23-Fact Tuesdays: The Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch!

Remember 23-Fact Tuesdays?  Not very surprising if you don't, since there was only one and it took place a few weeks ago.  But we are going to do one again (despite the fact that today is Sunday) and this time, all of the facts are going to be drawn from the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch (NBWR for short!)Adventure Guide Book!  If you recall, the Wildlife Ranch was the place that I talked about in our Animal Spotlight featuring the Aurochs a few weeks ago, where you drive through this large area and the animals will come up to your car!  Pretty neat, huh!?  And most of the pictures that I upload for this blog post will actually be ones that we took down there!  So, as Mrs. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus says, "Seat belts, everyone!"  Let's do this thing.

1.  The African bongo, a type of antelope, has a prehensile tongue that it uses to grab vegetation, much like a giraffe.

2. The "Critically Endangered" addax from the Sahara Desert has flat and broad hooves, which help to keep the animal from sinking into the sand.

A picture of an addax that I took while in Palm Desert, California, at the excellent zoo called "The Living Desert"

3.  The addax also is very lightly colored, which helps to reflect heat away from the animal, keeping it cool.

4.  The South American rhea can run up to 40 m.p.h.

A picture of the rhea that my mother took at the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch on our visit in 2008.  The rhea is one of the ratites, like the ostrich and the emu, amongst others.

5.  The Patagonian cavy is the second-largest rodent in the world, second only to the capybara.

6.  The Watusi is the largest horned animal in the world, and its horns can be six feet across when fully grown.

A picture of a Watusi, with a calf, that my mother took when we visited the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch in 2008

7.  The African springbok pronks, meaning that it jumps with all four feet off the ground.  Typically, when an animal pronks, it is either during pursuit by a predator, or simply during play.  During pronking, the springbok can jump ten feet in the air.

A small group of springbok at the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch in 2011

8.  The scimitar-horned oryx is labeled "Extinct in the Wild" by the IUCN, hunted to extinction in the wild for their horns, which the animal would sometimes use to spear predators to death.

 

 

9.  The gemsbok was kept in large, semi-domesticated numbers in ancient Egypt, where they were killed for sacrificial purposes.

10.  The Indian barasingha "has the unique ability to submerge their heads in water while closing their nasal passages," which "allows them to take advantage of vegetation in the swampy areas of their homeland."

11.  The name "wildebeest" came from the Dutch settlers who settles in South Africa.  It means (can you guess?) "wild beast."

12.  The nilgai, or the bluebull, is the largest of the Asian antelope.

13.  The "Near Threatened" white rhinoceros is the largest of all of the rhinoceros species, and the second largest land mammal, second only to the African elephant.

14.  The white rhino will wallow in mud to cool off, as well as to help protect their skin.

15.   The name "rhinoceros" comes from the Greek words "rhino" (which means nose) and "ceros" (which means horn).  Think about the name Triceratops real fast: tri=three, tops=face, so then cera (like "ceros") = horn!

16.  The "Critically Endangered" bactrian camel, the larger of the two camel species, can go several days without no water, spit when agitated, and can survive extreme temperature swings, from -20 degrees F, all of the way to 100 degrees F!

A picture of the bactrian camel that I took at the Denver Zoo when I went there with my friends Masaki Kleinkopf and Brynn Conroy in April of 2012

17.  The ostrich is not only the largest of all of the birds, but it is also the only bird to have two toes.

This picture of ostriches stalking our car looks like something out of Jurassic Park

An ostrich accosting my sister for food at the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch in 2011

18.  The blackbuck, native to India and Pakistan, is a "Near Threatened" species.  According to the guidebook, there are more blackbuck in Texas than there are in India and Pakistan.

19.  The gait of the giraffe is unique amongst quadrupeds.  As they walk, they swing both of their feet on one side of their body at the same time.

