Primates apart, few mammals employ tools. Sea otters use rocks to smash clams open, dolphins wrap sponges around their noses to protect themselves while they forage on the seabed, elephants swat insects with branches and humpback whales exhale curtains of bubbles to trap schools of fish; the grizzly bear, seems to be the only species other than humans to have invented the comb.
He starts at their beginning with a weighty introduction that looks at fossils dating back to the dinosaurs, the structure of feathers and the evolution of birds. From there on, the remaining chapters are captivating natural history, arranged in neatly named sections: "fluff", how feathers keep birds warm and dry; "flight", how they take to the sky; "fancy", the myriad beauty of feathers for sexual selection in birds and decoration for humans; and "function", how feather structure can inform new technologies.
Nor does anyone know how to breed eels in captivity. Mr Prosek tried to keep some in a tank but they banged their heads against the sides until they had seizures and died.
It is old, rather than young, mosquitoes that are infectious. Only females can transmit malaria (males suck plant juices, not blood) but they are not born with the parasites inside their bodies. They have instead to acquire them from humans already carrying the disease, and that takes time. Once a female does feed on infected blood, the parasites she ingests require a further 10 to 14 days to mature and migrate to her salivary glands, whence they can be transmitted to another host when she next feeds.
He was a harmless gecko — a nocturnal and often highly vocal lizard which has adhesive pads on the feet to assist in climbing on smooth surfaces.
See that live in numbers too large to count in ways too numerous to imagine. In that context, the discovery by Curtis Suttle of the University of British Columbia and his colleagues of a critter they propose to call Cafeteria roenbergensis virus, or CroV, should not be surprising. But for those brought up on a textbook definition of what a virus is, it is still a bit of a shock. For CroV is not a very viruslike virus. It has 544 genes, compared with the dozen or so that most viruses sport. And it may be able to make its own proteins — a task that viruses usually delegate to the molecular machinery of the cells they infect. CroV, as its full name suggests, is a parasite of Cafeteria roenbergensis, a single-celled planktonic organism that was itself discovered only in 1988. Despite the recentness of its discovery, C. roenbergensis is one of the commonest creatures on the planet. It is also reckoned by some, given that it hunts down and eats bacteria, to be the most abundant predator on Earth. It is found in every ocean.
This month the White House appointed a carp tsar to oversee the campaign. But government moves slowly. Fish do not.
In any case, though dinosaurs have left no usable DNA, other more recently departed creatures have been more generous. Imagine, say, allying synthetic biology with the genome of Neanderthal man that was described earlier this year. There is much excitement at the idea of comparing this with the DNA of modern humans, in the hope of finding the essential differences between the two. How much more exciting, instead, to create a Neanderthal and ask him?
The Cretaceous equivalent of zebra and antelopes — the victim species in every wildlife documentary about the dramas of the African savannah — were herbivorous dinosaurs called ornitho- pods.
Such tales had to be saddled like horses, and ridden for all they were worth.
The British empire is the Indian elephant in the living room and the tiger under the dining table.
I'm not aware of any vegetarian tigers.
"At the approach of the rain and the wind the swallows are busy."
Fingers are integral to art, communication, touch, love, fashion and counting. Using complex gestures the Romans could count to 1m: the word "digit" — the numerals below ten — originates from digitus, the Latin for finger. The phraseology of fingers is rich: we can have a finger in every pie, pull our finger out, twist someone around our little finger, let things slip through our fingers and, if unlucky, get our fingers burned.
Fire creates evidence as well as destroys it.
He combined the cold logic of Darwinism with a military ruthlessness.
"Female baboons clearly have some Lady Macbeth issues," observes the writer. "They all have male baboons that they want to become more alpha."
Coca-Cola was also bitten by a charitable bug.
Bat testes range from 0.11% of body weight in the African yellow- winged bat, to a whacking 8.4% in the generously endowed Rafin- esque's big-eared [sic] bat. (The largest primate testes by contrast, those of the crab-eating macaque, are a mere 0.75% of body mass.) And the small balls were indeed found in species where females were monogamous (though they might be members of harems), while the large ones were found in species where females mated widely.
Fifty million years ago there was no ice on the poles and crocodiles lived in Wyoming. Eighteen thousand years ago there was ice two miles thick in Scotland and, because of the size of the ice sheets, the sea level was 130m lower.
All lagoons sooner or later become either land or sea. If we fail, then sooner or later Venice too will become either land... or sea.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary: "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. The dinosaur disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons."
What name a genuinely new species is given, though, is entirely up to the discoverer. Hence the existence of Anophthalmus hit- leri, a blind cave beetle named in 1933 after Adolf Hitler. In this context, the recent naming of another beetle after the American president is hardly a hanging offence, although Mr Bush may not be flattered by the company. But when the scientific underpinning of taxonomy itself is threatened by politics, different questions arise. Last year, for example, there was a nasty row in Turkey between Kurdish and Turkish taxonomists over whose names should apply to some local animals. The Kurds accused the Turks of renaming several species to remove any trace of Kurdishness.
The scientific name of the beetle comes from a German collector, Oscar Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in 1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Adolf Hitler, who had recently become Chancellor of Germany. The genus name means eyeless, so the full name can be translated as "the eyeless one of Hitler". The dedication did not go unnoticed by the Fuhrer, who sent Scheibel a letter showing his gratitude.
£ £ Philosophy, religion, thinking,
wisdom, languages, truth, morality
«You must do the things you think you cannot do," said Eleanor Roosevelt.
Spellbound after visiting Constantinople in 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany wrote to his friend Tsar Nicholas II, «If I had com there without any religion at all, I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!»
The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller «Eats, Shoots and Leavers» comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.
In Ireland people ask St Anthony to help them find parking spaces.
How did Hobbes make so many enemies?
Human ignorance is more fundamental and more consequential than the illusion of understanding.
As long as nothing happens anything is possible.
William Faulkner, the South's great novelist, wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past".
Nobody thinks a novel can be translated by a machine. Sales of translated fiction rose by more than 600% in Britain between 2001 and 2015, and have been growing strongly in America too.