Plants and Animals

The stone tools styles that Homo sapiens took to Africa and most of the world were gradually replaced by new tools and were considered completely abandoned 30,000 years ago.  New discoveries have revealed that in West Africa this transformation was not made long after the rest of the world, the replacements appeared about 11,000 years ago. Long before H. Sapiens’ the appearance of sapiens, other early human species refined the use of stone tools in fine art. The first bones of our own species are related to the presence of a distinct style of flaking tools, referred to as the Middle Stone Age by scrapers and grinding stone anthropologists.

As the name implies, there was also a later Stone Age, characterized by many small tools and ostrich egg beads. They were published about 67,000 years ago and were thought to have replaced large equipment that served humanity for nearly 300,000 years throughout Africa 30,000 years ago.  Dr. Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Science of Human History has challenged this belief, especially on the basis of sites he has examined in Senegal.

Scerri said in a statement, “West Africa is a real frontier for human evolutionary research – we know almost nothing about what happened here in deep prehistory.” “We know almost everything about the origin of humans, extrapolated from discoveries in small areas of East and South Africa.” Scerri partnered with Dr. Khady Niang of the University of Senegal in Czech Anta Diop, Senegal, to study where Senegal sites where people roamed in a variety of environments, from dense rain forests to desert edges.  In scientific reports, they describe plenty of Middle Stone Age tools on the banks of the country’s two main rivers. Using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), which measures how long a substance has been kept away from sunlight, one was dated  21,000-24,000 years ago, the other 11,000 years old.

Co-author Dr. Jimbob Blinkhorn is responsible for the survival of the tools for the region’s isolation from humanity at the time. “To the north, the region meets the Sahara Desert,” he said. “In the past, there were Central African rainforests, which were often cut off from West African rainforests during droughts and part-time.” Niang added, “This coincides with a genetic study that shows that Africans living in the last 10,000 years have lived in much-divided populations.”

Moreover, the climate of West Africa seems to have been more stable in the last ice age than in other parts of the continent. People living in this region without the pressure of changing conditions rarely needed to give up the tools that their ancestors served so well. By the time Holocene almost moistened the forests of West Africa; they had probably connected with them in Central Africa and started a cultural exchange.

There’s an emotional verse in The Mighty Bush’s Isles that goes something like this: “Eels inside the year, they look for the entrance wherever they can.” This pseudonym seems to apply to one species above all others: the Snowbound Isle (or pug nose eel, Simenchelys parasite), which has been found in all kinds of places, including the hearts of sharks.

In 1997, the Journal of Environmental Biology of Fish published a particularly narrow account of the heart-aging tricks of sniffed yolks. It was investigated in 1992 that the 395-kilogram (871 pounds) shortfin described the isolation of the mako shark. Researchers were surprised to find the dead, a kind of horrible kinder, but otherwise two risky healthy corpses. As a kind of horrible kinder to surprise, the researchers were surprised to find the dead but otherwise the healthy corpses of two desperate eels. After some isolation, and analysis of the contents of the abdomen of the eels’ logs revealed that they had long lived inside the heart of the macaque to eat some blood. A similar observation was made in a 2006 study published in the journal Fisheries Environmental Science. In this example, a snubnosed eel enters the heart of a small-toothed sand tiger shark. They say butterflies in your stomach are signs of nerves, does anyone know that they represent eels in your heart?

It was not immediately clear exactly how the eels turned into the hearts of the sharks, although some isles were still seen entering the body of their attacker in an attempt to escape after entering the abdomen alive. It is found in the eels of snakes, (aptly) also known as the old eels, whose dreaded remains are found inside the body cavities of 11 different species of predatory fish. These animals are characterized by a stiff tip of their tails that they quickly carved in reverse along the shore. This same tail allows them to burst from the stomach of the eating fish just to get stuck somewhere else in the body cavity.

As part of #EelOrNoEel, Fish wrote about a trending challenge on Twitter, the director of natural history, the Alabama Museum, and #TeamFish enthusiast John P. Friel, “ true eels “ “Adolescents eat [snubnosed eels] in copepods and amphibians, while adults look like dirt dumps and use their strong jaws to tear off some of the flesh from carcasses. They can also be ‘fascinating parasites’ that opportunistically enter sick and dead fish.  As can be seen in the tweet above since Snubnosed yells can eat more than cookie-cutting sharks, as they bite round plugs of meat and twist their bodies at high speeds to snatch it from dead animals, can be seen in the tweet above.

