Fifteen years ago, Berkeley scientist Tim White and a team of researchers from Ethiopia and America found bones of a hominid older than the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy (A. afarensis). The team collected 110 bones, enough to reconstruct the skeletons of what was unveiled today as Ardipithecus ramidus. These bones date from 4.4 million years ago! Carl Zimmer points out several ways that this prehistoric species tells us new things about the development of humans. For example, in some animal species (including apes), male canine teeth are much bigger than the female version. These are the species in which competition for females often turns violent.

White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

There have been a couple of hominid bones found that are even older than Ardipithecus, but none with enough fossils to even begin reconstructing a skeleton. Link -via Metafilter

Make your own fractals with just a mouseover on these magic dots. Other interactive toys on the same site are just as fascinating, or should I say, addicting. Link -via Gorilla Mask

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Stephen Fry gives Mark Carwardine a hard time after the parrot attempts to mate with the zoologist. From the BBC series Last Chance to See. -via Arbroath

Today is the 38th anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. In honor of the occasion, Disney created a stop-motion video using the tilt-shift effect.

“A Day at the Magic Kingdom Park” is a never-before-seen look at the park in miniature scale. The video is created from a series of photos snapped inside the Magic Kingdom Park. And the trick is tilt-shift photography.

This really does remind me of my last trip to Disney World -because of how crowded it is! Link -via Boing Boing

Artist Amy Rawson (previously at Neatorama) has created a cute-as-can-be needle felted zombie bunny for Halloween. Or at least, it's cute on the side its eyeball isn’t falling out of! See more pictures at eBay. Link

120 little people live in a village near Kunming, China. The village was set up to protect the dwarves from discrimination. You can’t live there if you are over 4 feet 3 inches tall.

Now the group has turned itself into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters.

"As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people. But here there aren't any big people and everything we do is for us," said spokesman Fu Tien.

You have to wonder if there are exceptions to the community rules for normal sized children of the current residents when they pass the height limit. Link

A skunk named Mr. Bumble was turned over to the RSPCA when his owners could no longer handle him. The skunk, who loves bacon sandwiches, weighed in at 14 pounds! Mr. Bumble is now at Tropiquaria Animal Park in Watchet, England and is on a weight-loss regimen.

Park owner Chris Noisier told the BBC: "We're now working on dieting him down to what he should be and clearly bacon butties are not a normal part of a skunk's diet in the wild.

"We're putting him on the vegetarian option at the moment. It's very much like a human weight watching issue.

"He is getting to meet lots of new people so there's lots going on in his life and I suspect it's making up for the lack of his old favourite food."

Link -via Buzzfeed

When you pay a visit to your county or state fair, or when a carnival comes to town, you may get a chance to ride on one of Michael Jackson’s amusement park rides. The rides were sold to amusement companies around the country and have been refurbished and put back into use.

"It was a blast!" said Benny Vasquez, a Visalia, Calif., welder who was regaining his bearings after a dizzying turn on the Spider, an arachnid-shaped contraption with blazing green bulbs lining its black legs. "It's exciting for people to be able to sit on something that he owned."

Over the years, Jackson acquired about 18 rides for his 2,600-acre ranch in Santa Barbara County. Some gradually were swapped out for newer models and hit the carnival circuit without fanfare. But most stayed in place even after Jackson, acquitted on child molestation charges in 2005, left Neverland for good.

Several big amusement companies purchased what remained in 2008, repainting and sprucing up rides run down by weather and lack of use.

Link -via Fark

(image credit: Tomas Ovalle/LA Times)

See inside Godzilla, Gamera, and a couple of other movie monsters in poster form. If I could only read Japanese to find out where their weak spots are, then I, too, could save the world! http://www.kontraband.com/pics/19684/The-Anatomy-Of-Japanese-Monsters/?gpage=1#show -via Digg

Upodate: These are from the book An Anatomical Guide to Monsters by Shoji Otomo with illustrations by Shogo Endo, from 1967. More information can be found at Pink Tentacle, including partial translations. -Thanks, algomeysa!

Hmmm, this t-shirt outlet might not be the place to buy gifts for loved ones, but if you are a fat guy and proud of it, you’ll find a shirt to love. There are also shirts for big women and for women who love fat guys. Link -via Buzzfeed

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This ad for Freebord skateboards has skateboarders flying down the streets of San Francisco in the dark to connect glowing Tetris shapes. I have to wonder where the awesome outtakes are!-via Digg

Most of us think of sweet produce as fruit and not-sweet garden foods as vegetables, with the exception of the tomato because that’s been argued over so much. But which plant foods are scientifically fruits, and which are vegetables?

A fruit — a ‘true fruit’ — is one where all tissues are derived from the plant ovary and this alone. This includes peas. Whereas strawberries, for example, also include some of the flesh from the peg that holds the ovary, disqualifying them from fruit status. The apple gets its carpels involved as well as the ovary, leading to a kinky pome. ‘True berries’ are also ‘true fruits’, but not the other way round. Grapes, currants (red and black), elder- and gooseberries are all proper upstanding berries which will not deceive you or smuggle themselves into your house in pies before stealing your silver while you sleep.

Whatever you call them, you should have five servings a day, and eat a variety of different whatever-they-ares. Link -via Scribal Terror

Andy Woodruff noticed that Ohio has 88 counties, the same number as keys on a piano. So he went to work on a map application that assigns a note to each county. You can play a song on the map (a couple of songs are plotted out for you) or reassign the notes based on census data such as population, number of rental houses, or median age. You can even hear what a route from one place to another sounds like! Link to map. Link to the story behind it. -via the Presurfer

A 13-year-old macaw flew fifty feet up into a tree and was too scared to fly down. Emma Hooper of Botley, England believes that Cleo flew away because she was distressed at moving to a new home. When the RSPCA refused to come, Hooper called to rent a hydraulic lift, but was told it wouldn’t be available until the next day. Hooper stayed by the tree all night long.

"I felt so helpless. It was awful, the worst feeling in the world.

"I took out a chair and blanket but I was getting strange looks from people driving by.

"They looked very confused when I said my bird was stuck up in the tree.

"I ended up driving my car around the corner and parked next to the tree. It was warmer and I felt safer but I still got no sleep.

The cherry picker arrived at 7:30 AM, and Cleo was finally brought down. She had spent 16 hours on the same branch. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: SOLENT)

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Dogs will occasionally follow children home, especially when the child encourages it. In this case, the dog bonded to Suryia the orangutan and the facility is now stuck with Roscoe. This cute clip is from the National Geographic show Unlikely Friends. -via Huffington Post