TIL thread

[Infinity Blade]

TIL that the September 1993 issue of Earth magazine was largely dedicated to Jurassic Park dinosaurs and information on what they were actually like. It was written and illustrated by Bob Bakker (I pulled the following images from Darren Naish's Twitter->).

As someone very interested in the biomechanics of animal combat, I'm really intrigued by the detail he goes into describing all the potential weapons of these dinosaurs. Some are takes I agree with, others I didn't really think of but can maybe see being true, and yet others that seem to be either outdated/not really true.

[Supercommunist]

Clint's reptiles told a story about how he once saw a black window make a cast around its leg after getting bit by a beetle. I looked online and it seems there is at least one recorded account of a spider doing just that.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAhQX6y8RMY

[Exalt]

Recently, I learned of the species Gigantoraptor and Concavenator thanks to people discussing the latest creature pack for Jurassic World Evolution 2. The latter in particular has me curious.

[Infinity Blade]

TIL that Old World vultures actually have relatively strong grasping feet and talons. Even though they're primarily scavengers, they still retain these raptorial talons, and I've seen someone deem these a vestigial remnant Although, it looks like predatory capacity varies in Old World vultures, and the most predatory forms (the white-headed vulture and lappet-faced vulture) do indeed use their talons for hunting.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0944200621000544

books.google.com/books?id=juj5CQAAQBAJ&pg=PA128&dq=old+world+vultures+grasping+talons&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiiru-NkKaDAxVOGlkFHbgkB1MQ6AF6BAgFEAM#v=onepage&q=old%20world%20vultures%20grasping%20talons&f=false

These are the talons of an Egyptian vulture, for instance.


And Rüppell's vulture.

[Infinity Blade]

TIl that there is a buffalo called the Jafarabadi, which is a hybrid between the water buffalo and Cape buffalo. The Cape buffalo was apparently brought to India for the purposes of slaughter. Why they then decided to hybridize them with water buffalo escapes me, but the result was a weird-ass looking bovine.

[Exalt]

This reminds me of when I learned about coywolves and narlugas within a couple of days of each other.

[Exalt]

Today I learned that there were once billions of passenger pigeons, and now they are gone.

[Exalt]

Today, I have learned that marmots are squirrels.

[Infinity Blade]

YIL that cougars that become specialized in hunting bighorn sheep can drive isolated populations of them into extinction.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560313/#bib10

[Supercommunist]

Dec 24, 2023 5:58:27 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

TIL that Old World vultures actually have relatively strong grasping feet and talons. Even though they're primarily scavengers, they still retain these raptorial talons, and I've seen someone deem these a vestigial remnant Although, it looks like predatory capacity varies in Old World vultures, and the most predatory forms (the white-headed vulture and lappet-faced vulture) do indeed use their talons for hunting.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0944200621000544

books.google.com/books?id=juj5CQAAQBAJ&pg=PA128&dq=old+world+vultures+grasping+talons&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiiru-NkKaDAxVOGlkFHbgkB1MQ6AF6BAgFEAM#v=onepage&q=old%20world%20vultures%20grasping%20talons&f=false

These are the talons of an Egyptian vulture, for instance.


And Rüppell's vulture.

I suspect that the bearded vulture would have the strongest grip of all vulture given their bone/animal dropping tendencies.

[Supercommunist]

Apparently there used to be a cold blooded goat.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myotragus

[Infinity Blade]

Feb 5, 2024 2:10:03 GMT 5 Supercommunist said:

Apparently there used to be a cold blooded goat.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myotragus

Yup. Imagine how little resources an island must have if it forces a freaking mammal to evolve an ectothermic metabolism.

[Supercommunist]

TIL Henry the VIII had a suit armor that was completely made of plate. It had no gaps other than the visor and weighed 42.6kg.

When the French realized he made this they changed the rules of the tournament and made him use a differet set of armor.




izi.travel/en/a6b0-henry-viii-s-foot-combat-armour/en

[Infinity Blade]

TIL that black rhinos, the most temperamental of living rhinos, are still pretty chill overall.

ielc.libguides.com/sdzg/factsheets/blackrhino/behavior

[Infinity Blade]

Elasmobranch skeletons are crazy y'all.

Whereas covering a cartilage-like gel with a hard, continuous shell is expected to increase the stiffness but decrease the flexibility of a composite, there is some indication – from tessellated cartilage but also fabricated arrays (e.g., Martini et al., 2017) – that a tessellated shell with interacting tiles can be a “best-of-both-worlds” configuration, maximizing desirable properties of both tissue phases. Fahle and Thomason (2008) showed that compared with embryonic (non-tessellated) small-spotted catsharks (S. canicula), adult individuals have jaw cartilage that has a higher ability to damp mechanical energy, but is also stiffer. A large portion of the stiffness is surely due to the tessellated layer in adult animals (Dean et al., 2009; Egerbacher et al., 2006; Enault et al., 2015; Seidel et al., 2016; Wilga et al., 2016). From the biological perspective, this change in properties permits adults to consume harder prey than newborns (Fahle & Thomason, 2008), but is also particularly intriguing for engineering considerations because stiffness and damping are typically negatively correlated in artificial materials (Rivin, 1999).

In fact, recent work has shown that some finescale structural features in tesserae (e.g., the high-mineral-density laminae in spokes) exhibit stiffness and hardness values that exceed those of mammalian bone and calcified cartilage and have properties more akin to tooth materials (Seidel et al., 2019a).

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jfb.14444