Useless Natural History Trivia
I've made some comments in recent posts that included factoids some people seemed to find interesting. I'm a systematist, so most of the superfluous facts in my head are about biodiversity - but here's more natural history trivia you'd only need if you're on Jeopardy someday -
- There are two kinds of sloth - the two-toed sloth and three-toed sloth. Both are arboreal. But each evolved into a tree sloth independently from a separate ground sloth ancestor.
- The stinger of an ant, bee, or wasp is the same as the ovipositor in other insects. This is the structure females use to lay eggs. This is why male ants, bees, and wasps cannot sting you.
- The jackrabbit is a hare. There's a difference between a rabbit and a hare.
- Likewise, the fur seal is a kind of sea lion. There's a difference.
- Lungfish are more closely related to us than they are to other bony fish. And crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards or turtles.
- Many marsupial groups have evolved to resemble placentals - wombats look like woodchucks, Tasmanian devils look like wolverines, sugar gliders resemble flying squirrels and flying lemurs (which neither fly nor are lemurs), marsupial moles look a lot like our moles, and so on. But no marsupial has ever evolved hooves, and no marsupial has ever evolved flippers. This is, at least partly, because they're born at a much earlier developmental stage than placentals, but require a grasping hand to crawl from the birth canal through mom's fur to reach the pouch. You can't grasp things with a flipper or a hoof.
- There's a giant vampire bat in the fossil record. Its name - I'm not kidding - is Desmotis draculae, and it's from Cuba. It was about 30 percent larger than a modern vampire bat, but modern vampire bats have wingspans of something like 8 inches, so this wasn't something that would carry you off to its castle. (There are birds in the fossil record with wingspans approaching 20 feet, but the largest bats in the fossil record are no bigger than the largest flying foxes and fruit bats of today.)
Maybe more next week? Let me know if there's interest.
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I've always been fascinated by zoological trivia. My Dad used to say that if I didn't keep so much trivia in my head, maybe I'd be able to remember my phone number 