23-Fact Tuesday: The Polar Bear!

Everyone loves polar bears, so today, for the birthday post of Brooke Harrower, we are going to be taking a 23-Fact Tuesday look at them!  Allons-y!

1.  Despite the fact that the polar bear can be quite a fierce animal, it can also be very playful and gentle.  For proof, click HERE to see a very cute video of polar bears playing with sled dogs!

2.  A group of polar bears is called a celebration.

3.  In an attempt to safely film polar bears up close and personal without disturbing them, one production company resorted to an interesting array of spy cameras.  To see an awesome video of the polar bears playing with the spy cameras, click HERE.

4.  As we saw in the previous video clip, the polar bear is quite the curious animal.  It has to be, to survive in such harsh conditions!  The polar bear is also a lot smarter than many other bears, as can be seen in a comparison of a few different bear brains, below!  Look at how much larger (comparatively) the brain of the polar bear is than that of the American black bear!  Also keep in mind that more wrinkles=a greater surface area=a smarter animal!

5.  Unlike the color of its fur, the skin of the polar bear is actually jet black!

6.  Despite the fact that they are often erroneously pictured together, it is almost entirely impossible for penguins and polar bears to meet naturally in the wild, as no penguins ever really make it past the Equator, with the Galápagos penguin living the furthest north, right on the Equator!  For more information on the subject (as well as some really funny stories) click on the link HERE, to check out a page on the awesome blog March of the Fossil Penguins.

7.  As you can see in the video clip HERE, filming the polar bears for the excellent BBC series Planet Earth could be quite a challenge (see the full post HERE), especially when they come knocking at your door!

8.  The polar bear is the largest extant (still living, opposite of extinct) mammalian carnivore.  The males can grow up to a whopping 1,500 pounds! 

9.  It occurs to me as I eat this delicious cherry popsicle that the polar bear must have some sort of special evolutionary adaptation to prevent brain freeze as it consumes a cold and frozen meal.  Research should be done into this.

10.  Polar bears, after their emergence from their dens following the harsh Arctic winters, have been observed sledding down the hills on which the dens are associated.  Some scientists believe that this action is solely intended to clean the fur, but many others (myself included) believe that it is probably more for fun!  Check out the video HERE.

11.  The polar bear is native to only five countries.  These are Russia, Denmark owned Greenland, Norway owned Svalbard, Alaska, and Canada.

12.  The polar bear is a descendant of the grizzly bear, and was once thought to have diverged from the grizzly possibly only even around 70-100,000 years ago.  Others are more conservative in their estimations, as DNA analysis on one particular fossil specimen indicates that the polar bear diverged from the grizzly bear around 160,000 years ago.  It now seems more likely that the age of divergence of was much earlier in time than even 100,000 years ago, and polar bear fossils dating from earlier than that (round 115,000 years ago) have actually been discovered.

A picture of one of the grizzly bears at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo doing what the zookeepers call the "Yoga Bear."  This was from the behind the scenes experience that my dad, grandma and grandpa, my friend Masaki and I got to do with Kelley Parker a few months back!  Photo Credit: Masaki Kleinkopf.

Another picture of one of the grizzly bears at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo doing what the zookeepers call the "Yoga Bear."  This was from the behind the scenes experience that my dad, grandma and grandpa, my friend Masaki and I got to do with Kelley Parker a few months back!  Photo Credit: Masaki Kleinkopf.

13.  The oldest polar bear fossil known to science, the lower jaw of a male, was discovered in 2004.  It's age is thought to be between around 110,000 and 130,000 years old. 

14.  The scientific name for the polar bear, Ursus maritimus is "sumitiram susru" spelled backwards.  This means absolutely nothing and is really not that exciting, unless you are me and think it's funny and clever to spell things backwards and make stupid jokes about it.

15.  Algae, while not threatening to a polar bear in any significant way, can be extremely hard to wash out of the bears fur.  So therefore, in the summer of 2008 when three bears at Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Japan got a bunch of algae stuck in their fur, they were green for the entire summer!  True story!

16.  The polar bear is a fantastic swimmer, aided by its streamlined body and skull as well as its partially webbed feet, and have been spotted swimming strongly in open waters as much as 200 miles from the shore!

17.  The polar bear will consume a wide variety of foods, including everything from seals to walrus, beluga whales to bowhead whale carcasses, birds, and even kelp!

18.  The polar bear is labeled as "Vulnerable" by the IUCN, a position which may deteriorate in years to come with the further melting of the ice caps.

