One of the stranger behaviors of termites was reported this past week and a summary can be found in a note in Nature. This report contains a description of exploding termites! How, and probably more intriguing, why would a termite explode and commit suicide?
When I give my lecture in class about animal distributions, questions often are raised about how did animals get to some remote islands or even islands that are not that far off from the mainland. Sometimes the answer is that during ice ages the oceans was up to hundreds of meters lower than it is... Continue Reading →
An areas with thousands of fossilized tracks from the United Arab Emirates has been described in the journal Biology Letters. Additional background information about the find can be found HERE. The tracks have been described as having been formed by an extinct species of elephants and are possibly the largest continuous set of trackways discovered... Continue Reading →
I love interesting geological puzzles that many mysterious landforms and features present to us. Below are a few images of a landscape that show large rocks sitting on a flat, dry, lake bed. Notably there are what appear to be skid marks in the dry lake sediments leading to each rock. This should make anyone scratch... Continue Reading →
A story of a spectacular whale fossil find in the Atacama desert of Chile has recently been reported. The best pictures of the site can be found HERE along with the story. In the picture here you can clearly seen the outline of a baleen whale (like a bowhead or blue whale). There are likely... Continue Reading →
The worlds largest rock tumbler? This story caught my eye this morning. GSA press release - The Strange Rubbing Boulders of the Atacama. It seems that every other day I read about some place on earth that has a strange story to tell and usually that story is difficult to understand without an earth that... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 