The lappet-faced vulture or Nubian vulture (Torgos tracheliotos) is an Old World vulture belonging to the bird order Accipitriformes, which also includes eagles, kites, buzzards and hawks. It is the only member of the genus Torgos. It is not closely related to the superficially similar New World vultures, and does not share the good sense of smell of some members of that group.
This species is patchily distributed through much of Africa, though it is absent from much of the central and western parts of the continent and declining elsewhere in its range. The lappet-faced vulture breeds in Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Eswatini, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. On the Arabian Peninsula, it breeds in Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. It is also present in Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, the Central African Republic and Angola.
As with all vultures the beak and face area are extremely ugly. But this bird has redeeming legs. Almost looks like they are wearing cowboy chaps.
Some animals can be trained to do the most absurd things. While other animals are totally submissive to their powerful instincts. The dog in this video is doing something that a dog just shouldn’t be doing.
Studying how and why rhythm evolved in these primates could help unravel the mysteries of human musicality.
PHOTOGRAPH: AGAMI/GETTY IMAGES
THE INDRI IS a lemur, a primate with opposable thumbs; a short tail; and round, tufted, teddy-bear-like ears. They share a branch of the evolutionary tree with humans, but our paths diverged some 60 million years ago. Still, one very striking similarity has stuck around: Indris are one of the few mammals that sing. Family groups create choruses in the treetops of their rain forest home in Madagascar; their voices ringing out for miles. Those songs—which biologist Andrea Ravignani describes as sounding like a cross between several jazz trumpeters jamming, a humpback whale, and a scream—are also the only songs other than those made by humans to be structured with regular, predictable rhythms.
In fact, indri rhythm can be the same as human rhythm, says Ravignani, who studies bioacoustics at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He is part of an international team of researchers whose recent paper in Current Biology is the first to document rhythm in lemurs.
Analyzing how, and when, the lemurs’ songs use a rhythmic structure could help researchers understand musicality in humans, the evolutionary purpose of which remains mysterious. Traits like color vision, bipedal ambulation, and prolonged infanthood have all been attributed to evolutionary pressures that favored the people who carried certain genes. But music, which is so pervasive across human cultures, is unexplained. “As a music lover I am fascinated by the beauty of music,” says Ravignani. “As a biologist, I’m puzzled about why we still haven’t found an answer when many other things are so obvious in human evolution.”
Ravignani’s team’s work on the indris’ rhythm is just beginning. In addition to their morning announcement song, the animals also sing when they’re lost, as a warning, or as a threat, so De Gregorio is curious about whether those songs also have these rhythms.
Next, Ravignani wants to apply these research techniques to other singing primates, like gibbons, and then to marine animals like seals. “And then who knows?” he asks. “Every year or so, we discover that at least one animal species has something that we previously thought was uniquely human. So I think we’re up for a lot of surprises.”
Dec. 7 (UPI) — The owner of a Pennsylvania reptile sanctuary rescued a 3-foot alligator spotted by fishermen in the frigid waters of a river.
Christina Obrecht, owner of Christina’s Reptile and Animal Sanctuary in Palmerton, responded with volunteer Dana Ortiz when fisherman Logan Bauer and his father spotted the 3-foot gator in the water while they were fishing in the Lehigh River at Kimmett’s Lock, in the Allentown area.
“I never seen anything like it and couldn’t believe my dad when he told me it was in the water,” Bauer told WFMZ-TV.
Ortiz filmed video as Obrecht plucked the alligator out of the water.
“I went on the water, and was able to get in a little closer to grab him,” Obrecht told the Times News. “I grabbed him by the head, got him out and put him in the duffel bag for transportation.”
Obrecht said the gator didn’t put up much of a fight due to being exhausted from the cold.
“We knew that he would be very inactive, especially because alligators can withstand cooler temperatures, however once it gets too cold, they become severely inactive, so we knew that he wouldn’t act completely wild,” she said.
Obrecht said the alligator was likely a pet that was abandoned by its owner when it became too large to keep. She said the alligator wouldn’t have survived for very long in the river due to the cold temperatures.
“Sometimes these pet owners are even embarrassed to call a place. We definitely want to stress to never to be embarrassed. Everyone makes mistakes. Alligators do not make good pets. If you ever have an alligator, please call a facility. There’s always someone around to help,” Obrecht said.
Bele from the planet Cheron in the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.”
Venus the Cat, she has to be from the planet Cheron.
The owner insists Venus is not photo-shopped or painted. See video below.
National Geographic
The three-year-old tortoiseshell has her own Facebook page and a YouTube video that’s been viewed over a million times, and appeared on the Today Show.One look at this cat and you can understand why: One half is solid black with a green eye—the other half has typical orange tabby stripes and a blue eye.
How does a cat end up looking like that? Leslie Lyons, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies the genetics of domestic cats said she’s never seen a cat exactly like Venus.
“She is extremely, extremely rare,” Lyons said. “But you can explain it and you can understand it.”
Many reports about Venus refer to the cat as a “chimera.” In mythology, a chimera is a mishmash monster made up of parts of different animals. A feline chimera is a cat whose cells contain two types of DNA, caused when two embryos fuse together.
Among cats, “chimeras are really not all that rare,” Lyons said. In fact, most male tortoiseshell cats are chimeras. The distinctively mottled orange and black coat is a sign that the cat has an extra X chromosome.
But female cats, said Lyons, already have two X chromosomes so they can sport that coat without the extra X. That means Venus is not necessarily a chimera.
To find out would require genetic testing, said Lyons. With samples of skin from each side of the cat, “we can do a DNA fingerprint—just like on CSI—and the DNA from one side of the body should be different than the other.”
Cat’s Blue Eye Another Mystery
If Venus isn’t actually a chimera, then what would explain her amazing face?
“Absolute luck,” Lyons said. One theory: perhaps the black coloration was randomly activated in all the cells on one side of her face, while the orange coloration was activated on the other, and the two patches met at the midline of her body as she developed.
Cat fanciers who are transfixed by Venus’s split face may be missing the real story: her single blue eye. Cat eyes are typically green or yellow, not blue.
A blue-eyed cat is typically a Siamese or else a cat with “a lot of white on them,” she explained.
Venus appears to have only a white patch on her chest, which to Lyons is not enough to explain the blue eye.
‘The Revenant’ was a box office breaking movie and most reviews are that it was very good. In the movie the Leonardo DiCaprio character gets attacked and mauled by a mean mother grizzly bear. It is a riveting scene. But not the best bear attack scene in movies. Back in 1997 a movie was released called ‘The Edge.’ It received little fanfare and sort of faded away into oblivion. A few years ago I caught it on TV and was mesmerized.
The survivors are stranded in the Alaska wilderness and ultimately get stalked and attacked by a giant Kodiak bear. This Kodiak (Kodiaks are giant grizzlies) chases them for miles and the characters barely escape until the final showdown. Sensational bear attack scenes.
The Edge is a 1997 American survival drama film directed by Lee Tamahori and starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. Bart the Bear, a trained Kodiak bear known for appearances in several Hollywood movies, also appears in the film as a vicious grizzly; this was one of his last film roles.
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