Studies have indicated that regular exercise can be great for your body as well as your mind and that it is better to take a relaxing walk along the shore (if you are close to one). Sometimes, however, the changed tide washes up a surprise. One such surprise was when Florida resident Betty Gardner Gonzalez was stunned to find that a huge dead shark had washed up on the shores of Melbourne Beach in Brevard County.

According to a report from Fox 35 Orlando, Gonzalez made his walk around 6.30 am on Monday, January 4th. As a regular visitor to the beach, Gonzalez has seen pictures of abundant wildlife along the shelf coastline, including heron, ospreys, and apparently occasional dead sharks. The shark is also thought to be the gray nurse shark as the sand tiger shark (Carcharias taurus). These giant fish can live for about 15 years or more, reaching anywhere from 2 to 3 meters (6.5 to 10.5 feet) in length. 

The beauty of their teeth and the death machine around them may make you think that they are aggressive animals, but the C-bull is a species that usually bothers humans if people bother them first. They have an unusual eating technique that shows them the jerky air that makes them enjoyable. In doing so, the shark can float in search of prey for free. The first clue to Gonzalez’s that something bad was happening on the beach in the morning was the presence of vultures surrounding the beach corpse. He was curious as to what might have been the cause of the shark’s death; he jumped to find clues to the animal but could not find any statement of what happened.

“It’s just sad, especially since I don’t know what caused it to die,” Gonzalez told Fox 35 in a television interview. “I flipped the shark over, I just kind of got to see if there was any kind of mark and I can’t tell you how it was killed.” A deadly algal blossom known as the Red Tide is sometimes damaged by the organism Karenia brevis in waters around Florida; although there is no evidence that this shark was the cause of death at the time of writing. Its presence can cause skin irritation and coughing in humans and can prove fatal for marine animals.

In 2018, carcasses of turtles, dolphins, and even whale sharks were considered tidal products. In recent years the Florida coastline has seen some more unusual items washing up on its shores, including 16 bricks of cocaine and even a shipwreck.

It’s hard to imagine a mighty T. rex kneeling delicately above a clutch of eggs, However, new research around a fossil ovoid suggests that this behavior may have been practiced by some dinosaurs. The first non-avalanche dinosaurs (species outside the litter of dinosaurs related to living birds) featuring adult dinosaurs have been described in detail in the science bulletin. What’s more, the embryos were at different stages, indicating that the eggs could hatch at different times, which is usually determined after the parents start encouraging them.

Study author Shundong Bi, a professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, told IFLScience, “This is not the first time an oviraptorid has been found, or these are not the first ovarian embryos.” “But for the first time, an adult was found on top of a fetal egg. It is also the first nesting oviraptorid found outside the Gobi Desert. “

Brooding, seen in chickens that sit on their eggs to incubate them during development, was thought to be an unlikely behavior in non-avialan dinosaurs whose heavy bodies would surely squish their progeny. However, this new fossil found near Ganzhou, China, was the first to be discovered in an avalanche dinosaur preserved on top of an eggshell that still contains embryonic remains. The researchers believe that the presence of an adult in embryonic eggs at a stage of advanced growth provides strong support for the brooding hypothesis in some non-avalanche dinosaurs.

Interestingly, the embryos inside the eggs are at different stages of development, which means that if the eggs could survive, they would hatch at different times. Bi said, “Asynchronous hatching was not very widespread among dinosaurs.” “This phenomenon, known as asynchronous hatching, is a very strange and unusual of living descent of dinosaurs, even in modern birds.”

The researchers say their results prove that the evolution of reproductive biology along the line of birds archosaurs (a large group of vertebrates including dinosaurs and pterosaurs and represented by birds today) was complex and not linear, a growing process that was previously conceived. They give the theoretical idea that some aspects of non-avalanche theropod reproduction may be unique to these dinosaurs and did not eventually go to the avian ancestors who gave birth to modern birds.

Recent research has detailed how the aerial plane feature evolved twice in dinosaurs before the clad image of modern bird ancestors was detailed. This new insight introduces more features of avian dinosaurs and animals that can be shared by their distant cousins.

Brown tree snakes have led to the extinction of five-sixths of Guam’s bird species since they flew in planes 70 years ago. If they reach other Pacific islands, especially Hawaii, it is feared that they may trigger a similar birdpocalypse. Part of the deadly effect of these snakes is in the form of never-before-seen speeds that allow them to climb places other than snakes. Snakes make up for the disregard of four types of locomotion (in addition to gliding and jumping), known as documented rectilinear, lateral indulgence, sidewinding, and concertina mode for nearly a hundred years.

