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Heterocephalus glaber - Naked Mole Rat
Aside from their rather unsightly appearance, naked mole rats are a very unique species of mammal. Their societies are set up much like your standard ant colonies (they’re the only eusocial mammals), with a queen whose sole purpose is to give birth, and individuals who have specific duties in the colony. These include tending the queen, defending their massive labyrinth of underground tunnels, gathering food, and digging more tunnels. Their roles are largely determined at birth, and are unusual to change once the mole rat is an adult. Like ant and social bee colonies, all of the productive members of the colony are female.
Other cool things about naked mole rats:
- Their skin is remarkably impervious to pain and itching, due to a lack of proper Substance P encoding in their genes.
- Their lips are located *behind* their massive teeth, to protect them from damage while the rats dig.
- They are not truly warm-blooded like other mammals. When they get too cold, they travel upwards in the underground tunnel system, and when they get too hot, they go down into the cooler parts.
- They don’t need much oxygen or food and have a very slow metabolism.
- Their lifespan is up to 28 years, thanks to that ridiculous metabolism.
Proceedings of the General Meetings for Scientific Business of the Zoological Society of London. 1885.
The most excellent True Facts About the Naked Mole Rat (video) by Zefrank.
To cure impotence or “loss of vigor”:
Some people will do anything to get their “potency” back, and there are plenty of people out there who are willing to take advantage of that. John R. Brinkley was one of the myriad snake-oil salesmen at the turn of the century, but a medical degree bought from a diploma mill led the now-“Dr.” Brinkley to pursue grander matters.
Early on in Brinkley’s career, Bill Stittsworth, a farmer with “no lead in his pencil, no powder in his pistol” consulted him. Brinkley jokingly remarked that it was too bad the farmer didn’t have the glands of the frisky billy goats outside, but Stittsworth, taking Brinkley seriously, said “Doctor, I want you to transplant [the goat glands] into me.” The doctor did as much, and nine months later, Bill Stittsworth’s wife bore a son, appropriately named “Billy.”
Seeing the potential to profit from this venture, John Brinkley set up a major advertising campaign centered on “Billy,” and “goat-gland transplantation” took off. Over 16,000 men had their scrotums cut open, their testicles “cored,” and had tissue plugs from the goat testicles inserted. In the best-case scenario, the men’s bodies simply broke down the goat tissues and healed up, but many patients weren’t so lucky.
The fact that Brinkley was a mediocre medical man at best led to at least 43 deaths that were directly attributable to his operation, but hundreds more are believed to have been killed by infection, gangrene, or surgical mishaps. Those 43 deaths led to the revocation of Brinkley’s license to practice medicine in Kansas in 1930. Unfortunately for the easily-swayed, he remained in the goat-gland business for another decade, across the border, in Mexico.
From my recent article “8 Cures That Did More Harm Than Good” at mental_floss
I wonder if Bill Stittsworth noticed that little “Billy” looked exactly like Dr. Brinkley…
Left: Philippine tarsier - Tarsius philippensis [now Carlito syrichta]
Right: Tarsius fuscus and the Sangihe tarsier (Tarsius sangirensis)
Tarsiers are nocturnal prosimian (“before simians”) primates, and are the only completely carnivorous primate extant. They eat exclusively insects, small reptiles, and small birds, and unlike other primates, don’t eat any fruits or leaves.
Their eyes are as large as their brains, and unlike other prosimians, they do not have a tapetum lucidum (the light-reflecting membrane found in many nocturnal mammals, such as cats). The huge size of the eyeballs and the large section of the brain devoted to eyesight makes up for the lack of tapetum. They also have extraordinary hearing, and combine the two senses to great advantage against insects and animals trying to hide. in the dense rainforests of southeast Asia.
Learn More True Facts about the Tarsier.
Saugethiere vom Celebes- und Philippinen-Archipel vol I. A. B. Meyer, 1896.
