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Post by haysoos on Feb 29, 2016 19:45:33 GMT -5
I'm back from my vacation in Belize. Didn't see any penguins, but I did see storks and egrets, crocodiles, howler monkeys, jacanas, gallinules, antbirds, trogons, toucans, snail kites, numerous bats & hummingbirds, nurse sharks, two kinds of sea turtle, an octopus, stingray, eagle ray, and a dolphin! I also saw subterranean crayfish, catfish, and a tail-less whip scorpion!
Don't know all that much about penguins actually, but there is a fossil species from Argentina 37 million years ago that stood nearly 6 feet tall!
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 1, 2016 0:06:38 GMT -5
You went to Belize? Why was I not told.... still, you had fun, I missed a week of facts, it worked out in some way. Hope you have something on marmots!
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 2, 2016 0:38:24 GMT -5
After a week's break, I'm back and this week's animal of choice is the marmot!
Marmots are another genus of ground squirrel, much like the prairie dog who both belong to the Xerinae subfamily just below Sciuridae. There's 15 species within their genus Marmota, usually found across North America and Eurasia. The group includes a bunch of marmots like you'd expect including the groundhog and yes, many are at varying levels of endangered. Marmots are generally a larger sort of rodent, weighing across species roughly around 3-5kg in adults and measuring 60-80cm with a standing height of 15-18cm, roughly cat size. Much like their prairie dog cousins, marmots are 80% butt but this is due to their hibernation patterns. Some species like the groundhog will hibernate for 6 months while others like the Alpine marmot will remain hidden for 9 months. What is the deal with marmots? Simple, they're a burrowing group who tend to be herbivores though will occasionally eat bugs as needed, spend half their lives (which measure between 3-6 years in the wild, going upto 10-15 in captivity) sleeping and digging many a burrow. Their involvement in certain places during the 1930s remains unknown. The Alaska marmot has an interesting communication method, they use a high pitched two-tone warning squeak to warn off predators and is really, really odd.
It's short but all I can do, just getting back into things. Enjoy the pics anyway. |
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moimoi
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Post by moimoi on Mar 2, 2016 1:17:18 GMT -5
Welcome back! Nice pics. And regarding "their involvement during the 1930s in certain places" are you referring to their founding of the Chateau Marmot? Or perhaps some burrowing on behalf of British Intelligence around the Czech border?
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 2, 2016 1:24:29 GMT -5
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Post by haysoos on Mar 2, 2016 7:22:16 GMT -5
There were three species of giant marmot found from Nebraska and Colorado south to Mexico during the Pliocene (5-2 mya). Paenemarmota barbouri and Paenemarmota mexicana were about the size of a modern beaver: twice the size of the largest marmots today. Of course, even earlier, there were about 30 species of giant beavers some of which got up to 6 feet long - but we'll leave those for now. We have a thriving population of groundhogs ( Marmota monax) right here in my city. Most people don't really notice them, but there are at least three colonies in our river valley. A couple of years ago we had questions coming from news reporters about this "unusual" critter that people had found in one of our parks, which some locals had started feeding. We had to get our Park Rangers out to let them know that they were native critters, and feeding them is generally a bad idea. They are also known for their skill in photography:  |
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Post by Sanziana on Mar 2, 2016 13:11:20 GMT -5
Funny stuff:  |
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Post by ganews on Mar 2, 2016 19:23:44 GMT -5
I said VE CUT OFF YOUR CHONSON!!!
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Post by Desert Dweller on Mar 2, 2016 23:54:27 GMT -5
That high pitched scream did not scare away my dogs. They were all extremely interested and came running towards my computer.
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 3, 2016 0:00:54 GMT -5
That high pitched scream did not scare away my dogs. They were all extremely interested and came running towards my computer. Maybe there's some dog whistle frequencies in it's little cry. |
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 9, 2016 1:43:40 GMT -5
Greetings everyone, our facts this week are on the tarsier, requested by Logoboros and partially by Sanziana .
