Studies of the Dream

fyeah-seacreatures:

Close-up of a Farallones Fish. (MKawano.Photography)

I feel like this closely resembles my face when people wake me up unexpectedly in the morning.

(via explosionsoflife)

houseofangryhippies:

Only touch if you are in a position where you must help the animal.

(Source: empatheticvegan, via vegan--scum)

rhamphotheca:

Mapping the Genomes of Crocodilians Is Not for the Faint of Heart

by Miles O’Brien and Marsha Walton

David Ray never turns his back on his research, and with good reason! “If it can’t bite you, it’s not interesting,” he jokes.

Ray and his team study alligators, crocodiles, bats and flies, among other creatures. There’s no handbook for learning how to capture an alligator or a crocodile. “Oh, it’s great. I mean, there’s just a thrill,” says Ray, an evolutionary biologist at Mississippi State University (MSU).

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), this multidisciplinary team from several universities is mapping crocodile and alligator genomes. Reptiles resembling these animals have existed for around 80 million years and they are among the first reptiles to have their DNA sequenced. The research could expand our knowledge well beyond crocodilians to other reptiles, birds, and even dinosaurs.

“Birds and crocodiles, though you wouldn’t think it from looking at them, are each other’s closest existing relative,” notes Ray.

“The group currently assembled by David Ray and others includes scientists with expertise ranging from crocodilian systematics and population genetics to pure molecular biology to the fields of bioinformatics and comparative genomics,” explains Lou Densmore, chair of the Biological Sciences Department at Texas Tech University…

(read more: PhysOrg)       (image: Gianfranco Lanzetti)

__________________________________

Provided by National Science Foundation

(via reptilefacts)

rhamphotheca:

Museum Ph.D. Student Confirms New Lizard Species in the Congo

by AMNH staff

Museum graduate student Edward Stanley recently used high-resolution x-ray images of tiny “armor” bones to help an international team of scientists discover a new species of lizard from remote, war-torn mountains in Central Africa. The lizard, Cordylus marunguensis, was found on the Marungu Plateau in the southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is described in the African Journal of Herpetology.

The new lizard was discovered on an expedition led by Eli Greenbaum, assistant professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Chifundera Kusamba, a research scientist from the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles in the Congo. Suspecting that the lizard represented a new species, Greenbaum sent DNA samples and a specimen to Stanley, a third-year student in the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School—the first museum program in the Western Hemisphere with the authority to grant the Ph.D. degree.

Stanley compared the DNA of the Marungu lizard to similar species throughout Africa and confirmed that it was a new species. He bolstered the finding by using a technique called high-resolution x-ray computed tomography (CT) in the Museum’s Microscopy and Imaging Facility. The CT scans reconstructed the lizard’s skeleton in three dimensions, the first time such a technique has been used to describe an existing lizard species…

(read more: AMNH)       (image: AMNH/E. Stanley)

_________________________________________________

Click here to read the full article in the African Journal of Herpetology.

(via reptilefacts)

rhamphotheca:

Why Cant All Animals Be Domesticated

by Natalie Wolchover

About 11,000 years ago, humans realized there was a better place for some animals than the other end of a spear. We started coaxing them into our settlements, gradually molding their natures to better suit our needs for food, labor and companionship. Over the millennia, we dabbled with the domestication of many species. But only a few — most notably, the cow, goat, sheep, chicken, horse, pig, dog and cat — have proved themselves so useful that they have piggybacked their way across the globe, flourishing almost everywhere humans do.

But why just those animals? Why not the rhinoceros, tiger, zebra, or any of the hundreds of other seemingly suitable creatures that didn’t make the cut, and by consequence have been relegated to an ever-diminishing share of Earth’s land and resources?

According to the evolutionary physiologist and geographer Jared Diamond, in his acclaimed book “Guns, Germs and Steel” (Norton, 1997), there are six criteria that animals must meet for domestication. Many species come close, but very few fit the bill.

First, domestic animals cannot be picky eaters; they must be able to find enough food in and around human settlements to survive. The herbivores, such as cows and sheep, must be able to forage on grass and eat our surplus grain supplies. Carnivores, such as dogs and cats, must be willing to scavenge on human waste and scraps, as well as the vermin that those morsels attract…

(read more: Lifes Little Mysteries)    

(image: Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937), 2nd Baron Rothschild, with his famed zebra carriage, which he frequently drove through London. Zebras have been successfully tamed only rarely.)

(via moreanimalia)

rhamphotheca:

Portuguese Man-o-war (Physalia physalis)

by National Geo staff

Anyone unfamiliar with the biology of the venomous Portuguese man-of-war would likely mistake it for a jellyfish. Not only is it not a jellyfish, it’s not even an “it,” but a “they.” The Portuguese man-of-war is a siphonophore, an animal made up of a colony of organisms working together.

The man-of-war comprises four separate polyps. It gets its name from the uppermost polyp, a gas-filled bladder, or pneumatophore, which sits above the water and somewhat resembles an old warship at full sail. Man-of-wars are also known as bluebottles for the purple-blue color of their pneumatophores.

The tentacles are the man-of-war’s second organism. These long, thin tendrils can extend 165 feet (50 meters) in length below the surface, although 30 feet (10 meters) is more the average. They are covered in venom-filled nematocysts used to paralyze and kill fish and other small creatures. For humans, a man-of-war sting is excruciatingly painful, but rarely deadly. But beware—even dead man-of-wars washed up on shore can deliver a sting…

(read more: National Geo)     (photo: O.S.F./Animals Animals—Earth Scenes)

psychofactz:

More Facts on Psychofacts :)

did-you-kno:

Source

(via theleftnippleofrichardramirez)