19.  Hybrids of the polar bear and the grizzly bear, sometimes called grolars, have been known to occur both in the wild and in captivity, a further testament to the close genetic relationship between the two bears.

20.  Baby polar bears are possibly some of the cutest animals on the planet, as can be evidenced by the picture below of baby Anori from Germany's Wuppertal Zoo.

21.  Humans are the only animal that hunt polar bears.

22.  So well protected against the cold is the polar bear that they can quickly overheat, even when the temperature is below zero!  In order to combat this, the polar bear will try to avoid running and will rest for many many hours at a time.  Maybe my cat's a polar bear.

23.  Polar bears, like myself when Windows Movie Maker refuses to work, have actually been observed by scientists to throw tantrums when they fail to catch their prey!  The bears have been observed growling disappointedly, kicking piles of snow, and even throwing ice chunks!

Happy birthday Brooke, hope you enjoy!  And remember, 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!

Feeding Some Tigers!

So here are two more videos that I have uploaded from the behind-the-scenes visit to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo that I took a few months back with my father, sister, and grandma and grandpa, under the guidance of Kelley Parker!  It was a lot of fun, and we got to feed the Siberian or Amur tigers while we were there!  The Siberian tiger, Panthera tigris altaica,  is a sub-species of the tiger, Panthera tigris, and is labeled as "Endangered" by the IUCN.  The Siberian tiger is found in the Primorye region of eastern Russia.  Anyways, enough chit-chat, here are the videos!

Feeding the Siberian Tiger!


Siberian Tiger Jumps Up To Get A Pumpkin

Green Mountain Falls on Dwellable

The Denver Gem and Mineral Show Part 6: Dinosaurs and Their Ancient Relatives

At last: here we go on the sixth post of our Denver Gem and Mineral Show series!  Even though I went with my friend Masaki Kleinkopf a few months ago, I still have a large number of picture that I am eager to share with you.  If you are interested in reading about the other posts in this series, feel free to check out the Homebase for the series HERE, with links to all of the other posts in the series that have been created thus far!  Today we will be looking at the dinosaurs, as well as an ancient relative!  Fasten your seat belts, everyone!

Here we have the skull of Allosaurus!  We have discussed Allosaurus extensively, especially in our 23-Fact Tuesday post, so click HERE to learn more about this fascinating creature!

A dinosaur who needs no introduction, but, as you can see, I am introducing him anyways: Tyrannosaurus rex!  I believe the second picture is of the foot of Tyrannosaurus, but I am not one hundred percent positive.

Psittacosaurus, one of the most primitive ceratopsian dinosaurs known to science.  It doesn't even have a frill or horns!  So how do we know that it is a ceratopsian dinosaur?  It has an extra bone on its upper jaw called the rostral.  It is this bone that distinguishes the ceratopsians from the other groups of dinosaurs.

Another dinosaur foot, this one belonging to Diplodocus, a large sauropod from the Late Jurassic Period, whose remains are found in the Morrison Formation. 

 Some fossil footprints that I am guessing belong to a theropod dinosaur, but I don't actually know.

Some fossil bones of a hadrosaur known as Edmontosaurus.  Here is what the card says: "Edmontosaurus sp.  Cervical vertebrae and bone.  Lance Formation.  Maastrichtian.  Late Cretaceous.  Niobrara County, Wyoming."

Some teeth belonging to the massive carnivorous dinosaur Carcharodontosaurus.  Up at the top of the picture, you can see a few from Spinosaurus, as well. 

Various teeth and claws from the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center (RMDRC) booth.

This last guy, Desmatosuchus, is not actually a dinosaur, but a type of archosaur.  Although it looks quite fierce, Desmatosuchus belongs to an order of Late Triassic herbivores called the aetosaurs.  Desmatosuchus in particular has been found in Texas, and was around 15 or 16 feet in length. 

Denver on Dwellable

Animal of the Day: Coelophysis

Today's Animal of the Day is Coelophysis!  The picture of the cast you see off to the left (taken by me at the Denver Gem and Mineral Show a few months back) is from the AMNH (American Museum of Natural History) in New York.  I actually know a little bit more about this particular specimen of Coelophysis than I believe was labeled there, as I remembered seeing this specimen in my Dinosaur Atlas book from DK Publishers.  One of around 500 or so individual Coelophysis specimens discovered at a place called Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, this particular specimen was once thought to reveal something interesting about the species: Coelophysis was once thought to probably be a cannibal, as the remains of a baby Coelophysis were found in the area of the stomach!

