Facts About Nature

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Was into animals when I was a kid, and actually knew of this.

Meerkats are actually a type of civet. Civets are cousins of the cat family (cats seem to have evolved from civet like ancestors).

Polecats and skunks are sometimes erroneously called "civets".

Aren't they a type of mongoose?

They are a type of mongoose.

And mongoose in turn are....well when I was little kid they were...considered to be a type of civet. But from checking just now apparently scientists changed their thinking about that and consider mongoose as a separate group.



So maybe meerkats arent really "civets", but even so meerkats, mongoose, civets, genets, hyenas, aardwolves, and the cat family, are all in the same family of "cat like carnivors".

Honey is just basically bee puke

Tyrannosaurus had feathers, but many other giant theropods did not.

Religious Fundamentalism: The beginning of human civilisation was also the beginning of everything.
Reality: Human civilisation is just a very miniscule part of a much larger picture.

The arachnida clade is for more diverse than most people think it is.

Most people are only aware of spiders and scorpions. The arachnida clade also contains mites and ticks. It also contains amblypygids, opiliones (which are not spiders), palpigradi, pseudoscorpions, ricinulei, schizomida, solifuges (which also aren't spiders) and vinegaroons.

The arachnida clade also contains some extinct forms, such as Attercopus. Attercopus lived in North America during the Devonian. It looked like a cross between a vinegaroon and a spider.

The dinosaur with the longest name was Micropachycephalosaurus. The dinosaur with the shortest name was Yi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropachycephalosaurus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_(dinosaur)

Ceratopsid dinosaurs developed slightly different horn arrangements as they grew older.



I find ornithischian dinosaurs to be fascinating because most of them had beaks and teeth. They had beaks in the front, and teeth in the back. I cannot think of any modern animal with that sort of arrangement.

I've always found twisted-wing parasites to be fascinating because of how unbelievably horrifying their lives are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strepsiptera

Adult males have no mouth, and they only live for about five hours. Adult females are external parasites of other insects. They usually sterilize their hosts, and will often occupy 90% of the host's abdomen. The females have no legs, eyes or wings. The male inseminates the female through traumatic insemination, as she has no vagina. The developing young literally eat the inside of their mother, and can travel throughout their mother's open circulatory system.

There is no God.

In prehistoric North America, there were digging mammals with horns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_gopher

These creatures are called "horned gophers" ... though this is a misnomer, as they were more closely related to the mountain beaver.

Musk deer are not in the deer family. They are placed in their own separate family, since they are so morphologically distinct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_deer

During the time of the dinosaurs, there were no ice caps at the poles, but the poles still experienced midnight sun and polar night. Thus, they were completely different from any modern ecosystem. Some polar herbivores ate mushrooms and leaf litter during the dark winter, when the plants were dormant.

The ancestors of terrestrial vertebrates evolved the ability to breathe air long before they evolved the ability to crawl across land.

Case in point: Tarpons cannot breathe water and must breathe air ... though they never walk on land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpon

There are some vertebrates that look and behave like earthworms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptotyphlopidae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphisbaenia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caecilian