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The Soviet Union launched fruit flies into space in 1947. I did not know that until today. Since then, we’ve sent many living species up into space for exploration and experimental purposes, and eight of those were mammals. Can you name them all in two minutes? You don’t have to know their personal names, just what kind of mammal they were, in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I only missed one. Link
One way mammals are different from most animals is their large brains, in relation to the rest of the body. A new study says that the larger brains were developed for the sense of smell. CT scans of 190-million-year-old mammal fossils indicate that much of the the brain growth was in the area dedicated to the sense of smell.
“We studied the outside features of these fossils for years,” said Tim Rowe, professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences and director of the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, and lead author of the new study. “But until now, studying the brains meant destroying the fossils. With CT technology, we can have our cake and eat it, too.”
According to the study, other factors leading to larger brains in early mammals included greater tactile sensitivity and enhanced motor coordination. Fossils of some of the earliest mammals, such as Hadrocodium, bore full coats of fur, explaining the need for enhanced tactile sensitivity.
Researchers scanned a dozen early mammal fossil and more than 200 current species over ten years for this study. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
(Image credit: Matt Colbert)
Hundred of millions of years ago, sea creatures crawled up on land and started to become mammals. Then much later, a few went back into the sea, but left few fossils to show us how they did it -or at least that’s what we used to think.
For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.
These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link
Have you ever heard of venomous mammals? Until this article, I was only aware of Platypus males having venomous spurs, and chalked it up to just another platypus anomaly. But there are many mammals species that come with venom!
Platypus is one of the few venomous mammals
that can deliver venom capable of causing severe pain to humans. Although the venom is not lethal to humans, it is so
excruciating that the victim may be incapacitated. Oedema rapidly develops around the wound and gradually spreads
throughout the affected limb. Information obtained from case histories and anecdotal evidence indicates that the pain
develops into a long-lasting hyperalgesia that persists for days or even months.
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This infographic, titled Species-scape, purports to show various species at sizes relative to the number of known species in that group. Insects, represented by the fly, is the largest (at about 900,000 known species). If you’re wondering where we are, humans (and other mammals) are represented by the reindeer underneath the mushroom.