Colorado State University Professor Julie Savidge has now made another observation, which she and co-authors have called “living locomotion”, described in Current Biology. Savage Micronesia is working to save the starlings, one of two species of birds so far that the brown tree snake has been extinct in Guam. Even the starlings have just retained their nail tips, and their loss will have a devastating effect.

Professor Savidge said in a statement, “Sterling serves an important environmental function by scattering fruits and seeds that can help maintain Guam’s forests.” Savidge and others continue to make snake-resistant bird boxes but saw snakes enter into unexpected places. Night-vision videos of snakes on the summit revealed that the rear half of the snake loops around a tree or pole while the front extends like an inverted lasso. Concertina deploys speed to deal with other snake steep peaks, but it also has limitations. Brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) by making small bends in the lasso and shifting the position of the bend for other techniques, the snake can climb very wide cylinders compared to the length of the snake.

Co-author Professor Bruce Jayne of the University of Cincinnati said in a statement, “Designing barriers to the spread of fungi and reducing some of the harmful effects of this highly invasive species has a direct effect on understanding how brown tree snakes can and cannot climb.”

Jayne notes, however, that the brown tree snakes also see this new model as a fight. “While they can climb using this mode, it is pushing them towards limitations,” he said. Snakes are seen to stop frequently and breathe heavily in lasso-climbers, sometimes slipping backward. Researchers are keen to use the knowledge of this new snake to creating a vague design even beyond the capabilities of this snake. This will not only save starling but also allow the reintroduction of several species of Guam lost birds from the snake-free islands.

Another important issue is whether brown tree snakes are unique in lasso-climbing, or whether other members of the cat-sighted snake family can do the same. It was once thought that brown tree snakes did so much damage to gums because of their distinctive venom. Recent studies have found that they are a hundred times more deadly to birds than mammals, yet the same is true of many of their relatives, suggesting a similar risk to the island’s population. However, it remains to be seen whether other snakes have the ability to reach the nest.

When you imagine marine hunters from the vast ocean, you probably imagined hunters at the top like sharks and killer whales but some deadly hunters have more humble backgrounds. Marine snails do not appear to be all a threat to the untrained eye but they have evolved to travel, feed and hunt in some strange and great way. 

The sea snail Olivella semistriata is a suspension-feeding, swash-surfing snail found on tropical sandy beaches in the eastern Pacific. They spend most of their time in inland areas, where altered tides flow and move away from the coast. Their habitat here has inspired an innovative passive feeding technique that extends from the snail’s snail’s foot to the mucus-splitting two-winged joint. Once stretched, they form two gauze nets that filter out tidal currents and tiny food from flowing water. What else are you hungry for without taking goo-net for the filter?

The intertidal zone offers the opportunity to feed some great filters, but it also puts some risk from predators to prevent them from being driven. As a great baroque, these snails can immerse themselves completely in wet sand using two metaphorical flaps to pull them under. They also like to get old when they take out the nets. If the snails want to get some more distance, they can quickly exit the sea to make these flaps work differently. By stretching their feet alongside them, they can basically sway the waves and pump these flaps to gather more speed until they reach a better place.

One of O. semistriata’s most feared enemies is actually another type of marine snail, the Aragonia propagule. These killer snails rely on investigative predators that come in contact with their prey to detect it.  These are also opportunists and will basically try to get into anything that goes their way. They can sensitize to chemical changes as well as identify the victim through physical contact and their real skills are revealed once the victim is identified.

O semistriata is one of A. propatula’s are the most common food, although they will also eat crustaceans, including Hermes crabs. When the prey can be identified, the snail starts itself from what it catches and basically wraps its body in a fleshy ball. Unfortunately inside this ball, the snail will release digestive enzymes that break down the prey trapped inside. As soon as it happens, a. propagule begins to splash in the sand, sealing the fate of its prey in the sand and its mucous burden by blocking it by the potato. So, it seems that sea snails are more agile than the land above them. Find out here about one of the most dangerous in the world.

The study was published last year revealed the mighty Megalodon is actually a sea monster which we believe. As long as the body of an adult human is about 16 meters (52 feet) long with wings, they dwarfed other sea fish while they were alive.

