Monday, January 18, 2010

Labels: non-monkey animals, science

19:45 cdogzilla

Friday, October 23, 2009

Megafauna Pon Farr: Whales are awesome.

Labels: non-monkey animals, science

16:14 cdogzilla

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Wylie Coywolf: The coyote-wolf hybrid has made its way to the Northeast: Scientific American Blog

Labels: non-monkey animals

12:44 cdogzilla

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Book Review - 'Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell, and Know,' by Alexandra Horowitz - Review - NYTimes.com:

Dogs do not just detect odors better than we can. This sniffing “gaze” also gives them a very different experience of the world than our visual one gives us. One of Horowitz’s most startling insights, for me, was how even a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, “smell tells time,” she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction — but olfaction is fleeting. . . . Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.” While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, “including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.” Now that’s umwelt.

Sounds like an interesting book. As a dog lover, I'd like to read it. And, I like the title -- "inside of a dog it's too dark to read." But the problem I have with the passage above is the idea that because dogs smell things on the breeze, they have this totally different perception of time that includes "the up-ahead." Sounds kind of cool and mind-blowing at first glance, but don't we see things up ahead as well as what's right in front of us when we're walking? And we can smell the peanut roasting wagon that's around the street corner that we can't see yet, too. So, maybe not as much as dogs do, our perceptions would seem to give us the now and the up-ahead in the same way. This reminded me of the whole "eskimos have twenty words for snow" thing, like it's supposed to blow my mind there's more than one way to refer to snow. I'm no eskimo, but I have lots of words for snow myself: flurries, flakes, blizzard, white-out, drifts, slush, powder, sleet, etc.

Labels: Books, non-monkey animals

21:20 cdogzilla

Warren Ellis : Your AAA WHAT THE F-BOMB IS THAT Moment For Today: I'm not going to include the picture of the parasite that eats the fish's tongue, then takes its place. If you follow the link it will be looking right at you. It's going to give me nightmares. You may not want to click the link.

Labels: non-monkey animals, science

20:47 cdogzilla

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Spider "Resurrections" Take Scientists by Surprise: Great. Zombie spiders. Just what I needed to give me nightmares after Mrs. C-Dog found that Black Widow in the backyard yesterday.

Labels: non-monkey animals, science

18:01 cdogzilla

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Gorilla-viewing glasses prevent eye-contact - Boing Boing: The gorillas aren't going to be fooled by these for long.

Labels: non-monkey animals

23:23 cdogzilla

Monday, March 16, 2009

Dino Mites: A Diminutive Dinosaur in North America and a Rare Mass Death of Young Relatives in China: Scientific American - They headlined it for me. Although, I would've gone with the more dramatic "Dino-Mite!!" Double exclamation marks make is sound like J.J. Walker.

Labels: non-monkey animals, science

22:07 cdogzilla

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Forty foot snake found! Oh wait, fossil of a forty foot snake found. Still, pretty cool.

Labels: cryptozoology, non-monkey animals, science

21:19 bone daddy

I Want To Believe
Because everybody loves creepy gnome footage.

Labels: cryptozoology, non-monkey animals, youtube goodness

18:39 bone daddy

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Vacation Note:
Feeding an emu is kind of freaky if you've seen Jurassic Park.

Labels: movies, non-monkey animals, pictures

22:49 bone daddy

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Moray eel have a second set of teeth, "pharyngeal jaws," and it's been recently discovered that these jaws spring forward from within their throats to help them secure prey. You've seen Alien, right?

My daughter has moray eels for her second grade research project and I am totally restraining myself from convincing her to put sequential and synchronous hermaphroditism in her report. Eventually she'll learn that hermaphrodites always get a laugh.

Labels: cryptozoology, non-monkey animals

23:12 bone daddy

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Mini Blue?
One thing about North Carolina, we got the best car dealership commercials down here. The badger is freakin' hilarious.