A picture of one of the giraffes from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo from my visit a few weeks ago

20.  Giraffes eat around 75 lbs. of food a day, and can drink around 10 gallons of water in one standing!

21.  The heart of the giraffe can pump up to 20 gallons of blood per minute.

22.  There are two sub-species of sika (type of deer).  The Formosan sika, which inhabits Siberia, and the Japanese sika, native to Japan and Korea.

A picture of a Japanese sika that I took in 2011 at the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch

 23.  The North American elk is frequently referred to as the "Wapiti."  Wapiti is actually the Native American term that refers to the white patch of hair on the rear of the animal.

A picture of a small herd of elk that my mother took in 2006 at Yellowstone National Park

North Palm Desert on Dwellable

Animal Spotlight: Aurochs

This post is the birthday post of Govind Kamath!  Happy birthday, Mr. Kamath!  If you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animal, and I will do my best to get a post in!

Over the years, you may have pondered, "Where does my burger come from?"  You probably just meant where was the cow that it came from.  But now here is something else for you to ponder.  Where the heck did the cow even come from?  Do you ever just see wild, black and white cows?  Well, I am here to tell you all about the evolution of the cow.

A Watusi/Longhorn pileup!  They actually crashed into each other, though!  Trust me, I was there, you can even see my sweatshirted elbow in the mirror thingy!

During the Pliocene Epoch, from around 5 to 2 MYA, the planet went through a cooler spell.  The frequent ice ages were a part of this cool spell, as was the most frequent Ice Age.  This colder weather caused many of the worlds forests to decrease in area, which in turn caused the world's grasslands to expand.  This led to the evolution of many large grazing animals, and helped contribute to the Pleistocene Megafauna, often called the Ice Age Megafauna.  One of these large animals that evolved was the Aurochs.

The Aurochs (Bos primigenius), first became domesticated during the Neolithic Age, or the "New Stone Age," probably around 12,000 years ago.  As a matter of fact, two waves of domestication occurred.  As you can see in the map below, there were three different subspecies of the Aurochs; one in northern Africa; one for Europe and Asia; and a third for the mysterious subcontinent of India, as Rajesh Ramayan Koothrappali says in "The Big Bang Theory."  The two different domestications happened with the Eurasian subspecies, Bos primigenius primigenius, and the Indian subspecies, B. p. namadicus. 

These two different domestications of these two different species of cattle led to two different domesticated cattle!  In India, we have the Zebu cattle, which has been given its own scientific subspecies name, Bos primigenius indicus.  The other, Eurasian kind has become the cow that we know today from driving down the street and the Chik-fil-A ads.  While other types of bovines (members of the family Bovidae, a group of ungulates that includes water and African buffalo, yaks, bison, and, of course, cattle) have been domesticated throughout the years, specifically the water buffalo, the south-east Asian Banteng, and the Indian Gaur, it is cattle that have remained the most widely used, for a wide variety of purposes, too.

The Aurochs is now extinct.  The very last recorded female passed away in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland.

There are two particularly interesting breeds of domesticated cattle that I would like to now draw to your attention.  Back in December of 2011 on our trip down to Texas to visit my gramma, on the same trip where we visited the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country and saw the Acrocanthosaurus footprints, we also visited the San Antonio Zoo, as well as the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch near San Antonio.  This is an awesome place for EVERYONE to visit!  You get to roll down your windows as you drive through a park chock-full of deer, antelope, zebra, and bovines, and you get to drop food for them!  There are also three members of the order Struthioniformes (aka the ratites), like the South American rhea, the Australian emu, and, most terrifying of all, the African ostrich.  The ostriches was absolutely terrifying, and I will talk about them in a later blog post!  But also at the ranch they had two pretty crazy types of cattle!

The first was the Ankole-Watusi, often called simply the Ankole cattle or the Watusi.  Originally bred in Africa, the Watusi was named after the Watusi tribesmen (now the Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi).  This type of cattle has enormous horns that can span over six feet!  Both genders have these horns, and they can grow from between 1,500 - 1,800 pounds!  Below are some pictures that my family and I took of the cattle walking by our car!