Now, a new study published in the Historical Biology Journal claims that the descendants of these ocean giants were also giants in their own way, making their first few tail whales in the open sea already larger than most adults. The study examined the growth patterns and lifespan of megalodon, Otodus megalodon, to shed light on their reproductive biology.

Paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago and lead author of the study Dr Kenshu Shimada wrote in a statement, “As the largest carnivore of all time in the world, it is important to understand the role of the larger carnivores in terms of the evolution of marine ecosystems by explaining parameters such as growth.”

Using mathematical tomography (CT) scanning technology, Shimada and colleagues were able to see the ‘growth band’ at the megalodon vertebral specimens located at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. These bands, like tree rings, represent one more year in the life of each ring fish. The results revealed that a nine-meter-long shark had 46 bands in its spine, meaning it was 46 years old when it died.

This information could be used to back-calculate the shark’s body size at birth, which the researchers said was a tiny Bonnie megalodon measuring about 2 meters (6.6 feet) when it landed on Earth. They commented that this meant that megalodon gave birth alive and that these fish were able to snack on their siblings while they were waiting to be born. 

The evil practice is known as oophagy or intrauterine normalization, and is found in all existing lamniform sharks, the study said. A famous story among shark biologists is that when a scientist bit the dead female tiger shark by a man-eating fetus that was still alive inside the ovary, it was spread. If the results are correct, it could mean that the Magellan babies were the largest baby sharks ever.

Megalodon sharks are a popular species among fans, regularly appearing in sci-fi movies like The Meg. Although the fossil record of these top predators is rich, we still do not know much about their biology. It is a common problem in cartilaginous fish, which is rarely found in the records of fossils other than teeth. This is why the discovery of their giant vertebrae represents an interesting opportunity to say academically, as scientists work to close the gap in our knowledge of these terrifying predators.

Cephalopods can only look like a squiggly blob of rubber tent classes, but there is ample evidence to show that this strange creature has incredible cognitive abilities. Done, somewhat like a cephalopod “marshmallow-test”. As published in the Royal Society’s Open Science Journal earlier this month, two scientists at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University learned that more food is not always the best choice.

The optimal foraging theory explains that any animal that seeks food will adopt a strategy that provides the most energy for the least expense. Given the choice, you would expect an animal to always choose two easy snacks in one. However, as these cuttlefish are seen, some animals can apply more complex techniques that are not strictly managed by the utility, but with the ability of other brains to make decisions.

To understand how cuttlefish decides when to cut wounds, the researchers placed a few small cephalopods in a “training session” where they could choose one of two rooms: one with a shrimp and the other empty.  Obviously, the cuttlefish most often went towards the chamber containing a shrimp at first. If the cuttlefish chose one shrimp, they were not fed the shrimp within the chamber and only received a tiny shrimp as a reward. According to the researchers, this “priming raises the ‘value’ of one shrimp significantly,” effectively drilling it into their heads that a one-shrimp chamber was a safe bet.

In the second stage of the experiment, the cuttlefish was seen to choose between one shrimp and two chambers. The cuttlefish did not cut in the “training phase” as you would expect, however, trainees were more likely to choose a single shrimp or two based on their previous experience that tends to provide this choice even if it is not immediately visible.

Effectively, the researchers manipulated the cuttlefish to choose one shrimp as a choice between one and two shrimps. It doesn’t sound like much too intelligent people like you, but researchers argue that it shows some complex “value-based decision making”. Cattle fish forearms are not governed by simple means – “more food = better” – but a relative value perception and judgment based on their recent experience.

As the New York Times noted, the new study bears some resemblance to the “Stanford Marshmallow-experiment”, a classic psychological experiment first performed in the 1950s, where children waited to see if they were given a choice of instant prizes or two prizes, for some time.

Despite some similarities to this cuttlefish study, there are significant differences, such as the animal not using self-control or “thinking of the future”, but only strong learning. Nevertheless, scientists have previously suggested the idea of ​​running a satiety survey on cephalopods, including delayed cut catfish. Whether or not this ocean brain is ready for the fancy work remains unanswered for the time being.

Researchers funded by the Morris Animal Foundation have discovered a new non-cancerous syndrome called polyclonal B-cell lymphocytosis in some English bulldogs that were misdiagnosed with the common form of canine cancer. The findings are reported in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine.

Dr. Anne Avery, Professor of Immunology at the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University said in a press release, “It could save some dogs from being misdiagnosed, treated for cancer or even being Jewish when they shouldn’t be.” “Dogs may look like their veterinarians as if they have diagnostic-based leukemia but do not actually have cancer.”

