Agriotherium is the name of an extinct genus of bears, known as the giant short-faced bears of the family Ursidae. They occur first in Miocene Era deposits estimated to be about 13 million years old. Most appear about five million years…
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The origin of all animals can be traced to the understanding of how a single celled organism, develops into a multiple celled organism. Using the simple concept that an environmental mutation of such an organism, when beneficial, will survive and…
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Llamas. Beautiful, regal, intelligent, and highly complex creatures. They are fascinating to watch, and being around them gives one the feeling of being in the presence of royalty. Understanding the behavior of these animals is important to anyone who might…
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Hymenoptera are everywhere. If you want to escape them, you will have to go to Antarctica. They are not only ubiquitous, they are highly diverse in lifestyles even though they are specialised in body form. What are they? All the…
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It is dangerous to be a caterpillar. Not only are they and other maggots, grubs and insect larvae subject to predation by birds, small mammals and reptiles but they face an even creepier danger from other insects. Wasps. in particular,…
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People often make fun of the behavior of sheep following each other to refer to people who follow their leaders blindly as “sheep”. However this, and other, behaviors have kept the species existing for thousands of years and should not…
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Imagine a world without mammals, a primeval world of cool, wet forests filled with mosses, ferns and lichens and inhabited by flightless birds. This was the world of the Moa, in New Zealand before the coming of human beings. For…
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The Molting Process of Emperor Scorpions Emperor scorpions are one of the larger species of scorpions. Some grow to be eight inches long. Born in litters by the mother scorpion they will undergo several periods of growth before reaching adulthood…
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Archaeolemur is a genus of two species of lemur that became extinct around 1,100 to 900 years ago. With fossils found copiously in present-day Madagascar, the archaeolemur was a quadruped lemur adaptation that divided its time between the ground and…
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There are a bewildering number of insect types in the world but they all basically go through one of two types of life cycles. The more primitive types are called the exopterygotes, a word that simply means their wings (pterygota)…
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