Dinosaur cannibalism is not unheard of, and almost certainly occurred in the Late Cretaceous Abelisaur Majungasaurus from Madagascar.  However, this was disproven in 2002 by Rob Gay, when he showed that the baby Coelophysis were either crushed by the smaller ones, or that they weren't even baby Coelophysis!  Instead, many of them were found to be other, small reptiles, such as the archosaur Hesperosuchus, a member of the same group as the crocodilians, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs, amongst others.  So for now, it looks like Coelophysis was probably not a cannibal, but future discoveries may force us to change our minds once again!

Another picture of Coelophysis that I took, at the DMNS

Coelophysis is one of the oldest known dinosaurs, inhabiting North America around 220 million years ago (MYA), during the Late Triassic Period.  The site at Ghost Ranch is interesting, because there are just so many different specimens all clumped together.  Some paleontologists have suggested that a flash flood drowned a huge herd of these animals, or perhaps that they died while trying to cross a river.  We might never know what, exactly, killed these dinosaurs, or why so many of them died in such close proximity.  

The Ancestral Australian Aborigines As a Possible Cause for the Extinction of Australia's Pleistocene Marsupial Megafauna

A few weeks ago, in my Anthropology class, we had to do a cultural profile of one culture group of humans.  I chose the Australian Aborigines and, having just finished Tim Flannery's excellent book "Chasing Kangaroos," this whole concept of the Ancestral Aborigines being the possible cause of the extinction of Australia's Pleistocene megafauna was still quite fresh in my mind, so I included it in the paper.  I thought it was pretty interesting, and so I have decided to share it with ya'll, too, with a few brief modifications to make it more Blog friendly!  Hope you enjoy, and if you want a more comprehensive look at the topic, I highly recommend "Chasing Kangaroos!"

Interestingly, paleontologists today are using the Australian Aborigines to help them figure out when Australia's Pleistocene megafauna went extinct.  While today, there are no native animals larger than the red kangaroo, Pleistocene Australia was a very different place, as was the rest of the world.  The Pleistocene Epoch was the time of the Ice Age megafauna.  With the exception of Africa and south-east Asia, in most places nowadays, the Pleistocene megafauna is extinct, but back then, the megafauna were a world-wide phenomenon.  In Eurasia, there were the giant mammoths and rhinoceroses, the cave lions and hyenas, the Irish elk, and the giant polar bear.  In North America, there were the mammoths and mastodons, the short-faced bear, the giant bison, the dire wolf, the giant beavers, and the saber-toothed cats.  In South America, there were the giant ground sloths, the armored glyptodonts, and many large relatives of elephants.  

Australia also had its fair share of Pleistocene megafauna, with marsupial lions, the giant short-faced kangaroos, the hippo-sized wombat Diprotodon, and echidnas that were the size of sheep.  There are two main hypothesis when it comes to what caused the extinction of all these animals: climate change, or hunting by early human arrivals on Australia, the first Aborigines.  No one could figure out whether it really was the Aborigines that had hunted the megafauna to extinction, though, because no one could figure out the date that the megafauna had gone extinct, nor could they figure out the date that humans first arrived on Australia.  Some people believed that the megafauna survived until around 6,000 years ago, while others believed that they went extinct a great many years prior.  The same difficulties confronted those scientists attempting to determine when humans first arrived.  The sediments of Australia are notoriously hard to date, and since the animals of Australia are so unique (especially following the extinction of the dinosaurs), scientists were unable to correlate their data with other places around the world.[1] 

As more scientific discoveries were made, a new method of dating rocks was discovered, called optically stimulated luminescence (or OSL for short).  Using OSL, paleontologists were successfully able to date many different specimens of the various marsupial Pleistocene megafauna, and found that, while many of them approached the 46,000 years ago mark, none of them passed it.  Many different specimens were used from all across Australia, but they all said the same thing: 46 was the answer. 

