Although the flea is well-known for being the greatest animal high-jumper, researchers have demonstrated that the frog hopper could steal the crown for insect acrobatics. Compared to the previous title-holders, frog hoppers take off almost five times faster, exerting a force equivalent to over 400 times their own body-weight where the flea produces around 135…
Month: February 2016
Glyptodonts may have evolved neck protection in response to new sabre-toothed predators
Glyptodonts are an extinct group of large mammals which were reasonably common across South (and later, Central) America during the Pleistocene era. These large herbivores resembled ankylosaurs and armadillos, to the latter of which they are close relatives. They could be the size of a small car, with short legs and a fairly squat posture….
Dragonfly eyes detect up to 30 different ‘colours’
Our retinas contain four different types of light-sensing photoreceptor cells: rods, which detect low levels of light, and three cone cell types which detect red, blue and green wavelengths of light. These allow us to see in (relative) black and white when it’s dark, and in vibrant colour when it’s lighter. The wavelengths that different animals…
Section through a mouse vertebra
Section through the centre of a mouse vertebra, image courtesy of Michael Paul Nelson and Samantha Smith from the Nikon Small World competition.
#fossilfriday: Preserved brain visible in 520 million year-old arthropod
Almost all fossils represent the hard parts of long-gone animals: teeth, shells, bones and others. But palaeontologists do occasionally find fossilised soft tissue, too. This remarkable fossil was the first to be described where the brain and parts of the nervous system are visible – astonishingly – after more than 500 million years! Fuxianhuia protensa, an ancient…
Stunning X-ray still life images show skeletal adaptations in life poses
Seeing the skeleton in action can give viewers a very different perspective on adaptation and evolution, and most museums endeavour to pose their exhibits in real life position. This can be tricky, reassembling the bones and trying to give a realistic impression of total body shape and size beyond the skeleton itself. These images, from…
Ernst Haeckel: Happy birthday to one of the greatest scientific illustrators
To continue with another biological birthday, today would have been Ernst Haeckel’s 182nd celebration. Haeckel is undoubtedly one of the most talented and influential illustrators in the history of biology, and produced beautiful images for many zoological and botanical works of great importance including ‘The Art Forms of Nature’. This drawing, of the Peromedusae (jellyfish) demonstrates…
In Focus: Innovations in bats’ skin helped flying mammals take off
This week’s post was written with the help of Dr Jorn Cheney, post-doctoral fellow at the Royal Veterinary College. If you would like to contribute a guest post, please get in touch on Twitter or Facebook. Powered flight has evolved four times in the animal kingdom: once each in insects, birds, pterosaurs and bats. Biomechanists have spent decades…
#fossilfriday: Early sketch of a plesiosaur by discoverer Mary Anning
This drawing shows one of the first plesiosaur (long-necked marine reptile) skeletons found by Mary Anning in the winter of 1823-4. Anning, an English woman living on the south coast in Dorset, was one of the most important fossil collectors in scientific history and, with her family, discovered the remains of many new species, including…
Happy #DarwinDay! Celebrating Charles’s 207th birthday with his favourite barnacles
These bright and beautiful barnacle illustrations are from a monograph of Darwin’s from 1851, Living Cirripedia. Barnacles, along with fancy pigeons, were an extremely important group to Darwin’s work, and he spent eight years studying them in minute detail and reclassifying the entire group. His studies, which interrupted to some extent his writing of On the Origin of…
Scans show mummified Egyptian falcon’s last meal
Archaeologists are now using anatomical technology to look into Egypt’s past. Scanning techniques such as X-ray and CT allow researchers to examine mummified specimens without having to unwrap them, which can be destructive. And it’s not just human mummies which are the subject of interest – countless animals were often mummified and entombed alongside important…
Spine flexibility helps cheetahs reach top speeds
Cheetahs are the ultimate sprinters among large land animals, reaching bursts of up to about 110 kph (~68mph) and unbeaten as the fastest living runner on the planet. This beautifully re-articulated skeleton reveals some of the ways they are able to reach such superhuman speeds. The sigmoidal curve of the spine visible in this image allows the front and…
Anatomy To You 