mababang langit

on mealworms bursting out of lizards' stomachs and the wonder that is fistulated cows. http://boingboing.net/2013/04/01/dinners-revenge-mealworms.html

Hominid from Brian Andrews on Vimeo  is an animated short featuring  "photo composites made from human and veterinary images creating hominid creatures."  

The tarsier, a small primate best known for its bulging eyes and quiet demeanor, has a secret: It's actually incredibly loud, particularly if you're a dolphin. Until recently, this fact was a mystery to humans because the tarsier has an ultrasonic scream, inaudible to human ears. Texas A&M anthropologist Sharon Gursky-Doyen stumbled across the find when she noticed that when the tarsiers opened their mouths to speak, she wasn't hearing anything. "She had the foresight to get hold of a bat detector, and she was able to get that vocalization on a recording," Ramsier said. The tarsiers now find themselves in an exclusive club in the animal kingdom. Bats, dolphins and whales are the best-known practitioners of ultrasonic communication, but some cats also use the high-frequency method to communicate with their baby kittens . via

"Zombie" Ants Found With New Mind-Control Fungi A stalk of the newfound fungus species  Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani , grows out of a "zombie" ant's head in a Brazilian rain forest.  The fungus species can infect an  ant , take over its  brain , and then kill the insect once it moves to a location ideal for the fungi to grow and spread their spores. that thing. growing out of its head. eaaarrrgh from national geographic's top ten weirdest life-forms of 2011

so some lizard in australia has switched , before our very eyes, from laying eggs to bearing live young. big big news. meanwhile, the neighborhood dogs seem to have lost their turd-burying instincts and leave their business in our yard for all to enjoy. yeah, darwin with a hand trowel.

haven't posted any animal stuff in ages, so here's einstein , a three-day old pinto stallion from new hampshire that just claimed the title of world's lightest foal. he weighs 6 pounds and stands 14 inches high. makes me think of hammond's tiny elephant from the jurassic park novel. seriously.

...with their penises.

it's been a bad week for dealing with past addictions-- machinarium got me hooked bad. now i've been jonesing for more point-and-click... grim fandango looks promising. yeah i could try it out, just to taste. i can stop anytime i want. i quit fishkeeping a decade ago, thought i'd kicked the habit for good. but when the kids went on a field trip to bio research, those sneaky so-and-sos handed out free goldfish. free goldfish! now i could've been a pragmatic parent and flushed the things down the toilet right away; or a typical parent and bought a cheap fishbowl with plastic mermaid and hot pink "plants" and overfed the fish until they drowned in their own excrement; but oh no. once an aquarist always an aquarist. first we kept them in a punch bowl for a few days (100% water changes everyday, but not straight from the faucet, you let the water breathe for a day or so to reach room temp and release its chlorine). then i bought the smallest tank available (P19...

well it's actually a 100-million-year-old extinct crocodile , but just look at that bad boy. it looks like it jumped off a fantasy book cover. it was twenty feet long, had tusks like a wild boar, an armored snout designed for ramming, and it galloped after its prey on dry land. someone oughtta write a poem. boarcroc, boarcroc, burning lustrous in the swamps of the cretaceous...

"An undated photo released by The University of Cambridge shows a rook, a member of the crow family, as it drops stones into a tube to raise the water level and bring a worm into reach," via