About.com's Animals / Wildlfife website profiles hundreds of animals from Adélie penguins to xenarthrans and provide tips on how to watch animals and identify what you see. It helps you to explore wildlife, in your own backyard or further afield.
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- Earth Day 2009
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Wednesday, April 22 at 12:05am
About Animals / Wildlife Something dramatic happened to a lot of very big animals between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. During this time period, 34 major groups of large animals died-out. Among those that disappeared, were ten species that weighted more than a ton. Giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, giant kangaroos, and moa were among the fast-vanishing fauna.
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About Animals / Wildlife Leaf-cutting ants have the power to slice, dice, and pilfer the foliage of an entire grove of trees in a matter of days. With impressive efficiency, swarms of leaf-cutters clip and carry leafy material in vast quantities back to their subterrainean colony. There they process the clippings into compost piles, atop which... the ants cultivate crops of fungi. The ants tend these fungal gardens and in return the fungi provide a constant source of food for the ant colony.
About Animals / Wildlife Yesterday, I wrote about some extinct scorpionflies that scientists think may have fed on the nectar of seed ferns, conifers, and other ancient plants. Now you can get a pretty good idea of what some of these primitive pollinators looked like in this photo album of scorpionfly fossils.
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About Animals / Wildlife A new study suggests that scorpionflies that lived during the Jurassic Period fed on the nectar-like juices of seed ferns, conifers, and other primitive plants. As the scorpionflies feasted on the sweet liquid from these plants, they may have also acted as animal pollinators—couriers of pollen grains that are vitally n...ecessary to the reproductive cycle of their host plants. If this scenario is true, scorpionflies represent the earliest known animal pollinators.
About Animals / Wildlife Birds (Class Aves) are one of the six basic groups of animals. Birds, best known for their ability to fly, are unmatched in their command of the skies. Albatrosses glide long distances over the open sea, hummingbirds hover motionless in mid-air, and eagles swoop down to capture prey with pinpoint accuracy. But not all ...birds are aerobatic experts. Some species such as kiwis and penguins, lost their ability to fly long ago in favor of lifestyles suited more for land or water.
About Animals / Wildlife Amphibians (Class Amphibia) are one of the six basic groups of animals. The most familiar of the amphibians are frogs, toads, and salamanders. Lesser-known are the caecilians, a group of limbless, worm-like amphibians. Ancestral amphibians are notable for being the first vertebrates to have made the transition from a life in water to a life on land.
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You can view a lite version of the Animals / Wildlife facebook page here: http://lite.facebook.com/p/About-Animals
About Animals / Wildlife This photo album accompanies the recent article I wrote on Ningaloo's Whale Sharks...
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About Animals / Wildlife This chart provides brief information about the various eons, eras, periods, and epochs that are used to describe the Earth's history.
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About Animals / Wildlife Whale sharks are anything but camera shy. Between 1995 and 2006, scientists, tourists, divers, and tour guides snapped more than 5100 underwater photographs of these gentle giants at Ningaloo Marine Park, off the coast of Western Australia. The photographs weren't random portraits of fish. They were all captured as par...t of a long-term survey of the region's whale sharks.
About Animals / Wildlife Animals / Wildlife is now featured on Research Blogging. Visit the homepage:
www.researchblogging.org
About Animals / Wildlife Little chunks of DNA can act as unique barcodes that enable scientists to quickly identify an organism. This technique, known as DNA barcoding, is now helping conservationists who want to better understand sea turtles, a threatened group of marine reptiles. Since sea turtles are pelagic (they roam the open ocean and mi...grate vast distances), they are notoriously difficult study subjects.
About Animals / Wildlife As the saying goes, there are lots of fish in the sea. But that's only a half-truth. Scientifically speaking, there are also lots of fish in rivers, lakes, streams and ponds as well. Of the more than 32,500 species of fish, 43 percent inhabit freshwater habitats. Taking into account the fact that the water held in rive...rs, lakes, streams and ponds accounts for only a tiny fraction of the Earth's water—a mere 0.01 percent—freshwater fish are exceptionally diverse.
About Animals / Wildlife It seems young lemon sharks that live in the waters around the Bahamas are homebodies. Recent research has revealed that these "teenage" sharks stay close to their birthplace as they mature.
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About Animals / Wildlife Scientists have discovered that whale sharks, the largest fish in the sea, all belong to one big school. Instead of breaking down into lots of little social groups scattered throughout their range, whale sharks around the world intermix in a single, widespread breeding population. This is pretty impressive, considering... the range of whale sharks stretches in a broad band around the planet's belly that includes the tropical and warm temperate seas between 30°N and 35°S.