Tarisers are a type of primate, mostly confined to the Southeast Asian island chains. There's several genus of tarsier, many of which are found in the Philippines and Indonesia. They're generally very small little monkey-things, measuring around 10cm in length on average with much of that made up of tail and weighing just around 120g. One thing about tarsiers is that they cannot move their eyes, sad times sure but to make up for that they have an owl-like ability to turn their heads 180 degrees. Pellets are generally unheard of. The tarsier generally are nocturnal and solitary, dwelling on the ground under cover but ascending to the trees at night where those big eyes get to shine as they have great night vision. They earn their name for their elongated ankle bones (or tarsus) which enable them to spring great distances between trees and grips with those long digits. These guys are also bug-eaters, mostly eating insects like crickets, spiders and even extending up to tiny birds and lizards. As it goes, they're near threatened, not quite endangered but getting there mostly due to expanding human settlements and human destruction and strip burning of their forest homes. You may wonder why you don't get many tarsiers in zoos, much like the delicate platypus they don't survive well in captivity. Their lifespans will usually end up way shorter, down from around 24 years in the wild to 12 in captivity or even less, develop health issues and somewhat curiously, may kill itself through blunt force trauma to the head due to excessive stress being incredibly shy.
And so we come to the end with gifs and pics of this strange, strange creature. |
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Post by Logoboros on Mar 9, 2016 2:28:42 GMT -5
Yay! Though I'm still not entirely convinced that these guys aren't the product of some animatronics effects studio.
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Post by haysoos on Mar 9, 2016 9:12:45 GMT -5
The very earliest tarsier fossils are known from China, about 55 million years old. This would have been right at the start of the Eocene, at the time when Earth was at its maximum recorded average temperature, and there were giant forests, tapirs and flying lemurs right up into the high Arctic.
These earliest tarsiers would have also have been very close to the split between the tarsiers and the anthropoid primates (monkeys, marmosets, and much later the apes) - so very similar to our own ancestors at the time. Unlike the anthropoid group, the tarsiers have remained essentially unchanged since that time. Fossils assigned to the genus Tarsius are known from just a little later in the Eocene, making it the oldest living primate genus.
Although restricted to South Pacific islands now, the tarsiers were more widespread back then, with fossils found across Europe, Asia and North America. There's even some questionable remains that look tarsier-like from Africa, but might actually be a convergently clinging and leaping early anthropoid.
The tarsiers are the most carnivorous of primates, getting almost all of their nutrition from insects, and avoiding fruit and the like (which also increases the difficulty of keeping them in captivity).
While most tarsiers are solitary, there is a species on Sulawesi that lives in gregarious and incredibly cute family groups.
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GumTurkeyles
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Post by GumTurkeyles on Mar 9, 2016 9:34:21 GMT -5
 It's like a real live hypnotoad! |
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Mar 9, 2016 11:48:11 GMT -5
THis inspired me to do a wikipedia dive on primates this morning and the oddest thing I found out was that the big organizing principle in primate classification is noses: first wet vs. dry, and then for dry nosed primates sideways-facing vs. downward-facing nostrils.
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Post by Lord Lucan on Mar 9, 2016 12:12:32 GMT -5
While most tarsiers are solitary, there is a species on Sulawesi that lives in gregarious and incredibly cute family groups. I don't know if these are those on Sulawesi, but they're pretty cute.   |
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Mar 9, 2016 20:24:29 GMT -5
You’d think a tarsier winking would be cute but instead it looks like he’s just ordered a hit on you:  |
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dＬᵒ
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Post by dＬᵒ on Mar 10, 2016 0:01:28 GMT -5
The eyes gif is better with sound.
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Post by 🔪 silly buns on Mar 10, 2016 8:21:01 GMT -5
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 16, 2016 1:22:49 GMT -5
This week is the the turn for the Echidna, the other egg-laying mammal and not to be confused with enchilada, this animal does not go inside tortillas.
Echidnas or spiny anteaters are monotremes, resident to Australia and New Guinea consisting of four species. As you might expect, platypodes and echidnas are related and an example of divergent evolution. Short-beaked echidna are the most common being widely found in Australia. These spiny creatures are of course egg layers, so named after the monster of Greek mythos Echidna due to combing elements of both lizards and mammals which Echidna also represented. They live on ants and termites with some species eating worms and larva. As their diet involves a lot of prying open and picking through things, they have strong claws with which to dig and eat using their long spined tongues as they lack teeth much like their anteater cousins. An echidna has a variety of sizes, from as small as 2kg upto as big as 16kg with sizes from 30cm upto 100cm. Also, they live long with most living as long as 30 years and many upwards of 40. Young echidnas are called puggles, I'm telling you this because of the word puggles. Puggles. Echidnas do have electroreceptors in their snouts but like their eyes, it's not the main means of navigation. Most of what they use is their hearing and their sense of touch as well as scent. Unlike platypodes, echindas do enter a form of hibernation usually during autumn and winter but nobody is certain why as they have no environmental or survival reason to do it, possibly just assumed to be very lazy. Of the extant species (there's some fossil species dating to the Miocene and Pleistocene eras, haysoos will give you some interesting giant ancient animal facts) most are at some level of endangered except for the incredibly common short-beaked echidna. Predators for the echidna are mostly human but also other animals likes cats, foxes, dogs and goannas (a type of monitor lizard) along with snakes. Mostly they do like most spiny animals and ball up or dig their way out of danger.