Meanwhile, with the new OSL tool in their bag, other scientists headed off to sites of known human habitation to attempt to date them as well, and these efforts proved to be successful.  One of the main places that they dated was a place known as Devil’s Lair, a known area of ancient Aboriginal inhabitance.  What was especially important about Devil’s Lair was that there was sediment present for the last 63,000 years, meaning that instead of just a snapshot of time, the scientists had an uninterrupted sequence of time to figure out when humans started living there.  As the scientists dated the sediments with the first signs of human inhabitance, they came up with the magic number: 46,000.  Other sites came up with the same number too, including Lake Mungo, the oldest human burial known from Australia.  At Lake Mungo, the dates were a bit less precise, ranging from between 45,000 and 47,000 years ago, but the data still seems to point in the same direction.  The ancestral Aborigines arrived on the continent at around the same time that Australia’s Pleistocene megafauna went extinct.  With this new dating technique, scientists were also able to determine that there was no significant climate change for many thousands of years on either side of the 46,000 mark, effectively ruling out that hypothesis.  So it seems that, for a time, the people who believe themselves as part of the land and the natural world around them actually destroyed a significant part of it.

[1] For example, paleontologists studying dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation here in Colorado are able to look at closely related dinosaurs in other parts of the world like the UK and southern Africa (keep in mind that the continents were all together in one big landmass back then.)  That way, if the paleontologists are unable to determine the dates of, say, the Tendaguru Formation in Tanzania, they can look to the studies done on the rocks of the Morrison Formation for an accurate estimation.  This is a luxury that paleontologists, archaeologists and other scientists working in Australia simply do not have. 

Mildura on Dwellable

Harry Potter Names: Remus Lupin

Remus Lupin is one of my favorite protagonists from the Harry Potter series.  Despite the fact that he is a werewolf, he nevertheless is an exemplary wizard and a fantastic teacher.  The origins of his name are also quite interesting!

The surname, Remus, originates from the myth of Rome's foundation.  One of two main characters in the story, Remus's brother Romulus is the other central character.  There are many different forms of the myth, but here is how most of them seem to go.  The mother of Remus and Romulus has the two young boys float down in the river to protect them from the Gods, in the hopes that someone else will raise them.  They end up being raised by a female wolf.  Later on, they are adopted by humans, and eventually build a large city.  Both brothers want to be king, however, so the pair quarrel, and Remus is killed.

So we have the wolf connection: Remus and Romulus were cared for by a wolf, and Remus Lupin is a werewolf.  Another connection is that, in the seventh book, Remus Lupin is a guest on Potterwatch, and goes by the code name "Romulus."  Some sources even cite that J. K. Rowling's intentions were to represent the conflict within Remus Lupin (between his human side and his werewolf side) by having the names of the two brothers both apply to Remus Lupin.

Next, we have the last name, "Lupin."  In Latin, the word "lupus" means "wolf:"  This is where the scientific name for the gray wolf comes from, Canis lupus, shared by the many sub-species of the gray wolf, including the arctic wolf, the Mexican red wolf, and the domestic dog.  So that apparently means that "lupin" translates to "wolf-like."

We have one more connection, courtesy of Aniruddh Prakash: the letters in the name "Remus Lupin" can be rearranged to the words "Primus lune," which means full moon.  Coincidence?  I think not!  Clearly, Rowling put a great deal of thought into this name!

Some Like It Hot....Radioactive Hot

Today was quite an eventful day, for many reasons!  Went to the Zoo Lights at the Denver Zoo with some good friends of ours; learned that Ray Wise is not in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but is actually in X-Men: First Class; and learned that the building off the highway called "Quaker Steak and Lube" is actually a restaurant, and not a car repair place.  Also, on my way to the Morrison Museum this morning, I saw what I am pretty sure was a peregrine falcon, as well as a number of red-tailed hawks and kestrels, and the great-horned owl that I have seen a few times recently perched on the "speed limit" sign on the highway!  It was pretty awesome!  Oh, and did I mention that one of my fossils might be radioactive?

One of the Zoo Lights was this tiger, but I'm pretty sure he's supposed to go around something a little thicker....

I was talking to Dr. Bob today at the museum, and we were talking about fossil hunting in Texas, chiefly the fossils that I got down there when we went to visit my gramma last Christmas, as well as the fossil dig-site that he has down there.  As we were talking, I thought back to the fossilized wood (top picture, the thing with the penny on it and everything to the right and above that piece) that I had picked up in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on one of the first nights of our trip.  I had never been able to figure out what formation or what geologic time period it came from, so I asked Dr. Bob.  He said that there are a lot of different aged rocks from throughout the Mesozoic Era (the time of the dinosaurs), from the Triassic to the Cretaceous.  Then, as a sidenote, he mentioned that some of the fossilized wood down there tends to be radioactive, sometimes dangerously so.  Well then!  I am currently sorting this out, but I feel like I don't really have enough to worry about.  Famous last words, right?