A Watusi.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS!

Another Watusi.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS!

A baby Watusi!  HOW CUTE!

The second crazy type of cattle is the Texas Longhorn.  The Texas longhorn is, of course, native to the Lone Star State, and reports of the longhorn enduring thirst while still being able to fight off packs of wolves, as well as bears (presumably grizzly bears), from the pioneer times is not uncommon.  The longhorn, like the Watusi, also has six foot horns possessed by both sexes.  According to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch Adventure Guide Book, the longhorn "helped form the basis of the ranching industry of the American West during the 19th century."

A Texas longhorn.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS.

Another Texas longhorn.  CHECK OUT THOSE HORNS.

The aftermath of the Watusi/Longhorn pileup seen above!

Whoever said cows weren't interesting!

Fun Fact, A Look Ahead 8/18/2012

First off, I have to apologize for getting behind a bit, I have been a bit busy!  I have pushed back (or is it forward?) the promised posts from the last couple of days, so here is today's "A Look Ahead," with what I think is the most interesting "Fun Fact" yet!

Sunday:  Perfume-Loving Lions and Record-Breaking Cheetahs - Lions from the Denver Zoo fawn over the men's perfume "Obsession," while Sarah the cheetah become the world's fastest animal!

Monday:   The Sounds of Star Wars - Chewbacca may look like a bear, but was he voiced by one, too?

Tuesday:  The Salton Sea - Learn about how just a few people in southern California were able to severely alter their natural surroundings.

Wednesday: Learning Latin Roots - Common roots in scientific names in animals, as well as a few interesting and humorous ones!

Thursday:  Fossil Penguins:  Aptenodytes ridgeni and Pygoscelis tyreei - Finding out about more fossil penguins, these closely related to some alive today!

Friday: Animal Spotlight:  The Aye-aye - One of my favorite animals, the aye-aye, is featured in this "Animal Spotlight."

Saturday: The Loch Ness Monster....Fact or Fiction? - Spoiler Alert:  It's Fiction

Fun Fact:  If America didn't attack Japan with atomic bombs in World War II, the Japanese might have come under siege by bat.

Although I originally thought this to be a hoax, it certainly appears as if this is real.  I have found information on it on multiple sources.  And it is actually a brilliant plan too!  Here is what happened:

 On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, bringing the United States into World War II.  When Pennsylvanian dentist Lytle S. Adams heard the news on the radio, he thought back to his trip to New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns, and their extensive bat population.  He then thought up his idea for the "bat bomb:" strapping small, incendiary devices to thousands, perhaps millions, of bats, and releasing them over a strategic city in Japan.  The bats, as they would anywhere else in the world, would try to find cover in buildings, trees, and whatever nooks and crannies they could find before daybreak.  Then they would ignite the incendiary devices.  "Think of thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously over a circle of forty miles in diameter for every bomb dropped," he said.  Luckily for Adams, he knew Eleanor Roosevelt, and contacted her with his idea.  The White House actually liked it.  Said a Presidential memorandum: "This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into."  

Now, animal rights activists, beware.  Obviously, this plan is not very kind to the animals, and involves all sorts of animal cruelty.  To get the bats shipped, they forced them into a hibernation by sticking them into ice cube trays.  Next, the bats would be loaded into what essentially looked like a bomb-shell, consisting of 26 trays, with each of the trays containing compartments that would hold 40 bats.  Dropped from 5,000 feet, parachutes would deploy at 1,000 feet, all while the bats were awakening from their hibernation.  They would then fly off and roost, and then set the city on fire when the time was right.
Bats were the ideal creatures for this project, too.  They are nocturnal, so the Japanese would be hard-pressed to figure out what was going on.  They occur in simply massive numbers, so obtaining a great deal of them would not be super problematic.  In many caves, bats occur in the millions.  Furthermore, when bats are hibernating, they require no food, and therefore need little care when it comes to cleaning up little messes.  And finally, and perhaps most importantly, bats can carry more than what they weigh in flight, making them the perfect candidates for carrying bombs.  

