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There are eleven, count them, eleven puppies in this litter. Eleven. Ah-ah-ah! It looks as if they have imprinted on the guy in the bathrobe. -via Buzzfeed
“I’ve got two moles to attack, a cub to feed and a field to frolic in, can we get this line moving already?” Just be patient Mr. Fox, be patient, you’ll get to use the ATM eventually.
First spotted by Ash Warner Via BoingBoing
Disney animators, take note and make a movie based on these adorable little buddies NOW! Lil’ Bear and Tala the wolf pup are best friends, and they play the day away at Farmington, Pennsylvania’s Woodland Zoo in this heartwarming video.
They’re so cute together, and even though it’s been 6 years since this video was made the two are still best friends! Forget Disney, let’s just make a feature length movie out of footage of these two unlikely best friends growing up together!
–via TDW
Lazy dog owners across the world could use these brilliant inventions to help exercise their pets without actually having to walk themselves.
Fake Science is a great blog filled with all kinds of fun facts like the one above. Who knew that cats actually have built in danger sensors?
One of the newest chameleon species discovered in the wild is so small it’s no wonder they’ve slipped through the cracks for so many years. Found in Madagascar, the Brookesia micra is a miniscule 3cm in length, and is so cute that the Geico gecko has started looking for a new job!
Here’s more on this little cutie:
Ted Townsend, of San Diego State University did some genetic testing on the little guys and has come to the conclusion that they probably trace their roots back to a smaller variety of chameleon than what most of us are familiar with. “Their size suggests that chameleons might have evolved in Madagascar from small and inconspicuous ancestors, quite unlike the larger and more colourful chameleons most familiar to us today,” he told the Daily Mail.
As for the smallest reptile overall, that title still belongs to 16 millimeter Jaragua Sphaero, or dwarf gecko, but even at twice the size, the Brookesia micra are tiny little guys.
If you ever visit Madagascar, tread lightly and check your pockets before you head home, because these chameleons are so tiny that they’re easy to miss!
Link –image credit: Animal Press/Barcroft Media
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
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.