Lay an egg or two for our pics! |
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Post by haysoos on Mar 16, 2016 8:37:33 GMT -5
The monotremes, today consisting of the platypus and echidnas, are often thought of as "living fossils": representatives of ancient lineages going back to the early, early days of mammalian evolution. In particular, the trait of laying eggs is often considered "primitive", and nowhere near as good as the more advanced techniques of raising young in pouches or the state-of-the-art placental development in the "higher" mammals.
It's often thought that the monotremes only survived in tiny pockets in isolated Australia because if they had to evolve in competition with these other mammals, they'd lose. The evolutionary history of the echidna shows that this is not the case.
The earliest echidna fossils are only 13 million years old. Our little tarsier relatives go back 55 million years, and the even the apes are older at between 23 and 17 million years ago - making echidnas much more "advanced" than most primates on a chronological basis, if not morphological. Genetic evidence shows they split from the platypus somewhere between 48 and 19 million years ago (genetic molecular clocks aren't terribly precise). At the time Australia drifted away from the other continents with their load of marsupials and the platypus, there wasn't any echidnas - they were aquatic foraging platypus at the time.
One lineage of platypus came back out on land, started foraging in the dirt and leaf litter, and while in competition with all those terrestrial marsupials, they evolved into the echidnas. They didn't lose the competition, but were able to carve out a pretty successful niche for themselves.
So echidnas aren't so much primitive as they are a successful modern adaptation of an older technology. They're liking racing bicycles to the placental mammal motor cars. Silly looking, and perhaps not as versatile, but superior in certain tasks.
The largest known fossil echidna, Zaglossus hacketti would have been about the size of a Labrador Retriever. Not really gigantic, but pretty big for a critter that mostly eats worms. Their tongue would have been about half a metre long! They lived in the Pleistocene, and have been found with cut and burn marks on the bones - indicating that they were likely butchered, cooked (and presumably eaten) by humans.
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Post by 🔪 silly buns on Mar 16, 2016 8:50:21 GMT -5
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Post by songstarliner on Mar 16, 2016 11:23:34 GMT -5
Those critters are so crazy! What's that sludge they're slurping - some kind of nutrient slurry?? It's revolting. They seem to love it, though.
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Post by haysoos on Mar 16, 2016 22:57:54 GMT -5
Those critters are so crazy! What's that sludge they're slurping - some kind of nutrient slurry?? It's revolting. They seem to love it, though. Different zoos have different formulations they use. Probably the most common is a mix of monkey chow and cat food. Others use ingredients like biscuits formulated for leaf eaters, combined with dog kibble and ground into a milkshake. Not sure why you'd be feeding leaf biscuits to an insectivore, but they seem to like it. A few zoos have even put together cricket smoothies, which sounds super yummy, and is probably the closest you can get to their natural diet and still be operationally feasible. |
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Mar 17, 2016 14:45:47 GMT -5
I’m surprised no one’s yet mentioned the echidna’s brain, which is surprisingly big and neocortex-y for a creature its size (with its relative intelligence adding to haysoos’s “racing bicycle” metaphor—primitive lineage, advanced creature).  |
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 17, 2016 15:09:59 GMT -5
I wasn't going to, it's all neocortex-y sure but then I'd have to explain how it helps with problem solving.
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Hippo
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Post by Hippo on Mar 23, 2016 1:14:25 GMT -5
For this weeks facts, say hello to the salamander as requested by Lord Lucan . Next week brings an April Fool's entry before resuming for the final real post the week after, I am accepting entries for the entry on humans because I feel like I can't be interesting or funny about it so if you have some random facts, please PM me! No random fact submissions mean no random fact post next week so it's all on you, kid.