The plan was to send 10 B-24 bombers, each with around 100 shells chock-full of bats, would fly from Alaska, and release around 1,040,000 bats over the cities of Osaka Bay, such as Osaka, Amagasaki, Hannan, Kobe, Sakai, and Nishinomiya.  However, the weapon experienced a few changes of hand, most notably to the hands of the Navy in August 1943, following an incident near Carlsbad, New Mexico, where bats were accidentally released.  They roosted under a fuel tank, and set fire to Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base.

The project was ultimately canned in 1944, when it was learned that the bat-bomb project would likely not be operational until about halfway through 1945.  It seems likely that the atomic bomb is what caused the projects termination, even after an estimated $2 million was spent on it.  But who knows?  Perhaps this is REALLY what is going on at Area 51.

Animal Spotlight: The Red Panda

So for today's "Animal Spotlight," we are going to be taking a look at a very interesting creature: the red panda.  But how did I know this?  If you were an expert in logic and detective work, you might have already come to that conclusion, however, given the fact that not only did I post the title in the last "A Look Ahead," as well as by looking at the title of this post.  However, what you probably failed to take into account was that I, Zack Neher, and I alone, am the creator of this blog.  Therefore all executive decisions (i.e. what today's post is about) are made by me and my sole business partner, Chessney Von Pawncheck. 

OK, that is quite enough.  All long-winded explanations put aside, today's "Animal Spotlight" is, indeed the red panda.  The red panda is something of a misnomer.  Its scientific name, Ailurus fulgens, translates to "Shining Cat"; but the red panda is no cat.  Neither is the red panda a panda, as its name might imply.  Previously classified with the bears, and at another time with the raccoons (neither of which is the red panda), scientists now believe that the red panda deserves its own, special family, Ailuridae, within the superfamily of Musteloidea.  Within Musteloidea, besides the red panda, reside the weasels and kin, skunks and kin, and the raccoon, coati (the subject of this Friday's "Animal Spotlight") and kin.

A picture of the giant panda that my mother took at the San Diego Zoo

As you probably know, the Himalayas can get quite chilly at times.  To protect itself from the cold, the red panda has thick fur, as well as fur on the soles of its feet, which serves the double purpose of keeping its feet warm, but also helps to provide a bit of traction on ice.  When the snow melts, the hair-created traction also assists the red panda in obtaining a grip on the wet, slippery branches of its forest home. 

Although mostly a vegetarian, the red panda is certainly not above scavenging eggs from a birds nest.  They consume a great deal of bamboo, just as their namesake does. 

Listed as "Vulnerable" by the IUCN, the red panda lives in the Himalayan temperate forests of Nepal, China, Tibet, India, Bhutan, and Burma, as you can see in the map.
 But for those of you who want a bit more happiness when it comes to the red panda, simply click on the amusing video link below!

Red Panda Vs. Pumpkin

The Making of Planet Earth: The Snow Leopard

It was obviously not an easy feat for BBC to get all of the footage that they needed for their fantastic television series "Planet Earth," narrated by the equally fantastic David Attenborough.  Clearly, some segments would be easier to film than others.  One of the goals of "Planet Earth" was to get as much unique, never-before-filmed events and creatures, which would clearly make things a bit more difficult.  Below are listed some of the scenes that had apparently never been seen before on television.

1. The oceanic whitetip shark.
2. A piranha feeding frenzy, being filmed while the cameraman was actually in the water.
3. Arctic wolf hunt filmed from a helicopter.
4. Starving lions attacking and killing an elephant in the dead of night.
5.  Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico, U.S.
6. Amur leopard mother and cub in the Primorye region of Russia.
7. Bactrian camels in the Gobi desert in Mongolia eating snow to keep from getting dehydrated.
8. "The highest-ever aerial footage of Mount Everest and the Karakoram."
9. African wild dog hunt filmed from a helicopter.

