. Even Erwin Schrödinger never wanted to try his famous thought experiment on a real cat. Link -via Arbroath
Image: Irina Silvestrova/Shutterstock
Intelligent beings captured and forced to live in tiny space, then made to perform daily to entertain the masses. Sounds like slavery? PETA thinks so and they're suing ... on behalf of killer whales against SeaWorld:
LinkIt is reportedly the first time a US court has heard legal arguments over whether animals should enjoy the same constitutional protections as humans.
SeaWorld's legal team said the case was a waste of time and resources.
The marine park's lawyer, Theodore Shaw, told the court in San Diego: "Neither orcas nor any other animal were included in the 'We the people'... when the Constitution was adopted."
He said that if the case were successful, it could have implications not just on how other marine parks or zoos operate, but even on the police use of sniffer dogs to detect bombs and drugs.
Peta says the killer whales are treated like slaves for being forced to live in tanks and perform daily at the SeaWorld parks in California and Florida.
Silly rabbit, herding sheep is for dogs, not herbivores.
Via io9
Looking for something really different to give your loved one this Valentine’s Day? How about a roach?
How better to express your appreciation for that special someone than to name one of the Bronx Zoo’s 58,000 Madagascar hissing cockroach after them? Best of all, when you purchase this everlasting gift, you’ll help support the Wildlife Conservation Society and its five parks in New York City.
Ok, so technically, it might not be the most romantic gift, but it’s certainly something that won’t soon be forgotten, which is more than you can say about a dozed roses.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Watch out for these guys when you’re out on the race track in your Kart, because they might puncture your tires with their sharp spikes and bad attitudes. Created by DeviantARTist Dragonfly929, they’re the most punk rock father and son duo I’ve seen since the trailer for The Other F Word and they’re out for a bite of Italian.
Bowser is such a bad boy that he must get lots of love from the ladies, so why is he always after the Princess? And isn’t little Bowser Jr. adorable? I guess male pattern baldness starts at an early age for these guys, no wonder they’re so angry!
Link –via Obvious Winner
Antdude, if you’ve been waiting for an article to be specifically dedicated to only you, here you go. Of course, even those of you who aren’t insect/human hybrids will be sure to enjoy io9′s fascinating article featuring 10 frightening facts about ants. For example, did you know:
Ants have already survived a mass extinction event
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event is thought to have occurred approximately 65 million years ago following an absolutely massive impact event. Widely regarded as the downfall of the dinosaurs (and, incidentally, the rise of mammals), the years following the KT-extinction event are actually believed to have been a time of incredibly rapid speciation and worldwide expansion for ants, marking what researchers Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson call “a rise to ecological dominance.”
Really, there’s a good chance ants will outlive humans as well.
Aw, how cute, a dog with a kitten in its arms. Uh-oh, better watch what you dangle in front of a kitten! And now we know where the phrase, “Cat got your tongue?” came from! But Murkin the dog still loves kittens. -via The Daily What
Science has progressed to the point that we know how cats purr. In house cats, purrs are produced by vibrations of folds in the larynx. This was difficult to determine, as cats tend to stop purring when examined by a scientist, and cats that are restrained or unconscious do not purr. Such research is much more difficult for those studying lions and tigers.
But the details of who can purr and who can’t is not so simple. In a review of purring in cats, G. Peters tabulated that 20 of 36 species of cat have been said to purr, including lions, leopards, and other big cats. (As for the other 16, Peters wrote, there is not yet enough information to know whether they purr or not.) The question is whether the noises made by the big cats within the genus Panthera are true purrs — a sound created by moving air modulated by vocal folds as in smaller cats — or are actually different noises that only vaguely sound like purrs. The “rolling, gurgling growl” female big cats emit while in heat may be a kind of purr, or it may be something else entirely. And, Peters says, big cats might have the ability to purr but simply don’t. Somebody is going to have to make careful, close-up acoustic recordings of these purr-like sounds to better understand how they correspond to purrs of smaller cats, although I imagine finding volunteers for taping tigers in heat is a difficult task.
How much more frightening would it be to try looking down the throat of an actively purring big cat? Still, there is some research on the subject.
In 1989 anatomist M.H. Hast published a study on the larynges of big cats and found that lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards had “a large pad of fibro-elastic tissue” near the forward portion of their paired vocal folds. (The exception was the snow leopard, a big cat that has never been heard to roar.) These expansions, in addition to the ability of these cats to lower the larynx thanks to the flexibility of the hyoid bone and its attachments, allowed lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars to better transfer the energy required to make loud, low-frequency roars.
So it is possible that the biological differences that allows some big cats to roar has left them unable to purr. Read more about purr research at Laelaps. Link
(Image credit: Brian Switek)
These sleeping positions may be awkward to us, but cats are liquid, so they settle in just fine anywhere. The real reason you should check out this collection of cat pictures is because they are both funny and adorable. Link
Sally is a 44-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Denver Zoo. She developed a benign fibroid tumor of the uterus that was interfering with her other organs. Veterinarian Diana Boon arranged to collect orangutan blood from around the country and enlisted volunteer surgeons to remove the growth. The doctors tried to prepare but found a dearth of information on orangutan anatomy.
But when Sally lost the ability to go to the bathroom, Boon understood she had only days to live if the obstruction wasn’t removed. So on a Friday afternoon she fired off e-mails to the team, telling them the surgery had to be done by Sunday. And they wouldn’t have blood.
“It had to be a bloodless surgery,” Boon said. “It was either this would work, or this wouldn’t work and it would be fatal for Sally.”
And then, the group got a break. Covidien, a Boulder company that makes a device called LigaSure that helps limit blood-loss during surgery, donated the use of a machine for Sally’s sake.
Another snag loomed. The procedure demanded quite a bit of rummaging around in Sally’s abdomen. If a wayward blade nicked her distended bowel, she would die; Sally would not understand how to use a colostomy bag.
There were other hairy moments during the six hours of surgery, but Sally came through it. Read the entire story (and see a video) at The Denver Post. Link -via Fark
What more could an amorous porcupine ask for than a heart-shaped box of corn and a bouquet of red roses? It’s all just so romantic.
Via BoingBoing
