Born, like other comic book characters, out of an otherwise trivial but life-changing animal bite, the Rabid Librarian seeks out strange, useless facts, raves about real and perceived injustices, and seeks to meet her greatest challenge of all--her own life.
It was an Ice Age squirrel’s treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species.
The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds.
Just like modern bush crickets - also known as katydids - the Jurassic insects produced music with their wings. A "plectrum" on one wing was dragged along a microscopic comb-like structure on the other.
This produces a continuous "chirp" as the male insects rub, or "stridulate" their wings in a scissor-like motion. Dr Zapata described this stridulation as similar to playing a tiny violin.
By looking at the wing structures, he explained, "I could estimate that the animal made pure, musical tones".
Such a single-note tone would have transmitted efficiently - a regular wave of sound penetrating a noisy environment cluttered with vegetation. This would have allowed a female cricket to detect a male's song from tens of metres away.
A team of scientists have discovered a strange new creature that reportedly had 16,000 eyes when it lived during the age of the dinosaurs.
Working on Kangaroo Island in South Australia, the team of scientists announced the discovery, saying they have turned up a Cambrian predator with 16,000 eyes. Anomalocaris is one of the weirdest and fiercest creatures from the Cambrian period, when multicellular life first evolved over 600 million years ago. The animals were about a meter long, and shaped as a flattened oval, a bit like a modern flounder.
Before killer whales and polar bears, before sharks and tyrannosaurs, the world’s top predator was probably a bizarre animal called Anomalocaris. It lived in the Cambrian period, over half a billion years ago, when life was confined to the seas and animals took on bizarre shapes that haven’t been seen since.
A crocodilian fossil with big teeth and a doglike skull is now shedding light on the anatomy of a strange group of predators, scientists have revealed.
The fossil was unearthed by a municipal worker in a small town in Minas Gerais, Brazil. It dates back 70 million years, near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.
It’s not a bird or a plane, but it is an ant the size of a hummingbird.
A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere, says paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
The new species, Titanomyrma lubei, is related to giant ants previously found in German fossils. These long-distance relatives bolster the notion that the climate of the time had hot blips that allowed warmth-loving giant insects to spread from continent to continent, Archibald and a U.S.-Canada team propose online May 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
An ancient ant wing from Tennessee had hinted that big ants lived in North America during this time, says Torsten Wappler of the University of Bonn in Germany. “But complete preserved specimens were not known until Bruce came up with this beautiful preserved fossil.”