Animal Planet: Big Wet Rodent Day
There are beetles that live in beaver fur their
entire lives and eat beaver dandruff.
All beaver ponds fill with sediment and the
beavers move on. The beaver pond becomes a beaver
meadow.
Beavers are not destoyers of habitat. They are
creators of habitat.
Crocodile Hunter
What a classic chunk of evolution!
The Discovery Channel: Perils of the Ice Age
"Ice is a living force - always moving, always
changing its appearance."
Past 1 billion years - 95% warm periods, 5% cool
periods. Glaciations will happen regularly during
the cool periods.
[The ice cores form] a library of our own
glacial history.
The human species has survived many ice ages.
The blueberry fields of Maine - end moraines.
Fields of bluish boulders. Very very very cool!
The glaciers scraped 3 or 4 feet of bedrock off
of New England, making Long Island the dump of
New England. Terminal moraine.
Meltwater streams - water only up to your knees,
but crawling with boulders. Impossible to ford.
There are places along a coastline where
researchers can see the interaction of a glacier
and the earth. People have walked in the heart of
a glacier, hearing the constant popping and
creaking of the ice (sounds like rifle shots).
Always in motion, always changing. Very dangerous
- the space around the man was shrinking as he
moved through the ice. Fascinating.
Raising the Mammoth
Only 12 complete carcasses have surfaced in 200
years.
Tusks 9 feet long, and weighing 100 pounds.
Both Neandrathal and modern man share a history
with the mammoth.
A mammoth would provide over 3 tons of meat.
No natural predators other than man for adult
mammoths. Big cats and bears were natural enemies
for young mammoths.
Sinkholes with thermal ponds in South Dakota
were the death of many mammoths. Greens at the
bottom.
Columbian mammoths twice the weight of the
wooly. Exclusive to North America. A million
years of prosperity in north America. 5000 years
after man came, the last of the Columbians
disappeared.
The Discovery Channel: Sea Snakes
The turtle-headed sea snake eats fish eggs! It
has no venom or fangs - instead, it has a special
scale for scraping fish eggs off of the coral
reefs.
The Learning Channel
Picasso went into the caves of Lasceux, and when
he came out, he said: "We have invented
nothing."
Nature
The male produces millions of sperm: tiny,
inexpensive packets of genes.
Nova
A bat's wing, a whale's flipper, a man's arm, a
dog's leg. All are structurally [anatomically?]
identical, but they serve vastly different
functions.
4000 years ago, mammoths were still alive on an
island in the Arctic Sea.
One isolated group has a spurt of evolution and
that new form spreads out through the population.
15.000 years ago there was a shift to the
current climate. The last Ice Age ended in 10 to
20 years. That is the newest theory, taken from
studies on ice samples from the north pole.