Labels: non-monkey animals, youtube goodness

22:19 cdogzilla

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Cloned, glow in the dark cats. Y'know, in case you're hurting for Christmas gift ideas.

Labels: cryptozoology, non-monkey animals, science

23:18 bone daddy

Monday, July 16, 2007

Not Dead Yet
Long beaked echidnas may still be scurrying around in Papuan forests.

Labels: non-monkey animals, science

09:55 cdogzilla

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Bucky?
Villagers of Basra terrorized by badgers. Brits suspected.

"It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey."

Labels: non-monkey animals

15:12 cdogzilla

Monday, June 25, 2007

My Nature Documentary, by Jack Handey
Will Monkey and Giraffe be reunited?

Labels: monkeys, non-monkey animals

09:17 cdogzilla

Friday, June 22, 2007

Nice Find
A 35,000 year old carving of a wooly mammoth. (No recent word on the success or failure of attempts to clone a wooly mammoth Jurassic Park stylee.)

Labels: non-monkey animals, science

07:57 cdogzilla

Friday, June 15, 2007

Harpoon May Prove Whale Was At Least 115 Years Old [Boston.com]

Labels: non-monkey animals

09:16 cdogzilla

Monday, June 11, 2007

Shark vs. Octopus
Now if only they could drop a tiger into the mix. (There's a commercial and you can forward about halfway through the video to get to the action.)

Labels: non-monkey animals, sharks, youtube goodness

14:20 cdogzilla

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Who Would Win: Tiger vs. Shark?
In the water. No Ditka.

Labels: non-monkey animals

08:57 cdogzilla

Hogzilla
Is Hogzilla real? C-Dogzilla will get to the bottom of this!

Labels: cryptozoology, non-monkey animals

07:54 cdogzilla

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Is everyone watching planet earth on the Discovery channel? I've been consistently stunned by these things. Even when it's a subject like "Great Plains" and I think I won't be interested I see something amazing. Not only are they showing things that I've never seen before - and I'm a veteran nature documentary watcher - they're filming them exquisitely. The action shots are spot on. Other shots are so mesmerizing I'm convinced this show is a massive hit among stoners. They've turned nature into a special effect, and I don't mean that to sound cheap because, let's face it, special effects are cool.

Let me put it this way. A couple of weeks ago I saw a completely serviceable documentary on PBS' Nature series about scientists searching for a giant (20+ feet) crocidile. They didn't find any and the show was mostly about the people and the not finding. People don't appear in planet earth and they seem to find everything weird and beautiful that you want to see. For an hour, nature is powerful and dominant and lush and in focus.

If you can, try to catch the one with the Gelada monkeys that play and tackle each other while on near-vertical cliffs.

Labels: monkeys, non-monkey animals, sharks, TV

22:52 bone daddy

Friday, March 30, 2007

Get the kids! Otters holding hands, be sure to watch to the end.

Labels: cryptozoology, non-monkey animals, science

22:48 bone daddy

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Wild Animal Crossing
Driving into work this morning two animals darted in front of my car. The second was a wild turkey, of which I see a ton, so that wasn't too exciting, but the first a moment earlier was something I don't think I'd ever seen before. It was like a big ferret. Long, low to the ground, with a long sort of bushy tail, but definitely not a fox. It was dark brown or maybe even black and it moved quick. I've been driving myself crazy trying to think what animal is like a big wild ferret ... mongoose? polecat? People are trying to tell me it might've been an otter, but I've seen otter and this was no otter. Mink maybe? According to Encarta: "Although white-tailed deer are considered Rhode Island’s only large wild animal, moose and black bear occasionally cross the Connecticut and Massachusetts border in the state. Among the smaller animals native to the state are the raccoon, gray squirrel, woodchuck, and muskrat. Skunks, opossums, mink, coyotes, and red foxes are also numerous, as are salamanders, turtles, and snakes." I'm thinking mink.

Labels: cryptozoology, non-monkey animals

08:23 cdogzilla