Don’t Mess With Pissarrachampsa

Baurusuchidae is a group of extinct Crocodyliformes with peculiar, dog-faced skulls, hypertrophied canines, and terrestrial, cursorial limb morphologies.

That is scientist-speak for terrestrial, dog-faced crocodiles well-adapted to running down prey and tearing into their victims with big, sharp teeth. Even better, these creatures lived alongside — and probably occasionally fed on — dinosaurs.

Scientists have recently added a new creature to this list, called the Pissarrachampsa sera.  This predator lived during the latter half of the Cretaceous in what is now Brazil, and is represented by two skulls — one more complete than the other. The better skulls is quite impressive. The basic, underlying croc structure is there, but is modified into a shorter, stouter shape, and the size of the teeth differs throughout the jaws. This was a crocodile with big canine-like fangs at the front of the jaw.

Below is an illustration of what the creature may have looked like:

See the original article here.

Inside the World's First Shark Sanctuary (CNN Video)

Watch the World’s Largest Shark Tank on Live Webcam

Until August 7, you can swim with sharks from your desk, thanks to a live webcam embedded in the world’s largest shark tank.  To get excited for Shark Week, the Discovery Channel teamed up with the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta to place a live streaming peephole in the aquarium’s Ocean Voyager exhibit.

The exhibit, which was designed to house whale sharks, holds 6.3 million gallons of seawater, enough to fill nine and a half Olympic swimming pools. It is home to seven different types of sharks, including enormous whale sharks, vicious-looking sand tiger sharks, and bottom-dwelling masters of disguise called spotted wobbegongs. It also holds several other species of fish and four manta rays, the only manta rays ever to live in a U.S. aquarium.

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Endangered Snow Leopards Caught on Camera in Afghanistan

A surprisingly healthy population of rare snow leopards has been caught on camera in the wilds of Afghanistan. Researchers spotted 30 snow leopards in 16 different locations by placing camera traps in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor.

Snow leopards are threatened by poaching for their fur, the illegal pet trade and shepherds, but researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society said they were pleasantly surprised by the number of cats they found.

Conservationists estimate between 4,500 and 7,500 wild snow leopards still live in the remote mountains of Central Asia.

See the original article here.

Lost Rainbow Toad Found After 87 Years

Herpetologists at Conservation International have rediscovered the exotic Sambas stream toad (aka Borneo rainbow toad, aka ansonia latidisca) after 87 years of evasion, and released the first ever photographs of the brightly-colored amphibian.

The spindly-legged species was last seen in 1924 and European explorers in Borneo only made monochrome illustrations of it. A decade or so later, the conservation groups added the species to their World’s Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs campaign.

Researches recently took a team to look for the frog in the area of Western Sarawak.  After months of fruitless hunting, the researchers finally found the small toad two meters up a tree. Later they found another.

In the end the team had found three individuals of the missing toad species — an adult female, an adult male and a juvenile, ranging in size from 51 mm to 30 mm. All three toads exhibited those gangly limbs and the brightly colored patterns on their backs.

Read more in the original article here.  Also, see CNN's article here.

Also, learn more about Conservation International's Global Search for Lost Amphibians.

Rare Hermaphrodite Butterfly Hatches in London Museum

Visitors to the London Natural History Museum can currently see a butterfly that is both male and female.

The gynandromorph Papilio Memnon butterfly hatched in the puparium at this year’s Sensational Butterflies exhibition. It is one of just 200 gynandromorph butterflies among the 4.5 million butterfly specimens in the museum.

The term gynandromorph comes from the Greek “Gyn” to mean female, and “Andro” to mean male. The butterfly has distinctly different male and female markings — darker colorings on the male side and paler coloring, with flecks of blue, red and tortoiseshell on the female side.

As the coloring denotes, the butterfly is literally half female, half male — its sexual organs are half and half, and even its antennae are different lengths.

The Museum explains: “Insects can become gynandromorphs if the sex chromosomes do not properly separate during the first division of a fertilized egg, resulting in an insect with both male and female cells. They can also occur when an egg with two sex chromosomes, instead of a single one, gets fertilized by two sperm.”

Gynandromorph lobsters, spiders and crabs have also been observed.

Read more in the original article here.