Personally I think sloths are kinda cool. So I’m glad that new research suggests that they might have gotten a bit of a bad rap as… well… sloths. People used to think that sloths slept for 16 hours a day, but German and US scientists published a study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters [...]
Owners of talking birds should take note: So this African grey parrot flies out of his cage in Nagareyama, Japan , gets found by the police and ends up spending the night at a vet’s house. After a few days, the bird starts chatting the vet up. Among other bits of polly wisdom, the parrot [...]
What has four legs, is a cross between a frog and a salamander, and lived 290 million years ago? Gerobatrachus hottoni, of course! The amphibious missing link, whose name means “elderly frog”, was first discovered in the ’90s. It’s just taken that long for scientists to confirm its missing link status. Hopefully those caecilian paleontologist [...]
Above is an artist’s representation of the Mopsitta tanta, nicknamed ‘Danish Blue Parrot’ after the monty python comedy sketch. Fossil remains of the Mopsitta tanta were recently found in Scandinavia and are dated as being 55 million years old. Previously, the oldest parrot fossils found in the Southern Hemisphere were only about 15 million years [...]
Nadezhda, whose name in Russian means Hope, was a cockroach. She was taken up into space on an orbiting laboratory with the appropriately sci-fi-sounding name of Foton-M, where she conceived last September. Her little baby roach-onauts were the first roaches conceived in outer space. They were said to have matured at a faster rate than [...]
A report published in Singapore revealed a sharp increase in consumption of shark’s fins over the past year. More than 470 tons of shark’s fins (just the fins, mind you) were eaten in Singapore in 2007, compared with only 182 tons in 2006. This increase was directly linked by the report to higher incomes and [...]
Thousands of bats have been dying since March of this year due to a mysterious outbreak known only by the telltale white substance on the heads and wings of the bat carcasses. “White-nose syndrome” was first observed February last year, and has continued to attack bat colonies and mystify scientists. Other symptoms seen in the [...]
In the picture above is a rescued Alaskan bald eagle named Beauty. She was shot by hunters and as a result lost most of her beak. But the good news is that Beauty will be fitted with a new prosthetic beak soon. The operation is scheduled for this month. Meanwhile, she will remain in a [...]
When marine scientists thawed out the corpse of a colossal squid caught off Antarctica–the largest squid specimen on record–they were surprised by how huge its eyes were. The eyeball measured about 11 inches across, making it larger than a dinner plate. The lens was about the size of an orange. That makes the deep-sea hunter’s [...]
The chances, according to scientists, are one in ten thousand, but farmer Ralph Burge’s nanny goat Honeybear bucked those odds and gave birth to five baby goats, or kids. As rare as the quintuplet birth is, goats have been known to bear up to six or seven kids at a time. Burge and his wife [...]