You've got to hand it to them

Can pretty pictures make up for the thousand words that follow ? Hoping that they might, here is an audio slideshow about art inspired by Darwin, and some photos of amphibians and insects discovered from the Cordillera del Condor in the Andes.

Turning over a new leaf, not
Did you hear the one about the Neanderthal who went for a walk in the North Sea ? That joke may be old, but it's still quite historical. And it shows how much we can learn from just bone fragments these days. Heady stuff.

Now I'm as guilty as the next man of sometimes feigning illness, to skip out of school and other boring events. But that ploy, it turns out, just takes a leaf out of Nature's ol' trick book. A plant has been found in the Ecuadorian jungle that mimics the effect of leaf damage from caterpillars, pretending to be sick to avoid the boring attentions of mining moths. Who said little white lies were bad ?

Squid ears and chicken fingers
What is the sound of one tentacle flapping ? If this latest bit of research is anything to go by, squid and octopus might actually know the answer. But how do they hear without ears ? For the solution to that koan, read about the latest find in cephalopod sound.

This one's got paleontology in a bit of a flap lately. How did the three-fingered hands and feet of birds and dinosaurs develop ? While embryological data from birds seemed to show that the middle three out of five develop into fingers, paleontologists believed that it was the first three digits in theropods that did. Well, when you want to solve such deep dilemmas, just go find yourself another lovely fossil from China -- this time, a strange ceratosaur with barely visible thumbs. Take a look at this excellent article about the article. And if you listen carefully, you just might hear those three fingers clapping overhead.

These raptors, though, might be too busy cleaning house to be able to stop and clap. With housing markets the way they are these days, there's nothing quite like an ancestral home.

Ant nurses, baboon chaperones
More recent insights into primate behavior, this time from Kenyan baboons. Apparently, male and female baboons form platonic friendships, where the bond helps new mothers get better access to food and security. Let's just be friends, she said.

This article is about the recovery of blue butterfly colonies in Britain, but it shows how the welfare of one species can depend on the behavior of another. Blue butterfly caterpillars mimic ant grubs, get carried inside the ant colony and subsequently feast away on ant eggs for almost a year. But when the ants moved out, the butterflies couldn't complete their life cycle, and the blue butterfly went extinct. The supreme interconnectedness of every little thing.

Writing of ants, here's one about some lazy ants. Ants sleep, some of them sleep a lot. So much that they live about 10 times longer than the ones that don't sleep so much. Check out the video too, and until next time, sleep long and prosper.