Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.On the other hand, get on a crow's good side and they will express gratitude.
They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.
In the most recent attack, a 20-month old girl was playing outside a farm in Orkland, a small municipality in the south, on Saturday when the eagle came “out of the blue” and clawed her.
The girl’s father, who was not there during the attack, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the mother and a neighbor raced to fight the eagle. The raptor attacked three times before it was killed when hit with a piece of wood, Folkestad said.
It’s not unusual for paleontologists to disagree about ancient animal bodies — sometimes with a ferocious intensity. Gottfried recalled witnessing some scientists get into a heated disagreement over the angle of the thigh bone when assembling a triceratops specimen.The bit about shrink-wrapping the skin around the skeletons was interesting. I have a book on my Kindle shelf titled All Yesterdays that's a neat look at how illustrations of prehistoric animals have evolved over time, and also has some freaky-looking pictures of modern animals if they were reconstructed by yesterday's paleontologic illustrators from skeletal remains. You'll never look at cows... or your cat ...the same way.
John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, is part of the team that put forward the controversial 3D model of the megalodon. He said that the stakes are always high in science, but particularly when working on species that attract both public and scientific fascination.
“The more celebrity an extinct animal has, and the rarer it is, the more competitive or heated the disagreements can be,” Hutchinson said. “I know this all too well. I worked on T. rex.”
Hutchinson said that, early in his career, people used 2D illustrations of fossilized skeletons and shrink-wrapped skin around them, making them quite skinny. Based on these models, people believed Tyrannosaurus rex was around 11,000 pounds. But now, using various methods, scientists mostly agree that an adult T. rex would have been somewhere around 17,000 pounds.
"Adorably big-eyed and smaller than a house cat, black-footed cats are far more successful at hunting than lions. They can jump up to five feet in the air and 6½ feet in distance; they kill eight to 14 meals per night and can eat 3,000 rodents a year.That new resident at the Salt Lake City Zoo is pretty much fully grown at three pounds, which is about a fifth of the mass of Huck or Holden when they're in fighting trim. (Less than a fifth if we haven't been monitoring their dinner portions carefully.)
“They’re considered the fierce cat,” said Bob Cisneros, Hogle Zoo’s associate director of animal care, who described kitten Gaia as a “mighty warrior.”
“These guys are voracious hunters,” he said."
"After a handful of collisions, the box jellies changed their behavior. Less than eight minutes after arriving in the bucket, they were swimming 50 percent farther from the pattern on the walls, and they had nearly quadrupled the number of times they performed their about-face maneuver. They seemed to have made a connection between the stripes ahead of them and the sensation of collision."
