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theweaselking
These things are just plain weird. Mammals that lay eggs, are venomous, and don't bother *seeing* or *hearing* their prey when they can just go directly to sensing the electrical impulses in their muscles.
theweaselkingThese things are just plain weird. Mammals that lay eggs, are venomous, and don't bother *seeing* or *hearing* their prey when they can just go directly to sensing the electrical impulses in their muscles.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 04:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 02:44 am (UTC)"I SEE YOU. I KILL YOU. AND PERHAPS HUMP YOUR CORPSE."
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 05:29 am (UTC)but hen, i am an aussie. we do shit for fun that'd kill foreign folks.
:D
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-10 02:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 09:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 09:47 am (UTC)Welcome to a place where everything is a)poisonous, b)venomous, c) trying to kill or eat you (or both), or d) indigestible without 3 weeks preparation that makes fugu look simple.
We've got ants that will eat the most toxic toad in the world, herbivores that will hunt you down and disembowel you, octopii that kill you while keeping you concious of the fact, jellyfish that mimic a heart attack, back yard spiders that will leap out at you and kill you, crocodiles that have been trained by tourist boats to leap 30' out of the water in order to grab you, and more.
And that is not even touching on drop bears.
No, hear me out. This is not a joke.
I am talking about an arboreal pouncing predator, massing 50-60kg, with 3" talons. With a bad temper. And it is real.
Or at least, it was.
Say 'Hel-urk' to Thylacoleo Carniflex. Possibly the nastiest bit of evolution to have ever existed. Every naturalist will assure you that it went extinct sometime in the last 40,000 years, and no less than the last 10,000 years, but it is a big country, and there are lots of possibilities. And anyone finding one sure isn't going to be telling anybody.
So, yep, you can add drop-bears to the list. And that is possibly the biggest joke of all. Our most famous apocryphal beast, the product of the beer-fed imaginings of a bunch of bush-town jokers, has turned out to be the real thing. Because Australia can always come up with something nastier.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 06:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 07:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 07:59 pm (UTC)Despite the fact that it probably smells terrible and would just as soon spear me with its venomous-ness: I wish to pet it!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 08:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 09:04 pm (UTC)And yet he does not mind it, he does not feel the shame,
Because he does not know himself by such a title.
He's a 'Golden Shining Lovebird' in Duckbill-Platypese."
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 09:16 pm (UTC)"In 2004, researchers at the Australian National University discovered the Platypus has ten sex chromosomes, compared with two (XY) in most other mammals (for instance, a male Platypus is always XYXYXYXYXY),[56] although, given the XY designation of mammals, the sex chromosomes of the Platypus are more similar to the ZZ/ZW sex chromosomes found in birds"
"A draft version of the Platypus genome sequence was published in Nature on 8 May 2008, revealing both reptilian and mammalian elements, as well as two genes found previously only in birds, amphibians, and fish."
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 09:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 10:09 pm (UTC)Having multiple Y-ish chromosomes would be good, for instance, because as it stands with humans at least, there's no way to do parity checking on the damn thing when we reproduce - you can't compare _this_ Y chromosome with _that_ Y chromosome in the same cell to make sure there's no mistakes. However, there's clearly been some benefit to us to drop those extras that offset the downside of not being able to do that checking.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 02:48 am (UTC)Although they're arguably a benefit in making males with flawed Y chromosomes suffer immediate penalties and thus start loosing out to males with good Y chromosomes. Gets those bad genes out of the population faster than if they had redundant backup copies to help them limp along.
Seems to go with the general mammalian strategy of "Males are for trying extreme risky things, females are for having six emergency backup systems and being risk adverse". Comes with viviparous young followed by dependence on lactation.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 03:05 am (UTC)The addition of all those extra chromosomes is more likely due to the need for temperature tolerant developmental chemistry - anything developing in utero can make do with chemistry that operates within a relatively small temperature range as the uterus comes with AC and heating, but for egg laying animals you need chemistry that operates in extremes of the temperature.
In most egg laying animals that chemistry would require fewer chromosomes than in platypuses due to each indiivdual chromosome being larger, and therefore carry the additional genes - platypuses however have reverted back to egg laying from a marsupial phenotype and respective genotype, and the kludge the platypus has utilised to compensate for the need for the extra chemistry is probably [original research?] (http://www.flange.com) to just throw a few extra chromasomes with the neccesary extra genes into the mix. Given the environment platypuses currently live in you could have a simple XY chromosome and a very poor tolerance for temp. variations and so have also a low fecundity as lots of eggs wouldn't ever hatch due to development errors, and in that case freakish mutants with additional chromosomes with the right additional genes would have had definite advantages over their non-mutant relatives every so often (meanwhile, mutants with sufficiently larger chromatids rather than more chromosomes would have been sterile - advantage: XYXYXYXYXY freakazoids).
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-07 10:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 01:18 am (UTC)Why a Platypus?
Date: 2010-03-12 03:59 pm (UTC)Your point?
Date: 2010-03-08 02:23 am (UTC)Re: Your point?
Date: 2010-03-08 05:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-08 07:24 pm (UTC)They are weird. They are awesome. They are weirawesome.