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.

See the original article here.

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.

Chipmunks and Woodchucks Eavesdrop on Each Other

Chipmunks and woodchucks are entirely different rodent species, but they apparently speak the same language when it comes to alarm.

Despite belonging to a different genus, eastern chipmunks take heed of woodchucks’ alarm calls. To a lesser extent, woodchucks understand the warnings of chipmunks. Such inter-rodent understanding may not seem surprising, but both species are considered very solitary. They are not like prairie dogs that live in family groups.

Many creatures respond to their own species’ alarm calls, but interspecies comprehension is less documented. To see whether woodchucks and chipmunks responded to each other, scientists visited a nature preserve in Maine, recording their reactions to possible danger — both species share common enemies in red-tailed hawks, bald eagles and foxes — and to unthreatening chickadees.

Over the course of a few weeks scientists played the calls back on portable speakers. While woodchucks occasionally perked up to chipmunk squeaks, chipmunks were more attentive to woodchucks’ high-pitched whinnies. Sometimes the woodchuck alarms even sent chipmunks fleeing to their burrows.

To listen to the calls of both the woodchuck and chipmunk, read the original article here.

Both animals responded most to their own species’ alerts, but neither reacted much to crow alarms or chickadee songs.

Read more in the original article here.

Deepest-living land animal found

Worms have been found living at depths in the Earth where it was previously thought animals could not survive.

Discovered in South African mines, the roundworms can survive in the 118 degrees Fahrenheit water that seeps between cracks 1.3km beneath the Earth's crust.

The find has surprised scientists who, until now, believed only single-celled bacteria thrived at these depths.

The researchers found two species of worm. One is a new species to science, which the scientists have named Halicephalobus mephisto after Faust's Lord of the Underworld.

The other is a previously known roundworm known as Plectus aquatilis.

Read more in the original article here.

Emperor Penguins Rotate Through Giant Huddle for Warmth

Massive huddles of male Emperor penguins are crucial to keeping warm during Antarctica’s brutal winter while they incubate their eggs.

These tightly packed penguins shuffle en mass every 30 to 60 seconds, reordering themselves so every individual gets to cycle through the warm, central part of the huddle.

By taking small, 2- to 4-inch steps every minute or so, the penguins achieve maximum packing density. It’s like tapping on a can of flour to jiggle everything into the bottom.

But the shuffling also results in a wave of movement that rolls through the group and rotates every bird through the warmest parts of the huddle. Penguins can join the group on one end, cycle through the huddle and exit on the other end.

Read more in the original article here.

There's no such thing as a jellyfish

The video above is from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.  It illustrates how organisms commonly referred to as "jellyfish" are actually quite varied and diverse.  See the rest of the institute's videos here.