And, finally, the subject of today's post:

    10. A snow leopard hunting a markhor in Pakistan.

The snow leopards are another one of my favorite animals, but due to their elusive nature, they are very difficult to capture on film.  Much more difficult than they are for poachers to capture them, anyhow.  Hunting in large part for their fur has greatly reduced the wild population, forcing the IUCN to list them as "Endangered."

Due to their elusive nature, and their difficulty to film, the "Story of the Snow Leopard," if you will, proved to be a most excellent candidate for the "Planet Earth Diaries" (which I generally refer to on this blog as "The Making of Planet Earth."  For the DVD release, a ten minute or so long "making of" feature was included, highlighting the difficulties of each shoot.  Below is the list of the episodes of Planet Earth, and what their respective "Making Of" featurettes talk about.

The chart.  The Shallow Seas episode, with the
Planet Earth Diaries about the great white shark hunts, is filmed by Big Car Diary co-host Simon King.

When it came to filming the snow leopard, the makers of "Planet Earth" first turned to veteran cameraman Doug Allan, the same man who filmed the polar bears.  But after a few months of fruitless searching (in Nepal, I believe), all he had to show for his work were a few long distance shots, too far away to be of much use.  There were plenty of signs of the snow leopard being around, however.  One of my favorite things to hear from the entire "Planet Earth" series came from this predicament.  The film crew would track the snow leopard by following its footprints in the snow, in the hopes of getting close enough to learn more, or to even film it.  However, they would follow the tracks in a large circle, until they were seeing signs of human footprints too: their own.  The snow leopards were following them!

"Planet Earth" then decided to film along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, but were not allowed to, as the search for Al-Qaeda was taking place there, and only news crews were allowed in.  One year later, however, the "Planet Earth" crew were granted access, in December of 2004.  Below is a link to part two of the "Planet Earth Diaries" about the snow leopard.  The first part was unfortunately taken off of youtube, but anyways, here is the second part.

Planet Earth Diaries: Snow Leopard Quest Part 2

Below is another fascinating video of the snow leopard: the first ever snow leopard/markhor hunt recorded on film.  SPOILER ALERT: and don't you worry you animal lovers out there; the video has a happy ending for the markhor, but not so for the snow leopard.

First Ever Snow Leopard/Markhor Hunt

Redington Beach on Dwellable

Animal Spotlight: The Tapir

This post has been made into a Video Blog Post.  To view it on YouTube, click HERE, or below.

Today's featured animal is the tapir, an odd, pig-like creature from South and Central America, as well as parts of south-east Asia.  There are four different types of tapir: Brazilian, Baird's, mountain, and Malayan.  Collectively, their closest living relatives are the rhinos and horses.  Unfortunately, all four of the tapirs are classified by the IUCN as "Vulnerable," or "Endangered."

Despite their bulky appearance (between 300 and 700 pounds, and around seven feet long), tapirs can run surprisingly fast.  This, along with the thick skin that helps to protect the back of their necks, helps them to avoid their main predators, like jaguars, tigers, caimans, and anacondas.  Although the distinctive coat patterns of adult tapir help to camouflauge them a bit, the young are especially camouflaged, with spots and stripes, much like two of their main predators, the jaguar and tiger, respectively.

A statue depicting the struggle between a pair of jaguars and their tapir prey.  The statue was one of many at the fantastic Brookgreen Gardens near Myrtle Beach in South Carolina.

According to Japanese folklore, the tapir will eat your dreams.  It also features in both Chinese and Korean mythology, as well. 

Each species of tapir has its own range, generally with little or no overlap.  The Brazilian tapir inhabits most of northern South America, generally not venturing much further south than the Tropic of Capricorn.  Meanwhile, the Baird's tapir lives in southern Mexico, Central America, as well as the South American country of Colombia.  It is also possible that it lives in Ecuador.  Next, the mountain tapir lives in just a small strip of land in the South American countries of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, in the Cordilerras Mountains.  Finally, the Malayan tapir is found in the lowland rainforests in the countries of Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. 

