Hippo's Wild World of Animals - Random Animal Facts

I enjoyed that write up. Thanks, Hippo.

I like to think this is the same raccoon, before and after.



That was a good write-up!

Ha!  Because of the cotton candy; I didn't think of that.  I just imagined it cautiously verifying the food in the first, and then showing up at the table to boorishly scarf down after.

Woohoo! I love these craggy, inert motherfuckers! Let's all take a tortoise taxi!


 
   

 
 

Additional fun facts about turtles, because they are so fine:

• Turtles are thought to have exceptional night vision due to the unusually large number of rod cells in their retinas. Turtles have color vision with a wealth of cone subtypes with sensitivities ranging from the near ultraviolet (UV A) to red. It has been reported that wood turtles are better than white rats at learning to navigate mazes. In the laboratory, turtles (Pseudemys nelsoni) can learn novel operant tasks and have demonstrated a long-term memory of at least 7.5 months. They do however have a very low encephalization quotient (relative brain to body mass); their hard shells enable them to live without fast reflexes and elaborate predator avoidance strategies.
  
• Researchers have recently discovered a turtle's organs do not gradually break down or become less efficient over time, unlike most other animals. It was found that the liver, lungs, and kidneys of a centenarian turtle are virtually indistinguishable from those of its immature counterpart. This has inspired genetic researchers to begin examining the turtle genome for longevity genes
  
• They have their own Pokemon Go: TurtleSAt is a smartphone app that has been developed in Australia in honor of World Turtle Day to help in the conservation of fresh water turtles in Australia. The app will allow the user to identify turtles with a picture guide and the location of turtles using the phones GPS to record sightings and help find hidden turtle nesting grounds. The app has been developed because there has been a high per cent of decline of fresh water turtles in Australia due to foxes, droughts, and urban development. The aim of the app is to reduce the number of foxes and help with targeting feral animal control.
• Although turtle racing is generally a safe event, turtles on occasion can pose a danger to spectators. On one occasion, a turtle bit a woman who had given it a kiss to celebrate its victory in a race. Paramedics responded and injected the turtle with Valium after the turtle refused to let go of the woman's lip. The injection did not seriously injure the turtle, who soon returned to racing.
  

Aw, thanks! Everything can be made better through Finding Dory gifs.

Please give a nice welcome to the orangutan as requested by songstarliner and remember not to mispronounce their name, there is no g sound at the end.

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"and remember not to mispronounce their name, there is no g sound at the end" ?!!

I did but it's more specific than a spelling error seeing as orangutan can actually be spelled with a g at the end, it's a pronunciation issue where there isn't a g pronounced but some folk can feel like there is one anyway because of the rhythm of how the word is said and the repeating "an" syllable.

Most of the living great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans) tend to prefer forested and especially jungle environments. Only humans have appreciably spread from that habitat. Unfortunately, jungles in particular, with their warm, moist climate, abundance of scavengers, decomposers, fungi, and especially thin acidic soils make them terrible environments for fossil preservation.

There are at least a handful of orangutan fossils, unlike gorillas or chimps. There are scattered teeth in Thailand that share distinctive characteristics with orangutans found in Thailand between 10-13.5 million years old. They've even found an entire mandible/jawbone with teeth in it!

Thailand at the time was likely mostly jungle (much like today). So, not that surprisingly, it seems this quadrimanual canopy dweller evolved in places with a dense jungle forest canopy.

There is also Gigantopithecus. This was a huge primate. Depending on the reconstruction, it has been estimated at up to about 3 m tall. Basically, it was sasquatch. Here's a picture of a mandible, showing the enormous size of the molars in particular, and a comparison drawing with a human jaw:



Fossil teeth of Gigantopithecus were first discovered by a palaeontologist wandering through a Chinese apothecary shop, where the teeth were sold as "dragon teeth" to be ground up and used in traditional medicine. Since then, they've found fossilized remains throughout China, Vietnam and parts of India from between 9 million years ago up until just around 100,000 years ago. Unfortunately again, these fossils are fragmentary, and entirely of teeth and a few jaws. No other part of the skeleton has been identified.