In previous studies published by Dr. Avery’s team investigating B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (BCLL), the team determined which breed of dog had an increased risk of BCLL type of cancer. One of the breeds that were identified as endangered was the English Bulldogs, but research has shown that these dogs had a completely different presentation with this cancer. Dogs were much smaller than other breeds and had very specific changes in their B-cells (cells important for immunity and antibody production, which are usually developed in this cancer).

The researchers used a technique called flow cytometry to identify specific features of a population of cells. They found that some English bulldogs had different B-cells at the bottom than some B-cells in some dog breeds, which led researchers to wonder if these dogs actually had BCLL or some other unknown but related syndrome. Based on their original study, the researchers then looked at the blood components of these dogs and evaluated 195 English bulldogs in the BCLL cohort survey.

The researchers speculated that if the B-cells in these bulldogs were identical, they probably originated from the same original B-cells that were stimulated by BCLL cancer. However, if these B-cells were different in features, it could not be BCLL cancer that triggered their production, but something else instead. Results from flow cytometry data identified 83 of the 195 dogs that had mutated into B-cells that they deviated from expectations. Of the 83 dogs modified, 58 dogs had very specific differences in their B-cell production, suggesting that these B-cells were not the result of BCLL cancer. The researchers further pointed out that the age of these dogs was less than one to two years.

Three-quarters of the dogs were male, and many dogs had spleens in their blood and increased antibodies, which the researchers speculated could be the result of genetic origins in these English bulldogs. The researchers concluded that 70% of dogs originally diagnosed by BCLL in cohort studies had this newly identified syndrome.

Dr Janet Patterson-Kane, Morris Animal Foundation Chief Scientific Officer said, “This important finding proves that we should not assume that a high B-cell count always indicates cancer in English bulldogs.” “This is very important information for veterinarians who are primarily seeing these patients in their clinic.”

According to Dr. Avery, the new findings clarify BCLL’s previous work. They suggest that English bulldogs are more at risk of cancer than dogs actually developing a cancer-free syndrome that has many similarities to leukemia but does not have a serious clinical outcome. Moreover, the English bulldogs of the syndrome appear to have genetic origins and do not appear to affect other breeds of dogs. Further research is needed to confirm these studies and to identify a gene involved in the sensitivity of the syndrome in some English bulldogs.

A camera trap in the depths of a tropical jungle in Guatemala captures extremely rare footage of a jaguar that kills another wild cat, a predator named ocelot. This rare glimpse of the cat-on-cat conflict could be a reflection of how climate change and competitive resources are having a dramatic impact on the Central American ecosystem. The footage was captured in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve in March 2019. It shows a male jaguar silently waiting for more than an hour near a water hole. A hat moves around, but the jaguar doesn’t bite. Instead, it patiently waits for an oscillating slip and takes a sip from the water. The jaguar jumped up and snatched the six and threw it into his jaws.

This is believed to be one of the first images of a jaguar directly killing an ocelot, although the behavior was previously suspected based on signs of the ocelot found by the jaguar pope. As published in the journal Biotropica, wildlife environmentalists at Washington State University and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) described the footage in detail and argued that it could be an example of climate-change-induced conflict.

Both wildcats are active during the twilight hours of the day, but they usually avoid each other. Although jaguars are larger than ocelots, they are usually trapped in easy prey, such as armadillos or peccaries. However, the researchers argued that while climate change is known to have had an impact, the two have become closer to each other due to declining water supplies in the region.

Rony García-Anleu, the study co-author from the WCS’s Guatemala Program, said in a statement, “These dramatic camera trap images clearly show the face of fierce competition wildlife for a valuable asset like water.” “Unfortunately, climate change and the associated droughts are predicted to worsen, meaning wildlife is facing difficult times ahead as they rely on water holes to survive.” It’s not just an unexpected event documented in their camera trap event they also collected footage of two Jaguars who were present to fight a young Tapir; it’s an unusual tendency for adult Jaguars to avoid each other. Again, these two seem to be in conflict with each other as there seems to be stiff competition for resources.

Lucy Perera-Romero, lead study author and a WSU doctoral student adds, “We have evidence that a lot of things related to climate change are happening, but we can’t be aware of every detail, every outcome.” “In this beautiful, green forest, for example, we may not know that water flow is a serious problem. It can be another source of death – except.”