Don't forget to check in later in the day for this weeks "A Look Ahead!"

The Fox's Animal Magnetism

For a while now, it has been thought that birds could see the magnetic field, in order to help them migrate.  It has been hypothesized that, when they are facing north, they can see a little blurry patch at the bottom of their eye.  If they are facing east or west, then they can't see the patch, so they know where to put the patch in their field of vision to get where they want to go.  Recent research by a Czech team of scientists seems to indicate that the red fox can also use the magnetic field, but for a different purpose: hunting.

The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) ("Least Concern" by the IUCN) has the largest geographical distribution of any member of the Carnivora, with habitat on all of the continents except for South America and Antarctica.  In North America, it inhabits the United States and Canada, in Europe and Asia it lives almost everywhere, and in Africa it lives in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, and Libya.  Not only does it possesses the range shown in the map below, it has been introduced to Australia, where, like the Dingo, it poses a threat to native species.

The red fox hunts by leaping up into the air, and coming down right on top of its prey, literally (for the prey, at least) appearing out of nowhere.  But how to pinpoint its jump?  The answer lies in the magnetic field, which is visible to the foxes.  But how does this work?  Out of all of the explanations set forth by various journals and such, I thought the explanation from Nature was easiest to understand.  Here's what they have to say:

"Think of a laser pointer attached to you that always points slightly downwards in the same direction. Now think of some object on the ground. If you walk towards the object until the laser spot is on top of it you know that object is a set distance away."

Generally, it was thought that foxes would pinpoint their location solely using their very acute sense of hearing.  But then the Czech team found that, when the red fox was leaping in a northerly direction, 74% of the attacks were successful, while the leaping attacks in other directions had the success rate of a mere 18%.  That's a very big difference, and seems to point to the magnetic field theory.

A picture of the red fox outside of the house that our friends the Beckleys rented in Breckenridge one summer.  Awesome place to stay, especially if you are looking to escape the summer heat!  Photo Credit: Julie Neher

East Breckenridge on Dwellable

What Is It? The Weekly Challenge #2 Answer

 Hello again!  Thank you to our guessers for this week: surprisingly, one of you got it exactly right!  Congratulations to Kristie C., who guessed this weeks mystery animal 100% correct!  The correct animal was Pakicetus, an ancient ancestor of the cetaceans, or the whales, dolphins and porpoises.  Around 53 MYA, Pakicetus lived in a world that was gradually becoming what we see today.  At this time, what we now know as India was its own special island continent, moving steadily northwards until, eventually, India crashed into Asia.  This crash resulted in the largest mountains we have today, the Himalayas. 

However, 53 MYA, during the Eocene Epoch, India hadn't quite reached Asia, a small sea separating the two, the remains of the vast Tethys Ocean.  The Tethys Sea was high in saline, which is incredibly good for life.  Microscopic organisms like plankton flourished, sending reverberations up the food chain, all of the way to the fish, which exploded in numbers as well.  And on the shore of this Tethys Sea, in what today is Pakistan, stood Pakicetus. 

As Pakicetus watched the gread abundnace of fish in the waters, he began to take short fishing trips into the water.  Over millennia, as Pakicetus took more and more fishing trips, of longer and longer duration, adaptations that proved beneficial for hunting fish in the water occurred, like a more streamlined shape, most likely webbed feet, and nostrils placed further back on the head.  Over a few million years, Pakicetus evolved into another ancient whale, called Ambulocetus.

Check back in a few hours for your next "What Is It?" challenge?  I promise you, after the last two, this one should seem like a piece of cake!  See you all then!

Cloning the Cheetah: Why Bother?

In an attempt to discover why the cheetah has such a low fertility rate, a team of scientists, including David Wildt and Stephen O'Brien, decided to take a look at blood samples from a number of cheetahs, labeled "Vulnerable" by the IUCN.  What they found was startling, and very worrying; the cheetahs appeared to be dangerously, perilously inbred; they were all practically clones of each other. 

