"For once you must try not to shirk the facts." - Bertolt Brecht
I have to begin with an apology for the over-long Silence of the Llamasaurus, blaming it mostly on a certain article that had me quite depressed. But at length the ceratopsians did stop screaming, so onward ho, from horned dinosaurs to other horny things.
Fair trade
Chimpanzees, those mirrors held up to humans, are at it again. Not tool use this time, but something more complicated and crafty, in the nature of trade. For the first time, the hypothesis that chimpanzees exchange meat for sex has been confirmed by observations in the wild. I guess there's no such thing as a free lunch after all.
Sadistic spiders, agamous ants
The Amazons might have been a race of all-female warriors, but a species of Amazonian ants has gone one step further and done away with males entirely. Purely parthenogenetic colonies of clones tending their neat gardens of asexual fungi ... so who needs males anyway ?
Some spiders might ask the same question, especially when they were having holes drilled into their abdomens by their partner's pedipalps to deposit sperm. How could an animal that liquefies its prey and slowly sucks them dry ever be this sadistic, one wonders. What do marquises and human adjectives have to do with things older than words, one wonders. Are catching flies and wrapping up food all that they use those silken ropes for, one wonders. Pair bonding, arachnid style.
Not only fine feathers
A sense of rhythm is often considered a uniquely human attribute. What would a walrus or a fox know about the difference between a waltz and a foxtrot after all. Perhaps more than we imagine, if this recent find is anything to go by. And I used to think dancing was for the birds.
A number of cultures depict crows as clever animals, be it Odin's wise pets or Trickster Raven in the Pacific Northwest. But their talent for creative problem-solving also makes them one of Nature's great engineers, swimming rodents with large front teeth aside. Read all about tool-toting crows (and check out those videos). Could I please be bird-brained too ?
Fancy footwork
Tiktaalik fans, take note. Another beautiful 'missing link' has been dug out of Nunavut and given a native name. And this time it has all its legs intact. Pujilla darwini ("Darwin's young sea mammal" in Inuktitut-English) is a transitional form between fully marine pinnipeds and their lake-swimming otter-like ancestors, and at 23,000,000 years it is the oldest seal fossil found so far. Lots of great details and links are on the Canadian Museum of Nature's Pujilla page, so take a look and dig deeper around this strolling seal.
Hopefully all that should tide you over till next week. Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to plead a headache and go fall asleep immediately afterwards.
