Facts About Nature

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In some simple animals, there is no brain, no body cavity, no respiratory system, no circulatory system and no anus. Waste just comes back out the mouth. Gnathostomulids are a good example of this.

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

Opossums originated in South America, and continue to be more diverse in South America. The ancestors of the Virginia opossum made it to North America after the Great American Interchange.

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

Terror birds and toxodons also migrated north after the Interchange, but they were later killed off by the ancestors of Native Americans.

The spectacled bear doesn't look like much today, but one of its prehistoric relatives was one of the most horrifying bears ever to exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-faced_bear

There used to be a fully terrestrial crocodile on Efate called Mekosuchus, but it was hunted to extinction by ancient humans.

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

Gannets an swim almost as well as they can fly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8vaFl6J87s

Yeah. No facts in this post. I just want to post this wonderful video of frigatebirds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlyxR5YY0ww

Many male mammals (including male humans) have testicles that hang in a scrotum because sperm will die if they are too close to human body temperature.

Animals with a low body temperature (such as reptiles) will generally have internal testes, as a scrotum is unnecessary.

Random Facts About Lobsters:

- The American lobster is the largest arthropod alive today.
- Female lobsters glue their eggs to their legs to protect them.
- Lobsters are predators that eat bivalve mollusks, starfish and bristle worms. Sometimes they will also consume herring.
- Many lobsters start out blue, but turn bright red when they are cooked.
- Fossil lobsters date back to the early Cretaceous.
- Lobsters have two bladders.
- When a male lobster detects a fertile female or a rival male in its territory, it urinates into the water around it, in order to announce its presence. Lobsters communicate by peeing.
- A lobster's two pincers are different. One is larger, and is used for crushing exoskeletons. The other is smaller, and is used for tearing flesh. The larger claw can be on either side ... so lobsters can be either "right-handed" or "left-handed".
- Lobsters have an open circulatory system. Instead of blood and lymph, they have a hybrid body fluid called hemolymph. The hemolymph of a lobster turns blue when it is exposed to oxygen gas, whereas human blood turns red in these circumstances. This is because the hemolymph of a lobster uses hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin as an oxygen transport system.

Random Facts About Walrus

- Prehistoric stem-walrus can be traced back to the middle Miocene. On of the earliest proto-walrus known to science is Imagotaria.
- Walrus will often pull themselves out of the water using their teeth.
- The origin of the word "walrus" has been lost to time, though many linguists suspect that "walrus" comes from "horse-whale".
- Walrus are predators that eat clams.
- In any group of walrus, the strongest males with the largest tusks tend to dominate.
- Walrus could be found as far south as San Francisco Bay during the last ice age.
- Walrus have very odd sleep patterns indeed. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29616122/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/walruses-are-worlds-most-unusual-snoozers/#.Wx7dPtJzbIU

Random Facts About Sharks:

- Tiger sharks have been found with license plates in their guts. They'll eat anything!
- Some hammerhead sharks can give birth to live young without intercourse.
- The goblin shark has the ability to extend its jaws out to grab prey.
- The rarely-seen frilled shark has six visible gill slits. Most sharks have only five. This may be an ancestral trait.
- Most people who are attacked by sharks survive. Sharks don't like the taste of people.
- Thresher sharks can use their tails as whips to stun fish.
- A shark's skin is rough because it is covered in teeth.
- Sharks, on average, lose a tooth every 9 days.
- A shark's mouth teeth are connected to its gums. They are not embedded in the jawbones like our teeth.
- Most of a shark's skeleton is made of cartilage.
- A shark's muscles are attached to the underside of its skin, not its cartilaginous bones.
- Sharks have special organs which can detect the electrical auras of other animals.

The only two extant eusocial vertebrates are the naked mole rat and the Damaraland mole-rat.

It's hard to detect eusociality in the fossil record, but one can speculate.

Sometimes I wonder if eusocial multituberculates existed at any point in earth's history. Diictodon may also have been eusocial. That makes perfect sense to me, as they were basically the Permian equivalents of naked mole rats. Also, eusociality is more common in dry climates with scarce food resources. Permian Pangea was undoubtedly like this.

Just for fun, I feel like sharing some random facts about trees.

- Trees are polyphyletic. In other words, not all trees are closely related. Throughout the history of life on earth, several plants have evolve into trees separately of one another.
- The earliest trees ever were large seed ferns that evolved during the late Devonian.
- The largest tree on earth right now is Pando. Pando is a quaking aspen tree in Utah. On the surface, Pando appears to be an entire forest, but the roots of the "trees" are connected and the trees are genetically identical, so Pando is actually just one tree.
- Pando is 80,000 years old, according to current scientific estimates. This makes it one of the oldest organisms on the planet.
- The largest single-trunk tree in the world is a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park named General Sherman. General Sherman is 274 feet tall and is about 2,500 yeas old. It may weigh over 2,000 tons.
- Some trees (such as the strangler fig) will grow around other trees and eventually kill their hosts.
- The Ancient Celts believed that trees were magical, especially the Oak.
- Some trees need forest fires to spread their seeds.

Wooly mammoths actually survived until fairly recently. The last mammoths died around 1700 BC on Wrangel Island.

The mountain beaver is not a true beaver. It is more closely related to squirrels.

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

The "shell" on a paper nautilus is actually an egg case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-4JYPXPSrk

New Zealand had no human residents until around 1250. It was one of the last large landmasses to be colonized by humankind.