Wildt and O'Brien decided to confirm this hypothesis by taking skin samples from a number of cheetahs, and attempting to graft them onto a number of other cheetahs.  In a healthy population of animals, the skin grafts would be immediately rejected.  This is because the body of the animal who received the skin graft would recognize the skin to be from another individual, a foreign body, and attack it, just as it would attack any foreign body (i.e., germs or bacteria.)  Even in humans, skin grafts are often rejected, even ones from close relatives.

Normally a very majestic looking animal, this particular cheetah seems to have been caught at a bad time.  Photo Credit: Ted and Gail Neher

So when every single one of the cheetah skin grafts were accepted by the other animals, this did not bode well for the cheetah.  This meant the genetic diversity of the cheetah was incredibly, shockingly low.  But why is genetic diversity so important?  Well, without genetic diversity, the DNA of the individuals comprising a given population are very similar.  These individuals essentially become clones of each other, with many similar attributes, most important among them their immune systems.  In a healthy population of, say, cheetahs, say that fifty percent of them are immune to a certain disease, most of them evolving from a common ancestor.  The other fifty percent of the population has absolutely no protection against said disease, and the illness ravages their population.  An unfortunate (and oversimplified) event, to be sure, but fifty percent of the individuals remain to rebuild the population to what it once was.  With the low genetic diversity seen in the cheetah, if a similar disease in the hypothetical above sweeps through Africa, it is quite likely that a much lower percent than fifty would survive.  It is also possible that this disease would so ravage the global population of cheetahs that they would simply be unable to recover from this catastrophic event.

A cheetah scratching a log at the Denver Zoo.  The cheetahs incredibly slender build can help distinguish it from other cats. 

So why is the cheetah so catastrophically inbred?  Most of the time, low genetic diversity is due to a given species having passed through a "bottleneck."  20,000 years ago, cheetahs spanned the entire globe; ranging all over Europe, Asia and Africa, two species of cheetah, or "proto-cheetahs" if you will, even roamed North America (Miracinonyx inexpectatus and M. trumani.)  When the most recent Ice Age drew to a close around 10,000 years ago, the dramatic climatic changes (and likely human influences, as well) resulted in the extinction of much of the world's mammalian megafauna. Researchers think that this mass-extinction managed to knock the cheetah's numbers down to a very small population, likely comprising a mere handful of individuals.  (In fact, I remember reading once that at one time, some people thought that a single pregnant female mother was able to survive, but I don't think that this idea is all that highly regarded anymore).  While the cheetahs were obviously able to build their population numbers and density by a significant amount than that seen 10,000 years ago, this bottleneck came with a price; genetic diversity was, and is, miniscule.

Works Cited:

The Biggest Carnivorous Dinosaur Part 1: Move Over, T-Rex (Kind Of)

Tyrannosaurus rex, the "Tyrant Lizard King," has long been a dinosaurian favorite the world over.  He is quite the interesting animal, and simply massive; the publicity received by him and the giant-sized Velociraptor in Jurassic Park helped a bit, I'm sure!  However, T-rex is no longer thought to be the largest carnivorous dinosaur.  Well, yes he is.  But he isn't.

A picture of the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen Stan at the Morrison Natural History Museum.

Imagine someone who has never heard of the giraffe and elephant asks you which one is biggest.  You might say the elephant, because the elephant is much heavier and has more bulk.  But what if they mean which animal is taller?  Somewhat of a dilemma.  So using words like "biggest" (as I have done here) is not the best way to go.  So Tyrannosaurus still seems to be the heavyweight champion, there are other dinosaurs that, while more slender, were probably longer.  Kind of confusing, I know.

