Bacula and Second Chances

The Featured Creature: Stunning Bright Blue Cloud Forest Millipede Is Sure to Shock You

Okay, who’s ready to have their mind BLOWN?! Check out this absolutely stunning Blue Cloud Forest Millipede (Pararhachistes potosinus) found only in the remote high altitude cloud forests of Mexico. The bright blue coloration warns predators about its ability to produce toxic secretions.

View the full article for more pics and deets!

Our colleague and palaeontologist Thierry Smith has discovered a 70 million year old mammal with red teeth in Transylvania, Romania. Iron strengthened Barbatodon transylvanicus’ incisors and molars and gave them their red colour. Barbatodon is the oldest known fossil mammal with iron in its teeth and its skull is the most complete mammal fossil from the Upper Cretaceous period in Europe.

Barbatodon is a multituberculate (”multies”), an extinct lineage of mammals that are characterised by the presence of plagiaulacoids in their lower jaws. These teeth started out smaller and they had more of them, but in derived multies they lost all but the last pair and grew them into the giant saw-looking things you see here.

That said, the pictures there make it look a bit more ridiculous than it was, though only just. The tip of the lower jaw is missing in that specimen, which had a pair of rodent-like incisors, and based on other multies the complete skull would have probably looked something like this:

I can't stop thinking about how much mole skeletons remind me of whale skeletons.

Or perhaps a Whale is a very Large Water Mole, with it’s vibration-sensitive organs behind a vibration-amplifying balloon?  

MASSIVE CLAWED WHALE

NASAL TENTACLES AS LONG AS A MAN