Well, so much for the plot of Star Trek IV. :PAs per your instructions in the chatbox:
comrade_general [07|Sep 12:14 AM]: Someone point out to me in the nature yays thread that in ST: IV the whales were humpbacks and not blues.
Scientists believe they have discovered the origin of copulation.
An international team of researchers says a fish called Microbrachius dicki is the first-known animal to stop reproducing by spawning and instead mate by having sex.
The primitive bony fish, which was about 8cm long, lived in ancient lakes about 385 million years ago in what is now Scotland.
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/frozen-time-9-000-year-old-bison-mummy-found-siberia-n242966 (http://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/frozen-time-9-000-year-old-bison-mummy-found-siberia-n242966)
Heh, wow. That's a armadillo ton of ice!Yes - in fact 8-9 billion tons of ice, if my back-of-the-envelope calculation is right.
Thats crazy, anybody can think of a reason why she'd do this? Maybe she had just had cubs or something and wanted to protect and nurture something?
The "what if" article has at least one flaw though - some spiders DO live on the water and some are very capable swimmersYou could always let Randall Munroe know - I'm sure he'd be overjoyed to discover there are even more spider habitats...
A rare species of marsupial, the eastern quoll, has been born in the wild on the Australian mainland for the first time in more than 50 years.
The native animals were once found along Australia's east coast until they were devastated by foxes and disease.
Scientists in New South Wales (NSW) reintroduced the species from Tasmania earlier this year and now three females are carrying joeys in their pouches.
The bean-sized babies will stay growing inside the pouches for three months.
I just got lucky it didn't fly away from me. Also finally figured out the proper settings for my phone camera. HuehueAnd this is how great photos are made: luck in catching the moment, and knowledge of how to handle the camera - plus an artist's eye for a picture. Well done: I think they're amazing!
All the aminals that crossed a log on a guy's trail cam in Pennsylvania.
things like the bears, which could just wade the river, nevertheless choose the log to cross instead.This incidentally means I got the behaviour of the owlbear in my book unexpectedly accurate :)
(https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/2738/production/_114004001_somailsengi_cstevenheritage.jpg)
A little-known mammal related to an elephant but as small as a mouse has been rediscovered in Africa after 50 years of obscurity.
The last scientific record of the "lost species" of elephant shrew was in the 1970s, despite local sightings. The creature was found alive and well in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, during a scientific expedition.
Elephant shrews, or sengis, are neither elephants nor shrews, but related to aardvarks, elephants and manatees. They have distinctive trunk-like noses, which they use to feast on insects.
There are 20 species of sengis in the world, and the Somali sengi (Elephantulus revoilii) is one of the most mysterious, known to science only from 39 individuals collected decades ago and stored in museums. The species was previously known only from Somalia, hence its name.
Black-browed babbler found in Borneo 180 years after last sighting
Exclusive: Stuffed specimen was only proof of bird’s existence until discovery in rainforest last year
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/625d3f74ec69c2b04e5164c25b82412e2bbb1a30/0_94_1126_675/master/1126.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=4e8090115a00249c3f94ac2abf46c592)
In the 1840s, a mystery bird was caught on an expedition to the East Indies. Charles Lucien Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon, described it to science and named it the black-browed babbler (Malacocincla perspicillata).
The species was never seen in the wild again, and a stuffed specimen featuring a bright yellow glass eye was the only proof of its existence. But now the black-browed babbler has been rediscovered in the rainforests of Borneo.
Two local men, Muhammad Suranto and Muhammad Rizky Fauzan, chanced upon a bird they did not recognise in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan province in October last year and managed to catch it. They photographed the bird, released it, and reported their find to birdwatching groups.
Experts from the region confirmed the bird’s identity, noting its strong bill, chocolate colouring and distinctive black eye-stripe. Unlike the taxidermied specimen, the live bird’s iris was a striking maroon colour.
Article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/25/black-browed-babbler-found-in-borneo-180-years-after-last-sighting
The famed parrot Alex had a vocabulary of more than 100 words. Kosik the elephant learned to "speak" a bit of Korean by using the tip of his trunk the way people whistle with their fingers. So it's puzzling that our closest primate cousins are limited to hoots, coos, and grunts. For decades, monkeys' and apes' vocal anatomy has been blamed for their inability to reproduce human speech sounds, but a new study suggests macaque monkeys—and by extension, other primates—could indeed talk if they only possessed the brain wiring to do so. The findings might provide new clues to anthropologists and language researchers looking to pin down when humans learned to speak.
"This certainly shows that the macaque vocal tract is capable of a lot more than has previously been assumed," says John Esling, a linguist and phonetics expert at the University of Victoria in Canada, who was not involved with the work.
Scientists have filmed an ancient egg-laying mammal named after Sir David Attenborough for the first time, proving it isn't extinct as was feared.
An expedition to Indonesia led by Oxford University researchers recorded four three-second clips of Attenborough's long-beaked echidna.
Spiky, furry and with a beak, echidnas have been called "living fossils".
They are thought to have emerged about 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Until now, the only evidence that this particular species Zaglossus attenboroughi existed was a decades-old museum specimen of a dead animal.
"I was euphoric, the whole team was euphoric," Dr James Kempton told BBC News of the moment he spotted the Attenborough echidna in camera trap footage.
"I'm not joking when I say it came down to the very last SD card that we looked at, from the very last camera that we collected, on the very last day of our expedition."
Scientists have worked out how some of the largest whales in the ocean produce their haunting and complex songs.
Humpbacks and other baleen whales have evolved a specialised "voice box" that enables them to sing underwater.
The discovery, published in the journal Nature, has also revealed why the noise we make in the ocean is so disruptive for these ocean giants.
Whale song is restricted to a narrow frequency that overlaps with the noise produced by ships.
"Sound is absolutely crucial for their survival, because it's the only way they can find each other to mate in the ocean," explained Prof Coen Elemans, of the University of Southern Denmark, who led the study.