My kids (two boys, 7-year-old-twins) recently made a bird feeder. We painted it, hung it up in the backyard, and waited for birds to come. Now that spring is here, there are more and more birds at the feeder every morning. It’s nice to watch them, my kids learn about nature, the […]
Archive for the 'Animals' Category
Evolution is something happens over millions of years, right? Slowly, over eons of time, primates evolve into hominids, hominids in proto-humans, proto-humans into modern homo sapiens.
But evolution doesn’t always unfold at such a crawling pace. Take, for example, the case of several Italian wall lizards left on a small island off […]
What you see in the picture to the left is not a muppet. It looks like one, though, doesn’t it? What you’re seeing is a newly discovered fish with a flat face forward-looking eyes and leg-like fins that it uses to crawl along coral reefs.
This weird fish is a kind of […]
When I was a kid, one of the coolest posters I had in my room was of a sperm whale locked in a death struggle with a giant squid. (Yes, I was a nerdy kid.) And always wondered who came out ahead. the whale had size, obviously, and strength. And teeth, […]
Dolphins are known to be friendly, intelligent and social. But altruistic?
Yes, apparently. At least if you’re a pygmy whale.
Just yesterday, a dolphin known as Moko helped save two pygmy whales–a mom and her calf–who were in danger of being stranded on a beach on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.
Rescue workers […]
Behold the water shrew–the world’s smallest diving mammal.
Now, the fact that water shrews are about half the size of your average mouse does not make them particularly weird. It’s also not de-facto bizarre that the water shrew’s hyper-speed metabolism means that it can starve do death if it goes without eating for even a […]
Guess which animal has the longest penis proportionate to its body size? It’s not the blue whale. Elephant? Nope. Maybe the giraffe?
Wrong again. The award for longest penis goes to . . . the barnacle. That’s right, the barnacle–an arthropod that fixes onto a rocky surface and lives inside a […]
Chinese scientists at Northeast Agricultural University cloned a pig and altered its genes to make the animal glow fluorescent green. The scientists now report that the pig has passed the “green genes” on to its offspring.
(To clarify: the pig and piglets don’t glow all the time–under fluorescent lights they glow from the snout, “trotters,” […]
You know what’s weird? Evolution. Sometimes it leads to the most bizarre outcomes. For example, most archeologists think that whales evolved from early hippos, which makes sense since whales and hippos kind of, sort of, have similar features and both are mammals that spend most of their time under water.
But new fossil […]
Some snakes like to snack on squirrels. Knowing this, squirrels have come up with some pretty ingenious ways of avoiding their fate as snake food. For example, a grad student at UC Davis recently discovered that California ground squirrels and rock squirrels routinely chew shed rattlesnake skin, mush it up inside their mouths, […]