Salamanders are amphibious lizard-like animals found widely across much of North America and Eurasia with some populations in the northern fringes of Africa and South America. It is a widely diverse group to the point it is an order and has several subfamilies of which contain several species in themselves. It's truly like songbirds over here with 655 known living species of salamander out there with at least 76 of those considered true salamanders. The salamanders have been around a long time, dating back to Jurassic era and probably were probably 12 feet tall at the time, haysoos will give you the dirty on that. Many species are poisonous through skin secretions and often release a neurotoxin. Like many other amphibians, if it's looking flashy it's probably poisonous. Also in their defensive skills beyond that are limb regeneration (more later) and even camouflage for some. With a wide array of species there's also a wide array of sizes, going from the tiny minute salamanders at 3cm upto the Chinese giant salamander at 115cm though most float around 10~20cm. Lifespans also vary with 10~30 years being a rough average. Salamanders, especially axolotls, are commonly known for their regenerative abilities. Lose a limb and another will grow back within two weeks. Of particular note is the tail, should they lose that in an attack from a predator it'll wriggle around as a distraction while the salamander gets to run free once more. The salamanders are predators, pretty much eating anything they can floop their digits on. They're predominantly bug eaters across the species with a few taking in larger animals such as crabs and fish with some being very cannibalistic and eating other smaller salamanders. Salamanders are widely considered endangered, some because of their position as a delicacy or for medicinal purposes, others through good ol' habitat decimation but the main threat out there is from a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis affecting amphibians in particular.
Pics! |
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Post by Murray the Demonic Skull on Mar 23, 2016 5:41:40 GMT -5
The salamander was the emblem of Francis I, King of France. It was believed at the time that salamanders could live in fire and so they were associated with its powers. Animal history fact!  Yes that is supposed to be a salamander. |
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Post by Lord Lucan on Mar 23, 2016 7:10:36 GMT -5
 'Wow' is right! Thank you, Hippo, these little scamps have made my week. I'll think of some human factoids to PM you. |
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Post by haysoos on Mar 23, 2016 14:36:43 GMT -5
The earliest known salamander fossil species, Kokartus honorarius is from the mid Jurassic (about 165 million years ago), in Kyrgyzstan. Fossils of a similar age are known from China, Kazakhstan and England. This is somewhat odd, as from genetic analysis and fossil evidence from other groups, it would be expected that the lineage that leads to the salamanders would have broken away from the other amphibians back about 225 million years ago in the Permian.
So where were the salamanders for 60 million years? The centre of diversity for salamanders is in the Appalachian region of the United States, and even beyond that they are much more common in North America, then Europe, then Asia and Central America. It's thought that they kind of hung out in the mountains of central Laurasia for most of that time, and didn't really get themselves into areas that are well suited for fossilization. It's not really a satisfying answer, but is just one of the many, many areas of palaeontology where we have very little evidence or information at all, so we kinda have to shrug and go "Huh... That's weird. Fuck if I know."
Most of the earliest known salamanders appear to be neotenic - meaning they retain juvenile characteristics (like gills) into the adult state. So the salamanders seem to have started out as a group of amphibians that decided all this terrestrial running about and competing with these new-fangled fancy lizards and such was just too much, and maybe they should just go back to the water. Then they changed their minds again, and decided that as long as it was kinda moist and warm, maybe legs weren't a complete disaster. Then one group (the Sirens) decided once again that nope, legs suck and land sucks, and they're just going to go full eel. Except the arms. We're keeping the arms.
The biggest living salamander is the Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus), which can get up to 6' long. This is also the biggest known of any of the fossil species of salamander - making the group unusual once again in the annals of paleobiology. However, before the split amongst the extinct amphibian groups that gave rise to the salamanders, there were plenty of huge oddities dragging themselves through the Permian swamps. The largest was a Temnospondyl called Prionosuchus that hunted in Brazil about 270 million years ago. It would have looked a bit like a gharial or slender-nosed crocodile, and got up to about 30 feet long.
Another, Metoposaurus hung around western Europe in the Triassic. It "only" got to about 10 feet long, but was a chunky monkey, maybe weighing up to 1000 lbs. They had a huge, flat head (sometimes compared to a toilet seat cover), and many sharp teeth. They were likely ambush predators, something like a crocodile. They are often found in mass graves, where it seems like they all got concentrated together following droughts as their mudholes dried up (which begs the question of why there don't appear to be any actual salamanders in similar habitats).
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