Friday, January 03, 2014

The strangest recent animal discoveries

LiveScience updates its compilation of the weirdest recent discoveries from the animal kingdom. These include new species and discoveries about species we knew - or thought we knew.
There are the extinct animals: a tulip-shaped creature that filtered water through its head and a tiny beast what was wholly preserved even though it had no bones: in other words, a very rare discovery of a soft-tissue fossil. There was also "Predator X," Pliosaurus funkei,T a mosasaur 12-13m loing with teeth that dwarfed T. rex's.
There are the new discoveries concerning known animals: no one knew the cute little gray mouse lemur was a cannibal.
There's a 3-cm-long millipede with 750 legs. There are snakes with sensing tentacles on their heads, a Vietnamese fish with its penis on its face, a carnivorous sponge that looks like a beautiful living harp, a mouthless zombie worm, a two-headed shark (ok, that one was a fluke), and a charming video of a boa constrictor eating a howler monkey - whole, of course. 
If you greatly speeded up evolution into some kind of time-lapse movie, you'd see Nature seemingly throwing around DNA at random - sometimes hitting a dead end, but sometimes doing rather crazy things.



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