Lysosquilla maculata - Mantis Shrimp
Lysosquilla maculata is just one of several species of very awesome mantis shrimp. I’ve loved these guys ever since I saw a video of one break an aquarium on board a research vessel, and it got washed back out to sea. Bad. Ass. They are fascinating creatures.
The Oatmeal totally knows what I’m talking about. Check out the comic.
Top Right Image: Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle. M. Charles d’Orbigny, 1849.
Bottom Image: Peacock Mantis Shrimp. Rick Collier Imagery, 2011.
A cool article about Iberian Lynxes and the attempt to save the species!
Thanks for the heads-up on a very interesting development in species preservation!
Also known as the “Spanish Tiger,” the Iberian Lynx is as critically endangered as the “Highland Tiger” of Scotland. Long thought to be a subspecies of the European Lynx, its genetic profile has shown it to be distinct enough to be an independent species.
I’ve written about critically endangered animals in the past - in fact, I wrote about one of the first attempts to bring an extinct species back from the dead, a subject that’s receiving renewed attention in the scientific community and media as of late.
The Pyrenean Ibex faced similar challenges as the Iberian Lynx, but hopefully this unique and interesting cat will fare better than the Ibex did.
Things that exist
***I have a history blog (that I’m terrible at updating but is still not awful, seriously): Cabbaging Cove
***I have a personal blog (that is mostly awful but frequently updated): Of Paper and Ponies
***I have a Flickr stream (with about 650 new photos which will be posted this week): Biomedical Scraps
“Stfu, woman, this hangover can’t be cured by table water”
Mummified head of Pharaoh Ramses II, with artificially enhanced nose.
Did you know that the first plastic surgery was performed in Ancient Egypt? No, not on the living, but it was considered crucial to the Egyptians who were mummified.
In the afterlife, the only physical feature believed to be completely retained was the facial structure, but mummification dried the body such that the face was often unrecognizable. Ramses II was known for his elongated nose, so to ensure he would be recognized as a king in the afterlife, bone and seeds were surgically inserted under the skin of his nose after the desiccation of mummification, to restore and exaggerate its original shape.
Read more about plastic surgery, from Ancient Egypt to Tagliacozzi, to Harold Gillies’ wartime facial reconstruction in my mental_floss article!
Image: Catalogue General Antiquites Egyptiennes du Musee du Caire; The Royal Mummies. G. Elliot Smith, 1912.
Carnivora!
All members of the order Carnivora fall into one of two sub-orders: Feliformia (cat-like), or Caniformia (dog-like). Outward appearance of carnivora can be deceiving; most people would classify the hyena and aard-wolf as “dog-like”, while the weasels and pole-martens are commonly considered “cat-like”, which they are not.
The Feliformidae are obligate carnivores; that is, they must eat meat to survive, as their body cannot produce one or more nutrients that cannot be found in plants, or that their digestive tracts cannot absorb large amounts of non-animal matter. They are not all hypercarnivorans (meat making up >70% of the diet), however. The order Feliformia includes all of the cats (Felidae), mongooses and meerkats (Herpestidae), hyenas (Hyaenidae), civets and genets (Viverridae), as well as two very small families: the Nandiniidae, which contains only the African palm civet; and the Prionodontidae, which contains the two Asiatic linsangs.
Caniformidae include the seals, sea lions, and walruses (Pinnipedia); true dogs (Canidae); bears (Ursidae); skunks (Mephitidae); badgers, weasels, and otters (Mustelidae); raccoons, coatis, and kinkajous (Procyonidae); and the family containing only the red panda (Ailuridae).
Most Caniformidae (except for the Canidae, interestingly enough) are plantigrade - that is, they walk on all of their podial and tarsal bones on the ground at the same time. This affords greater stability and weight-bearing ability and is helpful when standing your ground or trying to balance in trees.
The Feliformidae (and the true dogs, or Canidae) are almost completely digitigrade - they walk on just their finger and toe bones, and have elongated “heel” bones and Achilles tendons. Digitigrade animals can move much more quickly and quietly than plantigrade animals, and their specialized “heels” allow for spring-type motion, like what you see in cats.
