If one Canadian researcher is right, the largest rodent ever found just lost about 1,300 pounds.
A biological brouhaha started this week over the fossils of the Josephoartigasia monesi, a giant rat that made its home a couple million years ago in what is now Uruguay. Unfortunately, only the fossilized skull survived — scientists never unearthed any of the remainder of the skeleton, so they had had to do a little guessing as to the rest of the creature’s proportions. Using the ratio of the size of a modern rat’s head to its body, the Uruguayan scientists who dug up the bones in January said the creature would have weighed a full ton — about 2,200 pounds, or 15 times heavier than the largest rodent roaming the earth today.
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For more than a century, crustaceans called facetotectans appeared to live in a biological Neverland: nobody had ever seen an adult member of the species, until now.
The young facetotectans, known by the riveting moniker “y-larvae,” were first identified in 1899. These relatives of barnacles are not scarce — more than 40 different species of y-larvae live all over the world. But in a hundred years of hunting for an adult, scientists never found one. Everything they knew about these peculiar crustaceans came from studying the young, and that didn’t reveal much — imagine if everything we knew about dogs came from looking at puppies.
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Even a big fish needs to be held sometimes.
Army engineers in Oregon saw a big blip on their sonar readings near the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, which they assumed to be a pile of debris. Instead of junk, they found sturgeon. About 60,000 of them had gathered in a huge congregation 40 to 50 feet below the surface of the river, and U.S. Geological Service biologist Michael Parsley said his estimate could be on the conservative side.
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Who’d have thunk that a species of shrimp may be the world’s most visually acute animal? Dr. Sonja Kleinlogel, a marine biologist at the Max Planck Institute, and Andrew White, a quantum physicist at the University of Queensland, have discovered that the mantis shrimp, which inhabits the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, can not only see ultraviolet and infrared light but also has optimal polarization vision, an ability so rare that not a single other animal has it.
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According to Inuit myth, a urine-soaked cloth was once whipped from an old lady’s hand and carried out to sea, where it turned into a sea monster called “skalugsuak.” Of its legendary peculiarities, skalugsuak lives for 200 years, has thousands of teeth, weighs over a ton, eats caribou whole, has skin that can destroy human flesh, and possesses—in place of eyes—living, glowing creatures which lure its prey.
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The microscopic bdelloid rotifer—best known as an all-females species that hasn’t had sex for 100 million years—has thwarted the attempts of Eugene Gladyshev and Matthew Meselson to mutate their genes with blasts of gamma radiation. Although the radiation shattered their genomes—it was a far higher dose than had ever been tolerated by an animal to date—the plucky, resourceful gals sewed their chromosomes back together and not only survived the blasts but continued to reproduce.
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