Prehistoric Reptiles From Russia Possessed The First Modern Ears
The discovery of the first anatomically modern ear in a group of 260 million-year-old fossil reptiles significantly pushes back the date of the origin of an advanced sense of hearing, and suggests the first known adaptations to living in the dark.
…..The ability of modern animals to hear a wide range of frequencies, highly important for prey capture, escape, and communication, was long assumed to have only evolved shortly before the origin of dinosaurs, not much longer than 200 million years ago, and therefore comparatively late in vertebrate history.
…..But why would these animals have possessed such an ear” “Of course this question cannot be answered with certainty”, explains Müller, “but when we compared these fossils with modern land vertebrates, we recognized that animals with an excellent sense of hearing such as cats, owls, or geckos, are all active at night or under low-light conditions.
Maiacetus inuus whales think they are cool because they give birth on land
Fossils from two early whales — a male and a rare pregnant female — shed light on how these ancestors to modern whales made the leap from walking on land to ruling the sea.
The fetal remains, found with the 47.5 million-year-old pregnant female, were positioned head down, suggesting these creatures gave birth on land, while spending much of the rest of their time in the water
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The fetal skeleton is the first specimen of the extinct whale group known as Archaeoceti, and the find represents a new species named Maiacetus inuus, a hybrid of the words for “mother whale” and Inuus, the name of a Roman fertility god.The fetus was positioned head down like other land animals, allowing it to begin breathing right away. This suggests the group had not yet made the leap to giving birth in the water like modern whales, which are born tail first to allow them to start swimming right after birth.
The 8.5-foot (2.59-meter) male, which was collected in the same fossil beds as the female, is about 12 percent bigger and had fangs that were 20 percent larger than those of the female. Gingerich said these well developed choppers suggest the creatures spent a large portion of their time catching and eating fish.
Both fossils had four flipper-like legs that could have supported their weight on land, but only for short distances, suggesting these whales likely came on shore to mate, rest and give birth, Gingerich said.
Titanoboa cerrejonensis is the best snake ever!
Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.
“This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus,” enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.
“It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately.”
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Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis (“ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss”). That means “titanic boa from Cerrejon,” the region where it was found.
While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.
Conrad, who wasn’t involved in the discovery, called the find “just unbelievable…. It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get.”
Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.
One of my goat-troopers captured in Nigeria
Newspaper claims suspect transformed into a goat
Fri Jan 23, 6:07 pm ETLAGOS, Nigeria – One of Nigeria’s biggest daily newspapers reported that police implicated a goat in an attempted automobile theft. In a front-page article on Friday, the Vanguard newspaper said that two men tried to steal a Mazda car two days earlier in Kwara State, with one suspect transforming himself into a goat as vigilantes cornered him.
The paper quoted police spokesman Tunde Mohammed as saying that while one suspect escaped, the other transformed into a goat as he was about to be apprehended.
The newspaper reported that police paraded the goat before journalists, and published a picture of the animal.
Police in the state couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Belief in black magic is widespread in Nigeria, particularly in far-flung rural areas.
My cannibal stars prepare to devour entire galaxies!
Oddball ‘Blue Stragglers’ Are Stellar Cannibals
Astronomers have found what they say is the strongest evidence yet that a mysterious class of stars known as “blue stragglers” are the result of stellar cannibalism.Blue stragglers are found throughout the universe in globular clusters — which typically are collections of about 100,000 stars, tightly bound by gravity. Because all the stars in these clusters are thought to have been born at the same time, they should all be the same age, but blue stragglers appear to be younger than their cluster peers.
The origin of these strange, massive stars has been a longstanding mystery, said study leader Christian Knigge of Southampton University in England.
“The only thing that was clear is that at least two stars must be involved in the creation of every single blue straggler, because isolated stars this massive simply should not exist in these clusters,” Knigge added.
UFOs and the truth
UK UFO files reveal alleged attempt to shoot UFO
By RAPHAEL G. SATTER
LONDON – An American fighter pilot flying from an English air base at the height of the Cold War was ordered to open fire on a massive UFO that lit up his radar, according to an account published by Britain’s National Archives on Monday.
The fighter pilot said he was ordered to fire a full salvo of rockets at the UFO moving erratically over the North Sea — but that at the last minute the object picked up enormous speed and disappeared. The account, first published in Britain’s Daily Star newspaper more than 17 years ago and to this day unverified by military authorities, was one of many carried in the 1,500 pages the archives made available online.
The unnamed pilot said he and another airman were scrambled on the night of May 20, 1957 to intercept an unusual “bogey” on radars at a Royal Air Force Station Manston, an airfield at the southeastern tip of England about 75 miles from central London.
“This was a flying object with very unusual flight patterns,” the pilot said, according to a typed manuscript of his account mailed to Britain’s Ministry of Defense by a UFO enthusiast in 1988. “In the initial briefing it was suggested to us that the bogey actually was motionless for long intervals.”
Ordered to fly at full throttle in cloudy weather, the pilot said he was given the order to fire a volley of 24 rockets at the mysterious object.
“To be quite candid I almost (expletive) my pants!” the pilot said, saying he asked for confirmation — which he received.
Retired U.S. airman Milton Torres told Britain’s Sky News on Monday that he was the pilot and has spent 50 frustrating years attempting to uncover the truth of his mid-air encounter.
Speaking from his home in Miami, Florida, Torres said he never saw the UFO with his naked eye, but watched in awe as it appeared on his jet’s radar and sped off before he had chance to fire.
“All of a sudden as it was coming in, it decided to take off and leave me behind … The next thing I know it was gone,” Torres told Sky News. “It was some kind of space alien craft. It was so fast, it was so incredible … it was absolutely death defying.”
In the newly published government file, the U.S. airman said the UFO appeared impossible to miss.
“The blip was burning a hole in the radar with its incredible intensity,” the pilot said. “It was similar to a blip I had received from B-52’s and seemed to be a magnet of light. … I had a lock on that had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier.”
As he closed in on the object to prepare for combat, however, the object began to move wildly before fading off his radar. The target gone, the mission was called off, and he returned to base to an odd reception.
“I had not the foggiest idea what had actually occurred, nor would anyone explain anything to me,” the pilot said. He said he was led to a man in civilian clothes, who “advised me that this would be considered highly classified and that I should not discuss it with anybody not even my commander.”
“He disappeared without so much as a goodbye and that was that, as far as I was concerned,” the pilot said, according to the account.
Britain’s military said it had no record of the incident, according to the files. Neither did the U.S. military. The second pilot’s account, also included in the files, paints a somewhat different picture of events, saying there were not one but several “unknowns” and that he did not remember being contacted by anyone about staying quiet. He did not mention the targets’ size.
“I know this is not a very exciting narrative but it is all I can recall,” the second pilot said.
His name, like his colleague’s, was redacted from the files.
David Clarke, a UFO expert who has worked with the National Archives on the document release, said it was one of the most intriguing stories he had culled from the batch of files released Monday.
He said that the CIA once had a program intended to create phantom signals on radar — and that this may have been an exercise in electronic warfare. Whatever the case, Clarke argued that “there’s no doubt something very unusual happened.”
Clarke said the batch of files released Monday — which include witness accounts, investigations, and sketches — was part of a three to four year program intended to make a total of 160 UFO-related files available to the public.