In the late sixteenth century, two Dutch eyeglass makers discovered that objects appear magnified when viewed through multiple convex lenses in a tube. For this simple discovery, Hans Janssen and his son Zaccharias are considered by some to have invented the microscope around 1590. About this same time, another eyeglass maker from Holland, Hans Lippershey [...]
The Dasypus novemcinctus, or nine-banded armadillo female almost always gives birth to four young of the same sex. The offspring are actually quadruplets that come from one fertilized egg splitting into four parts. The general wikipedia description follows: the Nine-banded Long-nosed Armadillo or just Nine-banded Armadillo, (also known as the poor man’s pig or poverty [...]
The dodo bird, or Raphus cucullatus, became completely extinct around 1800. While thousands of these birds were slaughtered for meat, it it generally believed that their demise was primarily due to pigs and monkeys eating their eggs. The birds were native to the Mascarene Islands in the Central Indian Ocean. They became extince on Mauritius [...]
As the average person’s stomach will hold less than two quarts, it only stays in this stage of the digestive process for three to five hours. The stomach slowly releases this semi-digested food to the intestines where it completes the digestive process. Roughly 15-17 hours after you take the first bite, the food is excreted [...]
You might think the animal with the longest gestation period would be one of the larger mammals, but in fact it is the Alpine black salamander. It is a viviparous amphibian which lives in the high altitude Swiss Alps. At altitudes above 4,600 feet, it’s gestation period can be up to 38 months. It bears [...]
Another interesting question to first consider is: is a zebra a light animal with dark stripes, or a dark animal with light stripes? It’s generally believed that a zebra is a dark animal with light stripes. Most scientists believe that the zebra evolved from a horse-like animal with no stripes. One theory of where the [...]
While insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, we don’t have a very accurate count on the number of species. There are over one million named species, but many scientists estimate the number of unnamed species to be as high as 30 million. Even considering only the million or so insects [...]