…and suddenly people everywhere are sending you images from their snail and slug porn collections. You are all just plain weird.
(via Dave Littler)
I think you want to read Carl Zimmer’s post on bat flight — it has lots of lovely slo-mo videos that show just how amazingly agile bats are.
I’m not going to say much about this since Ed Yong has an excellent write-up, but a new feathered dinosaur has been discovered, called Tianyulong. As you can see in this image of the fossil, it was bristling with a fuzz of thin fibers — proto-feathers.
There are a couple of noteworthy features in this creature. One is apparent: feathers just didn’t bloom suddenly in evolution, but appeared in steps. This animal has ‘feathers’ that don’t branch like those of modern birds, but instead form more of a furry coat than a set of flat blades.
The other cool thing is that this is an ornithischian dinosaur; most of the other dinosaurs that have been discovered to have feathers were saurischian. What that means might be made more clear by this diagram:
It implies that just maybe the last common ancestor of the saurischia and ornithischia were also covered with proto-feathers, which means that feathers may be a primitive state in this lineage.
Zheng X-T, You H-L, Xu X, Dong Z-M (2009) An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur with filamentous integumentary structures. Nature 458:333-336.
Several new and spectacular cephalopod fossils from 95 million years ago have been found in Lebanon. “Spectacular” is not hyperbole — these specimens have wonderfully well-preserved soft parts, mineralized in fine-grained calcium phosphate, and you can see…well, take a look.
In this new tradition, my wife picks out some image that isn’t a squid and has me post it — I think it’s maybe to broaden my interests, and occasionally to send me a message.
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Oh, right! It’s our wedding anniversary! It’s been 29 years of fidelity for a pair of infidels so far.
The hyper Japanese narration somehow made me think of The Calamari Wrestler.
