The Biology, Agriculture, and Paleontology thread

Behold and judge for yourself.

The Great Barrier Reef headed for 'massive death'.

Oh crap.

... I hope climate change deniers have a special place in Hell waiting for them.

It's things like this (among others) that I consider myself unfortunate to have been born at the time I was.

If there is i'd imagine it being an eternity bathing in industrial waste and choking on toxic smog.

I think that Dante's "Judecca" might also work, seeing as being frozen over and silenced certainly has irony value, but it might be stretching Judecca's "inclusion criteria" a little to host climate change deniers.

I thought Judecca was meant for traitors. So climate change deniers would be out, unless you stretch the definition of traitor.

The Circles of Greed (Number Four) and Fraud (Number Eight) might work.

Edited by M84 on Aug 28th 2018 at 3:09:20 AM

Well, traitors to their lords and benefactors with great historical and societal consequences. If you consider Nature as a benefactor of Man and Man as responsible for Nature (if memory serves some denominations of Christianity consider Man as the God-appointed steward of Nature), you might make an admittedly far fetched case that climate change denial would count as treason against Nature and thus for eternal punishment in Judecca.

(However, while this popular culture reference is interesting, it may be more on topic in the climate change topic or better yet in a chat thread somewhere)

Here's something on-topic: I've noticed that almost every animal that a jumping specialist has disproportionately large thigh muscles in comparison to the quite thinly-built calves ^note replace "thigh muscles" and "calves" with "femur" and "tibia" in the case of insects; the only exception to this is the frog, whose leg muscles are much more even in their development (which is to say, even the calves are quite robustly built). Does anyone know why? You'd think the calves appear to not play that much of a role in jumping power, but the frog example appears to debunk that notion.

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 28th 2018 at 5:58:10 PM

Law of the lever, I'd imagine. If you treat a leg as a lever during a jump, you can do a bigger move with a movement close to thigh than with one at the knee but also need more force.

But then why not augment the thigh's efforts with the lower leg's own?

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 28th 2018 at 6:39:39 PM

Frogs are going to be a difficult option to explore for this because their hind limbs are required for both jumping and swimming, and different muscles may be needed for different aspects of those motions.

Here's a 2007 paper on the morphological correlates of aquatic and terrestrial locomotion in Rana esculenta.

It probably won't answer your question, but it does (among other things) discuss the groups of muscles used by this species of frog in jumping and swimming.

... OK, if my skimming of that highly technical Wall of Text is even remotely accurate in its conclusions, the thigh muscles are the only ones in the entire leg that are relevant for jumping performance (in conjunction with the tendons, of course), but on the other hand the lower leg's heavy muscularity has more to do with swimming performance, which makes sense, considering the frog needs power more than speed in its leg movements to swim well.

Once again, I made the mistake of forgetting that the animals I am comparing are adapted to significantly different habitats (in this case, I was comparing completely terrestrial animals with little to no swimming ability to a semiaquatic one that is a well-known good swimmer).

Incidentally, remember my earlier question about animal respiratory systems? Someone suggested that the bird respiratory system solves the problem of "dead space" (i.e. oxygen-poor air volume that doesn't get ventilated out of the respiratory tract) with its parabronchial design, but according to Wikipedia, birds are technically worse than mammals in this regard (about 4.5 times the volume for same-sized specimens)... yet it's apparently deceiving when one doesn't consider the one-way flow of air through the lungs.

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 29th 2018 at 12:30:01 PM

Clearly the transition from Velociraptor to chicken was a messy one.

And yes, I know that Velociraptors were almost certainly not the direct ancestors of chickens. I'm just making a joke here.

Now I'm wondering what ancient hellbeast was the ancestor of the Canadian Goose. You'd only need one glance at those feathery assholes to realize that the dinosaurs never really left.

Edited by M84 on Aug 30th 2018 at 12:53:43 AM

Hellbeasts probably come from geese. And, how far the poor things have fallen, weakened and become frail...

Geese and swans: evil tricksters with very pointy bits.

Not an ancestor per se, but ducks & geese are closely related to ten-foot-tall birds that lived in Australia until 18,000 years ago.

Edited by Spinosegnosaurus77 on Aug 30th 2018 at 7:15:36 AM

Ah, the Demon Duck of Doom

Though new research suggests that it's relationship to ducks may be more complicated than first thought. (Assuming you are referring to Gastornis).

I was talking about dromornithids.

Yeah, my screw up on the genus name. I wanted Bullockornis (B. planei specifically). Which was indeed a member of the Dromornithidae.

Though they are related to the Terror Birds who I got the names mixed up with. (Same order, different family).

The short of it is, when any particular species in Aves gets large enough physically, it starts dusting the neglect from the "Theropoda" basket of terror off, and dives into it headfirst.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Aug 31st 2018 at 2:05:37 PM

Speaking of terrifying birds...what bird has the most intimidating plural form? For me it's a tossup between a murder of crows and a parliament of rooks.

Gastornis & dromornithids are closely related, but terror birds like Phorusrhacos belong to the same order as cranes, rails, bustards, etc.

What about a conspiracy of ravens?

A mob of emus.

I was always taught that it was an unkindness of ravens.

How about a tyranny of kingbirds? That said, I don't know whether the most awesome or terrifying name of all is an omniscience of godwits.

Not as awesome as a 007 of goldfinches.