The fact that T-rex has some serious competition has put barely a dent into his popularity, and some of the other larger carnivores are receiving a lot of attention, too. The longest of these carnivores, which we will learn about on Wednesday, was possibly around 20% larger than Tyrannosaurus Rex!  Today, we are going to look at another enormous killer, of South American origin; the massive, the monstrous, Giganotosaurus.

A Giganotosaurus on display at Fernbank Museum, in Atlanta, Georgia

Giganotosaurus is an estimated 46 feet long, comparable in length to the average Tyrannosaurus!  We do have some specimens of Tyrannosaurus that are around the same size as Giganotosaurus, but either way: Giganotosaurus was a massive animal! Of course we don't actually know for sure what the maximum size for any dinosaur is as, unlike for most living animals, we generally have a relatively small sample set, but we can make close estimates based on the finds we have.  And these estimates indicate that Giganotosaurus grew to simply massive proportions.  One of the largest terrestrial animals that we know of is Argentinosaurus (who, like Giganotosaurus, was also found in Argentina), a sauropod dinosaur that lived at the same time as Giganotosaurus.  For Giganotosaurus to prey on even the juveniles of such a large herbivore, it would similarly need to grow to massive proportions.

Giganotosaurus vs. Argentinosaurus at Fernbank Museum, in Atlanta, Georgia

Giganotosaurus vs. Argentinosaurus at Fernbank Museum, in Atlanta, Georgia

This pattern repeats itself all over the world, the pattern of gigantism evolving in sauropods, along with the subsequent evolution of gigantism in the theropods (meat-eating dinosaurs), is a pattern repeated throughout the world, and throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods of the Mesozoic Era, the two periods in time when the rule of the dinosaurs was absolute.  Here are some more of the predator-prey, giant-sized carnivore/giant-sized herbivore relationships seen throughout the Mesozoic.  The first animal named will be the predator, and the second will be the sauropod.

Asia, 160 MYA: Sinraptor, Mamenchisaurus
Europe, 125 MYA: Neovenator, Ornithopsis
North America, 150 MYA: Allosaurus, Diplodocus
North Africa, 95 MYA: Carcharodontosaurus, Paralititan

In tomorrows post, we will look at the last relationship, and focus on another larger (or longer) than life carnivore, Carcharodontosaurus.

Another Living Fossil: The Coelacanth

400 millions years ago (MYA), during the Devonian Period, life had already gained a foothold on land.  However, in the seas, unless you were at the top of the food chain, there were a lot of predators to contend with.  If you were a fish in the middle of the food chain during the Devonian, you not only had to deal with ancestors of the modern day shark, but a now-extinct group of armor-plated fish, called the Placoderms.  Some of these Placoderms, like Dunkleosteus, grew to simply enormous proportions, around 30 feet in length!  One type of fish that lived during the Devonian and was most likely preyed upon by the sharks and the Placoderms was a fish known as the Coelacanth.

The Coelacanth (SEE-lah-canth) was a relatively unassuming fish, its closest living relative being the lobe-finned fish.  Fossils of the Coelacanth have been discovered ranging from 400 MYA to around 65 MYA, coinciding with the death of the dinosaurs.  In 1938, however, when one was hauled in on a fishing net off the coast of South Africa, the temporal range of this animal was extended by 65 million years!  Today, by studying the living Coelacanth, scientists have found that the fish gives birth to live young, unlike other fish.  Further discoveries both in Africa (off the coasts of Mozambique, Madagascar, Kenya and Tanzania) as well as Asia, around Sulawesi, Indonesia, of living Coelacanth specimens have further widened the current geographical range of the Coelacanth.

A specimen of the Cretaceous coelacanth Coccoderma nudum from Germany.  On display at the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History on the campus of the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

Unfortunately for this living fossil, it is labeled "Critically Endangered" by the IUCN, much like yesterday's living fossil, the mountain pygmy possum.  Just like the mountain pygmy possum, conservationist groups are working towards it's protection, trying to keep fisherman from fishing in the Coelacanth's habitat.  Hopefully, humans won't be the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, for this 400 million year old fish.