Muton

umzoology:

Pholidota; Manis javanica 

There’s nothing quite like a Malayan, or Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) to help me feel better the day after a museum catastrophe!  It was a great trend the first few months I was in the museum to play the “Do we have _____ in the collections?!” game, because more often than not the answer was ‘Yes’ (the things I’ve asked about which we do not have are a platypus, unicorn, big foot/Sasquatch, Tasmanian devil, and some other odd Monotremes and Marsupials…).  Such was the case with the pangolin.  I thought for sure that there was no way a little University Zoological Museum in Montana would be in possession of a pangolin, but here it is!  Our collection actually houses one study skin, one tanned skin, and a complete skeleton.  Not bad considering this pangolin is from Southeast Asia! 

Pangolins are interesting for a multitude of reasons, from the unique thick keratin scales that cover their mammalian bodies, to their fierce claws for digging and climbing, and on top of that they completely lack teeth.  Some species of pangolins have claws that are so large they are unable to put any weight on their forelimbs when walking for fear of breaking them, so they have become one of the only mammals to walk bipedally.  Not that I’m one to pick favorites, but if I absolutely had to, the pangolin would probably win! 

drueisms:

Wow Wednesday - Wasps that are smaller than amoebas

Thrips are tiny insects, typically just a millimetre in length. Some are barely half that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’ egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.

That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp – complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is actuallysmaller. At just 200 micrometres (a fifth of a millimetre), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive and a miracle of miniaturisation.

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

Click through to read more about this ridiculously awesome animal.

(via insectlove)

insectlove:

tagmata: Sycamore Lace Bug (by Gilles San Martin) My favorite hemipteran family.

umzoology:

Felidae

Last month I featured a variety of genera and species of canids but I’m personally a cat person (secret’s out), so here’s my favorite family: Felidae!  I had no idea how many different genera of felines we had in the collection; twice as many as the canids with fourteen, including one extinct species!  AWESOME!  

Here they are from largest to smallest: 

Smilodon - Cast skull of the saber-toothed cat, lived between 2.5ma - 10,000 years ago, endemic to the Americas
Panthera leo - Lion
Puma concolor - Puma, Cougar, Mountain Lion
Panthera pardus - Leopard
Lynx canadensis - Canada lynx
Lynx rufus - Bobcat
Felis yagouaroundi - Jaguarundi  
Felis wiedii - Margay
Leopardus tigrinus - Oncilla, Tiger cat 
Felis catus/Felis domesticus - Domestic house cat
Leopardus pardalis - Ocelot
Prionailurus bengalensis - Leopard cat
Felis silvestris - Wildcat

I’ll refrain from going into great detail about any one of these species at the moment, but I find it interesting how despite some size discrepancies and a slight variation on the degree of pronunciation of the sagittal crest, most of these genera are surprisingly similar in the morphological sense.  With the exception of the oddly rounded cranium of the Ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) I don’t know that I would be able to identify any of these based on anything besides size comparisons, but then again there aren’t exactly a lot of jungle cat species up here in Montana to worry about! 

ulaulaman:

Jesus shares your political views - but is more extreme

science:

Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane.

(via sabrinacampagna)

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Once the basic shape of the eye is specified, cells within the optic cup differentiate, populating the retina with neurons that sense light and refine visual information before it is transmitted to the brain. In fish and amphibians, retinal stem cells are maintained throughout the animal’s lifetime in a stem cell niche located adjacent to the lens (seen in yellow above). This situ hybridization image of a zebrafish eye (from a ~3-day-old larvae) reveals gene expression patterns that distinguish retinal stem cells (red) from the cells that are becoming neurons (purple). By comparing gene expression patterns within the retinal stem cell niche in normal and mutant eyes, we gain insight into how stem cells turn into neurons.

discoverynews:

Most Detailed View Yet of the Apollo 11 Moonwalks

The clearest view yet of the famous Apollo 11 landing site on the moon was captured by a NASA spacecraft in orbit around our planet’s natural satellite.

The agency’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) zeroed in on Mare Tranquillitatis, or the Sea of Tranquility — the place where humans first touched down on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. The new image from LRO captures amazing details of the historic site, even revealing the remnants of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s first steps on the moon.

keep reading

umzoology:

Monkey Sale

Now for the hands-down (no pun intended) creepiest drawer in the museum: the primates.  Something about their little faces and fingers with fingerprints and skulls that look like children really gives me the heebie-jeebies.  All of these individuals were donated by F. S. Todd, who’ve I’ve mentioned before as being a huge contributor to our collection in the 1960’s while he worked for the L.A. Zoo.  A few of these specimens, however, were actually donated to him from pet shops in that area.  I find it a little hard to believe that people use to (and still try) to own primates as pets, or any wild animal for that matter.  It gets a little too Planet of the Apes meets Battlestar Galactica meets Animal Farm for me. 

Top to bottom, left to right: Saguinus oedipus, Cottontop tamarin; Cebuella pygmaea, Pygmy marmoset, and Alouatta villosa, a juvenile howling monkey that apparently died of starvation when its mother was killed in the Panama Canal area. 

The Monkey Sale clipping is from the Spokane Washington newspaper back in the 1960’s, advertising a local monkey sale.  So affordable! 

thescienceofrealities:

First Photos of 298 Million Year Old Forest Unveiled.

“ Scientists have just released the first photos of the incredible 298 million year old buried forest that was recently found below a coal mine in Yuda, China. The extensive array of tree and plant fossils that were photographed were found still arranged in a forest landscape - a first for fossil discovery. The entire forest was covered by fallen ash, which erupted from an ancient volcano, preserving it for eternity.

Had it not been for the volcanic eruption, the Permian Era forest and trees would’ve been transformed into coal over the millions of years that have passed since it thrived on the super continent of Pangea.

The vegetation and animal species that grew over the layer of volcanic ash have compressed to form the coal mine that lies above the discovered site.

The fossil forest is located in Inner Mongolia, in the northern region of the Helanshan Mountains.

The area preserved by the volcanic ash is suspected to be a staggering 6.2 miles in length - almost the full length of the coal mine, which is 7.72 square miles in area.

Thus far, the scientists have explored only 10,763 square feet of the ashen fossil forest, uncovering a multitude of leaf, tree, and plant fossils, some of which still bearing a greenish hue.

An array of ferns have been found in addition to extinct trees with leaves still attached to the stem, and branches leading down to their trunks.

The volcanic fossils give an accurate indication of where each plant grew in relation to the others in the forest.

Scientists were lead by University of Pennsylvania’s Hermann Pfefferkorn.

The team will continue to explore and document this “Permian vegetational Pompeii.”

They will continue to catalog this nearly 300 million year time capsule as they go on. “

Source.

(via dendroica)