There's no evidence that it reached North America, but the Beringia land bridge existed several times during the period they were extant, so it's certainly possible.

It appears that Gigantopithecus is pretty close to orangutans - either first cousins or maybe second cousins by way of Sivapithecus. Anyhow, they were closer than either of them are to gorillas, chimps or humans.

Gigantopithecus teeth do have embedded phytoliths (protective silica spicules) from bamboo, that suggest they may have gotten most of their food from bamboo, like those pretentious black-and-white bears. This could very well be one of the big barriers keeping them from having migrated to North America, as well as a contributor to them finally going extinct.

Not actually related to orangutans. Or tortoises. Or raccoons or skwirls or any other critter we've discussed lately. But I just saw this video on reddit that displays the incredible hunting skill of the shoebill, that is basically a straight-up living dinosaur. The terrifying head-lock as it targets its prey is magnificent.

gfycat.com/FlatClassicAstarte (it's one of those weird new web media style gif-type thingies that I don't know how to link)

A day early but this week's animal is the elusive Tasmanian devil as selected by songstarliner .

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I getcha. There isn't space this season but it'll probably end up in next season should I do a writeup. Given I did touch on dolphins already I can put these snouty weirdoes in the maybe pile for season four.

Tasmanian devils were once more widespread, being found across Australia as well as their current restricted range on the island of Tasmania. They seem to have gone extinct on the mainland about 3000 years ago, after having been driven down into just three little pockets of deviltry. Perhaps not so coincidentally, this would be just about the exact same time that the dingo was introduced to Australia.

Although they are the largest living marsupial predator, it wasn't so long ago that another Tasmanian relic held that position. The thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger (because it was stripy). It was about the size and shape of a dog (up to about 70 lbs). It also was widespread in Australia until about 3000 years ago, and then got restricted to Tasmania. There it carried on until European settlement, and the last known thylacine in the wild was shot by farmer Wilf Batty in 1930. The last captive thylacine died in 1936.

There were other large marsupial predators further back in the past, though.

One was Thylacoleo carnifex. It was about the size of a (smallish) leopard, had retractile claws (like a cat, but unlike any other known marsupial), and had a thick, kangaroo-like tail which it could use to prop itself up in a semi-upright posture. It had huge jaw muscles, and probably had the most powerful bite, pound-for-pound of any known mammal. Its teeth were a combination of pointed incisors - like a vampire beaver - and long, broad slicing molars unlike any other mammal's. Some palaeontologists have claimed that Thylacoleo used these weapons to bite into really tough melons instead of chowing down on other Pleistocene critters, but those palaeontologists don't get invited to cool palaeontology parties any more. Especially when there's a site by Lancefield, Australia with thousands of bones with odd cut marks on them. These cut marks match the physiology of Thylacoleo's weird slicy teeth.

Thylacoleo evolved about 2 million years ago, and went extinct about 46,000 years ago. There's quite a few critters (and plants) that all go extinct at about that same time. There are no known major climatic shifts at that time, although Australia had been going through general drying and loss of biodiversity for about 700,000 years. It happens that 46,000 years ago is when Australian aborigines really started growing in population and began using fire to clear the landscape. Another coincidence?



Another big marsupial predator was Thylacosmilus atrox. Rather than Australia, this one lived in the other haven of marsupial diversity, South America (the North American opossum is a successful descendant of this region). It was up to 260 lbs, about the size of a jaguar, and had canine teeth even longer than the famed saber-toothed Smilodon. Unlike Smilodon, the canines of Thylacosmilus were open rooted, meaning they would keep growing throughout the animal's lifetime.

For once, humans had nothing to do with the extinction of Thylacosmilus. It lived between about 10 million years ago and 2.5 million years ago, going extinct about the time of the Great Faunal Interchange, when North American and South America joined together and cats, llamas and raccoons rushed south and armadilloes, porcupines and opossums moved north.