C.G.P. Grey busts some myths you may have heard about animals. He goes pretty fast, so in case you want to check the facts more slowly, the script is available at his site. Link -via The Daily What

Found via Arbroath - does anyone know where this was from?

That's what Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said, in defense of an Alaskan oil pipeline project. It's all about the caribou:

Here’s his theory: The caribou very much enjoy the warmth the pipeline radiates. “So when they want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline,” he informed his colleagues. It’s apparently the equivalent of being wined and dined. And that has resulted in a tenfold caribou population boom, he concluded.

“So my real concern now ...if oil stops running through the pipeline...do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?” he asked.

Link - via News of the Weird

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

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Just in time for Valentine’s Day, these kitties want to show us just how to celebrate the upcoming holiday. Isn’t love beautiful?

Via I Can Has Cheezburger

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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.

Via I Can Has Cheezburger

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:

Wobbegongs 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.

Link | Photographer’s Website

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

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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!

Link -via Nerdcore

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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

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

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

“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:

It 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.

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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.

Link

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

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 

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

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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

A Sulcata tortoise enjoys a salad, which probably took hours in real time. With time-lapse fast forward photography and a dramatic soundtrack, he’s an unstoppable eating machine. -via Geekosystem

How do you tout the benefits of your fancy-schmancy lawn mower? Lawn mower maker Jacoben turned to advertising icon Stan Freberg to create (now classic) ad campaign.

Stan's answer? Compare it to a sheep. The Presurfer has the video clip: Link

Is giving a cow whiskey the secret to ensuring it will live a long healthy life? It might sound silly, but if Bertha, the world’s longest-living cow had a few shots every year before staring in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, then who knows, maybe it helps. Interestingly, Bertha also holds the record for most calves birthed by one cow.

Read about more long-living animals over at Mental Floss.

Link

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This is what I look like after a night of hardcore blogging. To be fair, a dog this lazy could only belong to a lazy person who obviously didn’t want to bother cleaning up the spilled food himself.

Even one Saint Bernard by itself is a lot of dog. Yes, they belong to a breeder, Lasquite’s Saint Bernards in British Columbia. I can’t even imagine how much kibble they go through. -via reddit

Look at the size of this moth -it’s 11 inches across! This is the Atlas moth, the largest moth species in the world. The wings have transparent “windows” that are not holes, but translucent tissue. See many more pictures of this gorgeous moth at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user fabianfred)

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There you have it gamblers, go put your money down on the Giants. Teddy the Porcupine has called it and you can’t deny his foresight.

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The boxing world might have a furry new lightweight champ on its hands, in the form of this adorable boxing cat! It appears that he’s learned how to stick and move by watching fights on TV, and if this video is any indication of how he’ll perform in the ring this kitteh’s got some fierce moves!

–via Geekosystem

Now THOSE are some horns! Alex Wild of Myrmecos blog found this wasp with some serious antennae in Australia, and got it identified within 24 hours by tweeting it: Link

Previously on Neatorama: When Army Ants Attack by Alex Wild

You're looking at a "supergiant," a type of amphipod found at the Kermadec Trench off New Zealand, at an ocean depth of over 4 miles. Deep sea amphipods are not unusual, but they're usually only about 3/4" to 1" long. As you can see in the photo above, the supergiants are a lot bigger:

Alan Jamieson, from the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, said: "It's a bit like finding a foot-long cockroach."

"I stopped and thought: 'What on Earth was that?' This amphipod was far bigger than I ever thought possible."

The strange animals were found using a large metal trap, which had been equipped with a camera, housed in sapphire glass to keep it safe from the high pressures of the deep sea.

Link

What is this cat singing? Most likely the lyrics are, “Stop with the flute already!” -via Buzzfeed

On February 2 every year, we watch the skies to see if they are clear enough to throw a scary shadow over our local groundhogs. But how much do you really know about these rodents? They’re not endangered, they don’t chuck wood, and they’re not all that great at predicting weather. On the one day of the year that we pay attention to groundhogs, find out more about the habitat and lifestyle of these critters at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Matt MacGillivray)

The one who didn't get away. A male Nephilengys malabarensis snapped off his genitals (red box) in the female, but it was eaten anyway.

I suppose it's better to snap off your genitals rather than be devoured by your partner after mating, but it's not that much better. Here's a solution that the male orb-weaver spider Nephilengys malabarensis developed to increase its chance of survival after mating with a cannibalistic female:

Daiqin Li at the National University of Singapore and his colleagues studied the species and found that after the male breaks away his severed organ continues to pump sperm into the female. This allows him to fertilize her remotely, while denying entry to other males. Even though the male cannot regrow his genitals and so renders himself sterile, he increases the odds that he will father the offspring of his one and only mate. [...]

Li thinks that this bizarre strategy, found in only two spider families so far, evolved to counter the female’s penchant for cannibalism. “The females are very aggressive and 75% of them kill the males during sex,” he explains. “The duration of copulation is also very short, and the females initiate the break-off.”

Link

Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits

Tessie is a red fox Labrador with her own Facebook page. She is a well-behaved spectator, but instinct tells her she really, really wants to play! -via Buzzfeed

An “image enhancement engineer” explains how he cleans up images of outer space so we can make out the details. His most common challenge? Photobombers. -via Buzzfeed

Uh-oh! This shark has been slimed! The hagfish is also called the snot eel for a good reason. If attacked, it instantly oozes slime from its pores that teach a predator to never try that again. Watch this scene in action at National Geographic. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

This adorable little critter is the newest addition to the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in New York. But it has a problem -the chick (whose gender remains unknown as of yet) still doesn’t have a name. That’s where you come in. You can submit two names, one for each gender and Spanish names are preferred. The zoo staff will narrow the selections down to five finalists and the public will get to vote on the official name. As for prizes:

The winner will receive a VIP tour of the zoo and will become the adoptive parent of the named chick for one year.

Any ideas?

Link Via ZooBorns