Tiger shark that was donated to an Aquarium in 1935. Days later the shark regurgitated the arm of a missing man who was identified by his distinctive tattoos.
Turbo Facts: Tiger Shark Turns Sherlock Holmes!
Category Archives: Animals
Turbo Facts: Dogs are Smarter than Humans!
Dogs are one of the few species that can express empathy.
Turbo Facts: Planet of Apes!
A group of 15 monkeys escaped a research institute in Japan by using trees to catapult themselves over a 17ft high electric fence one by one.
Turbo Facts: It’s Mon(k)ey Business!
Monkeys can learn to use money. Capuchins that were taught to exchange silver discs for treats began budgeting for foods they liked, buying more of something when the price dropped, and started gambling. Eventually, rich monkeys even figured out they could pay each other for sex.
Turbo Facts: Cunning Dolphin
A dolphin at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies was given a reward of fish for turning in trash that had fallen in the pool to the trainers, including dead seagulls. She began hiding fish under a rock to use to lure gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish.
Turbo Facts: Mike, a chicken lived for 18 months without its head.
On September 10, 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen of Fruita, Colorado was planning to eat supper with his mother-in-law and was sent out to the yard by his wife to bring back a chicken. Olsen chose a five-and-a-half-month-old Wyandotte chicken named Mike. The axe removed the bulk of the head, but missed the jugular vein, leaving one ear and most of the brain stem intact.
Due to Olsen’s failed attempt to behead Mike, the chicken was still able to balance on a perch and walk clumsily. He attempted to preen, peck for food, and crow, though with limited success; his “crowing” consisted of a gurgling sound made in his throat.When Mike did not die, Olsen instead decided to care for the bird. He fed it a mixture of milk and water via an eyedropper, and gave it small grains of corn. (Source)
Turbo Facts: Fancy a Donut Shaped Brain?
Squids have a brain shaped like a donut and their esophagus runs through it. If the Squid eats something too big, it can result in severe brain damage.
Turbo Facts 3: Immortal Jellyfish!
There’s a Jellyfish that reverts to an earlier stage in its development cycle in order to cheat death.
Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish, is a species of small, biologically immortal jellyfish found in the Mediterranean Sea and in the waters of Japan. It is one of the few known cases of animals capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary individual.
Theoretically, this process can go on indefinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal!!
5 Tenacious Survivors Who can Beat Survivor Series Contestants Big Time!
When we think about the history of life on earth and the vast changes that have transpired over millions and millions of years—as single-celled organisms evolved into species as disparate as redwood trees, dragonflies and humans—are wonderfully apparent. But, among all that evolutionary change, some organisms have little modified from their distant ancestors.
The great Victorian naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley called these creatures “persistent types,” but there is an even simpler name for them—survivors.
1. Velvet worm
“Velvet worm” is something of a misnomer. Stretching a quarter of an inch to eight inches long, and flanked by rows of stubby legs along their smooth bodies, these invertebrates aren’t worms at all. They belong to their own group, which is more closely related to arthropods, and these inhabitants of the forest undergrowth are part of a much, much older lineage that goes back to one of the greatest evolutionary explosions of all time.
2. Cow sharks
Most living sharks, from nurse sharks to great whites, have five gill slits on a side. But there are four species of cow sharks that have six or seven gills, a feature thought to be retained for millions of years from some of the earliest sharks. These deep water, six- and seven-gill sharks are considered some of the most archaic of all shark species.
These deepwater sharks are opportunistic feeders—taking whatever they can—and may have had a stable role as a deep-sea cleanup crew, scavenging on the bodies of marine reptiles during the Mesozoic and shifting to marine mammals after the time of the dinosaurs. We know very little about the appearances of these ancient sharks, but their roughly bladed teeth hint that they have been consummate deep-sea carrion feeders for millions of years.
3. Horsetails
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Long-lived lineages of animals often get most of the attention, but there are some survivors among the plants, too. Horsetails must be some of the greatest. These archaic plants are often found growing in patches along streamsides and other wet habitats. Place a dinosaur toy among them, and the prehistoric model will look quite at home.
The reason why horsetails are considered so ancient comes from two lines of evidence. Living horsetails are unique among plants in that they reproduce via spores rather than seeds. Other plants likely gave up this method of reproducing millions and millions of years ago, but, old though it may be, the spore technique makes horsetails resilient and very difficult to remove from places where they are considered weeds.
4. Duck-billed platypus
The duck-billed platypus truly looks as if it belongs to another era, if not another planet. In fact, when 19th-century European naturalists first saw stuffed specimens sent from Australia, some scholars thought the animals must be a joke. But evolution wasn’t kidding—here was a mammal with a duck-like snout and a tail like a beaver and that laid eggs.
Monotremes, like the platypus, are strange mammals. These archaic, egg-laying forms last shared a common ancestor with marsupial and placental mammals over 175 million years ago, and rare fossils from Australia indicate that there have been platypus-like forms since 110 million years ago.
5. Horseshoe crab
There is probably no animal that epitomizes the title of “survivor” than the horseshoe crab. With their shield-like carapaces and long, spined tails, these arthropods look prehistoric. When masses of one species, Limulus polyphemus, congregate on Mid-Atlantic beaches in the warmth of early summer, it is difficult not to imagine the scene as something from the deep past.
Exactly when, where and how horseshoe crabs evolved remains a matter of ongoing investigation, but the group of arthropods they belong to is thought to have diverged from their arachnid cousins around 480 million years ago.
5 Strange Facts About Fauna Kingdom+ Flora Kingdom
Compiled are 5 strange facts from the kingdom of flora and fauna which are eminently true! From inadvertent murderer to Mortal Kombat – the plant & animals have it all.
1. A saguaro cactus once killed a man. When an Arizona man vandalized a 23ft saguaro with a shotgun, the cactus shed one of its arms and crushed him to death.
2. In 1991, there were 60,000 jellyfish orbiting Earth.
NASA raised thousands of jellyfish in space. They ended up unfit for life on Earth.
The point of all this, was to test how the jellyfish would respond when they were back on Earth.And here, according to Deep Sea News, is the result of the studies: The astro-jellies’ sense of gravity did, indeed, seem to be impaired by being raised in space. Basically, the invertebrates had vertigo. (Source)
3. There is an island off the coast of Brazil entirely infested by one of the deadliest snakes known to man, with a venom capable of melting human flesh.
Queimada Grande is the only known home of the golden lancehead (Bothrops insularis), one of the most venomous vipers in the world. The snake’s venom is said to be three to five times stronger than that of any mainland snake, according to Smithsonian. Oh, and it’s capable of “melting human flesh.”(Source)
4. Blue whales are so enormous that a human being could swim through their largest veins and arteries. (Source).
5. Crayfish females lure males with urine, but then play hard to get.. A female’s urine, strange as it sounds, is a powerful aphrodisiac to a male.
Releasing a steady stream of urine to attract a mate and then fighting off anyone who still dares to approach you doesn’t seem like a great idea for getting sex. But this bizarre strategy is all part of the mating ritual of the signal crayfish.
The female doesn’t want just any male – she’s after the best, and she makes her suitors prove their mettle by besting her in a test of strength. As he draws near, she responds aggressively, even though it was her who attracted him in the first place. No quarter is given in these fights. The female only stops resisting if the male can flip her over so that he can deposit his sperm on her underside.(Source)
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