Amoeba proteus

Image by Antonio Guillén via Flickr

I thought it would be fun to investigate a single celled organism and Amoebae seemed a good place to start, but boy, I really didn't know what I was getting into! To get around all the complexity and diversity, the Amoeba, Amoebidae and Amoebozoa, I've decided to focus primarily on one species, Amoeba proteus. They can be found at the bottom of clean ponds, anywhere in the world as far as I know, and seem like an all-round good place to start.

Nautilus

Image by PacificKlaus via Flickr

It looks like we're going way back in time for this one, indeed some Nautilus have barely changed for 500 million years. They look quite a lot like prehistoric ammonites, although ammonites are actually more closely related to octopus and squid than to nautilus. Nautilus are all on their own, the only living cephalopod to have an external shell - all others have their shell within their body and some have none at all. At least it's all smooth and beautiful with its stripy white and brown-orange-copper colour. Worth having on the outside I think.

New Year, New Blog

Hello all! Yep, I'm having such fun with this blog malarky that I've decided to start up a whole new similar-but-different blog which I'm calling:

Natural Born Record Holders

I've been finding out about so many gigantic monsters and unique oddities that I decided to start a site totally devoted to giants and unique oddities. Also the fastest, oldest, smallest and whatever other '-ests' we can think of.

I'm taking much more of a whizz-bang approach with this one. I won't be going into great detail on their life and times. We will focus instead on their gold medal, marvel for a while and respectfully move on after a brief celebration.

Real Monstrosities shall of course continue, with the next post tomorrow as usual. I'm just hoping to use what I've learnt so far to try something with a different tack.

So I hope you will join me on this journey of joyous discovery. 

It could be fun!

Head on over to NBRHblog.com.

It's only just begun!

Happy New Year everyone!

Giant Centipede

Image: Tod Baker

Giant Centipede pretty much just means 'really big centipede'. It usually refers to the (really big) ones in the family Scolopendromorpha. When people think 'big centipede' or even just 'centipede', they usually think of a typical (or really big) member of this family. The biggest one of the lot is Scolopendra gigantea, the Amazonian Giant Centipede, which can get over a foot (30 centimetres) long, while others can be much smaller. The really big ones are mostly tropical, but sizeable ones can even eke out a living in deserts. This is interesting, since they dry out easily and like to keep themselves to moist areas and are generally nocturnal.

Water Walkers

There goes Christmas. Now it's time to look to the future, maybe even a little further than New Year's Eve. Or not. In any case, whatever your hopes and dreams, your trials and burdens, your strengths and weaknesses, walking on water would be really cool. More or less half of these miraculous creatures could have 'Jesus Christ' thrown onto their name, but for them walking on water is not a miracle, it's simply life or escape from death. They just don't know how lucky they are! But then again, who does?

Christmas Island Red Crab

Image via Wikipedia

The time has come to really start ramping up the jolly. To help you out in that I can think of nothing better than going off to a tiny isolated island to check out a small cold blooded beast with a tough, unyielding integument that is red like Santa Claus' red bits, red like an unwrapped Ferrari and red like blood. Or maybe sorrel.

The island in question is Christmas Island, an Australian territory named after the day of it's discovery. Actually it's closer to the capital city of Indonesia than to any Australian coast, but that's history for you.