Animal World

A new species of prehistoric giant boa constrictor, the "Titanoboa", has been discovered. This behemoth of the reptile world lived several million years ago, weighed as much as a car and was as long as a school bus, putting even the most terrifying of Hollywood"s giant movie snakes to shame."The largest snake the world has ever known — as long as a school bus and as heavy as a small car — ruled tropical ecosystems only 6 million years after the demise of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, according to a new discovery published in the journal Nature.Partial skeletons of a new giant, boa constrictor-like snake named “Titanoboa” found in Colombia by an international team of scientists and now atthe University of Florida are estimated to be 42 to 45 feet long, the length of the T-Rex “Sue” displayed at Chicago’s Field Museum."

View: Full Article | Source: University of Florida.

An angler in the US had quite a shock when a fish he"d caught bit him with distinctly human-like teeth.Samples from the mysterious fish have been sent away for analysis to determine its species, in the meantime the specimen has been placed on ice however nobody is in a rush tocook and eat it.

An angler had a shock in the US - when a mystery fish bit him back with distinctly human-looking teeth. Frank Yarborough was fishing in Lake Wylie, South Carolina, when he hooked the fish which was 5lb and nearly 1ft 8ins long.  

View: Full article |  Source: Orange  

Bugs were a lot bigger more than 250 million years ago -- millipedes longer than a human leg, dragonflies with wing spans like hawks -- and now a question that has long puzzled scientists has been explained. The reason there are no humongous insects now is because of a bottleneck that occurs in insects' air pipes as they grow larger. They were able to surmount the problem in the Paleozoic Era thanks to a high-oxygen atmosphere.Insects aren't like animals with backbones and deliver oxygen to their tissues directly and bloodlessly through a network of dead-end tracheal tubes. In bigger insects, this mode of oxygen transport becomes less efficient, butno one has been exactly sure why.Alex Kaiser of Midwestern University and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory and Arizona State University delved deeper by shining X-rays on four living beetle species, ranging in body mass by a factor of 1,000.

This allowed the team to measure the exact dimensions of the beetles' tracheal tubes.Kaiser and collegues discovered the air passageways that lead from the body core to the legs turn out to be bottlenecks that limit how much oxygen can be delivered to the extremities, Kaiser said. The team also examined the passageways that lead from the body core to the head. "We were surprised to find that the effect is most pronounced in the orifices leading to the legs, where more and more of the space is taken up bytracheal tubes in larger species," he said. Kaiser and Argonne biologist Jake Socha also used the results to predict the largest size of currently living beetles. If data on the air passageways to the head were used as a limiting factor, they predicted a crazy-large, foot-long beetle, while the leg data predicted a beetle that matches the size of today's largest living beetle, Titaneus giganteus. The research is detailed in the Aug. 7 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

View: Full Article | Source: Xinhuanet

Anglers all have tales about the one that got away, the fish of legendary size that stripped the line from the reel. A new study suggests why that there might indeed be giants and offers an explanation for how they grow so huge. Turns out fishermen themselves can be responsible for the monsters. If a lake or pond is overfished, and a lot of the big ones are caught, the situation is ripe for oversized freaks to develop, according to a new computer model. The research suggests that harvesting only large fish knocks out the food competition for the remaining adults, allowing the adults to gorge on smaller fish and inflate to giganticproportions.

The effect is strongest for fish prone to cannibalizing their own. A Eurasian perch growing in such a situation, for example, can become more than four times as big as an adult fish the same age in a body of water not heavily fished. "The destabilization of a cannibalistic population can induce the growth of 'cannibalistic giants,'" scientists write in the August edition of the American Naturalist. Further, the population becomes less stable and more susceptible to crashing into extinction, especially as the rate of fishing increases. The giants were not found to develop in the virtual populations spared from harvesting. The effect also applies to fish species that are not cannibals, but it is less pronouncedand does not tend to push the population toward extinction, the computer model suggests. There could be a useful lesson for fish farmers. The model accounted for a range of factors, from food availability to reproductive rates and digestion time. When the researchers over-harvested small fish, cannibalistic giants were not produced, but non-cannibalistic fish grew bigger, faster—a technique that fish farms could use to grow market-ready crops more quickly.

View: Full Article | Source: Yahoo! News