Huge h/t to the ever-awesome Emily Graslie of The Brain Scoop for finding the words to simplify something I’ve wanted to post on for a while ;D Go watch The Brain Scoop and get smart!
More on Tetrapodal Locomotion!
The Brain Scoop
Images from:
[Wolverine, Walrus] American Animals. Witmer Stone and William Everett Cram, 1902.
[Spotted Hyena, California Sea Lion] The Book of the Animal Kingdom: Mammals. W. Percivall Westell, 1910.
[Black-Footed Ferret, Polar Bear] Quadrupeds of North America. John James Audubon, 1851.
[Kinkajou, Lion] Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle. M. Charles d’Orbigny, 1849.
It was…not from any specialty that I’m well versed in, and I’m really bad at simplifying things that I don’t understand terribly well myself, so thanks…I hope I wasn’t totally talking out my ass when it came to trance induction. x_x
And I tagged the original reply with her name and the show, but for anyone who missed it, yes - this is Orihime Inoue from Bleach. She’s technically spinning a Welsh Onion, not a leek. The music it’s set to is a scat-singing section in the traditional Finnish polka tune “Ievan Polkka”, as sung by the Finnish folk-fusion quartet Loituma (where “Leekspin”s original name “Loituma Girl” comes from).
That was a great read! The documentaries made on the cases after the book was published were pretty good, too.
Anyone with an interest in prion diseases in general, but not *only* BSE, kuru, or scrapie, would be well-advised to give the book a read - even as someone who’s been well into the prion world for almost a decade, I actually learned some new things about the diseases, and got some great historical insight into how the Fatal Familial Insomnia trait was treated in the past.
With the caveat that a lot of work on “misdiagnosed” diseases is crankery, this is a very interesting-looking book, and a few doctors whose science I trust have read it and said it’s a good read, if sort of an emotion-based argument for vegetarianism in the end.
I unfortunately don’t know any good books about Kuru that I’ve read personally, but my highest recommendation is to watch Kuru: The Science and the Sorcery, from the Smithsonian Channel, if you can ever get your hands on it.
If you can find anything by Michael Alpers (the lead researcher who discovered the cause of kuru and who worked within the Fore community for decades), that’s a definite win, but from what I can find so far, all he’s authored is a bibliography of the best scientific papers on the matter.
There’s a good read on The Globe about the “Last Laughing Death” - when kuru was declared no longer a threat in 2010, a fairly extensive-yet-succinct summary of Alpers’ and his colleagues’ work was written up, and there’s some excellent multimedia resources there.
I’m not sure what the best resource would be for old field sketches, aside from illustrated biographies of famous natural history artists.
One of my favorite singular field sketches was by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, when she realized she had a fish that was supposed to have been long-extinct on her hands…
Many of Louis Aggasiz Fuerte’s paintings were actually done right out in the field - not specimens or menagerie animals. He never had many base sketches preserved, from what I’ve read, and he didn’t even make any base sketches in the first place for many of his illustrations.
Darwin, of course, had many sketches preserved, and his are some of the best “on the fly” pen sketching examples I can think of, even though not all of them were from the field - he just sketched what he was thinking of and didn’t professionally illustrate things. His work in “Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” is particularly, er, “interesting”. The full book can be found here.
For anyone who’s curious (but doesn’t want to see the most grisly of the teratomas), Monsters Inside Me had an episode with a patient who had an ovarian teratoma growing inside her.
Of the animals that humans definitely effected/made extinct, definitely the thylacine. Their jaws, their curious hunting habits, their brood-pouches on both sexes…they were fascinating creatures.
Of the animals that humans indirectly made extinct, the Haast’s Eagle and the moa. Terrifying birds, but SO COOL.
Of the species that humans never contacted, definitely Tiktaalik.
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A blog for all biological and medical ephemera, from the age of Abraham through the era of medical quackery and cure-all nostrums. Featuring illustrations, history, and totally useless trivia from the diverse realms of nature and medicine.
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