I Am Loved.

⛅

Monty rested his little head in my hand and my heart almost exploded. 💚😭

biggest betrayal is when it’s supposed to thunderstorm and it doesn’t

Here’s an odd one: the skull of the only known “narluga”, a possible narwhal/beluga whale hybrid. It was killed by a Greenlandic hunter around 1987 and the skull was lying on top of a toolshed in 1990 when it was noticed by a visiting scientist. According to the hunter, the animal was a uniform grey color (as opposed to the mottled narwhal and the white beluga), with the tail of a narwhal but the pectoral flippers of a beluga whale. 

The skull is larger than both parent species’ and its teeth a strange mixture of both. Narwhals don’t have teeth except for the single large tusk of the male, while beluga whales have a full set of smaller teeth. The narluga seems to have a full set of teeth but some of them are strangely elongated and oriented like narwhal tusks, as seen in the third picture. The unusual dentition didn’t seem to bother the animal since it reached a great size but it would presumably have been sterile as most hybrids are. No other examples of narwhal/beluga whale hybrids have been found. 

The skull is currently housed at the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen.

im really drinkin my love and respect reptiles+amphibians juice today, so if u have a pet of the reptilian or amphibious type, rb and add pics pls

The golden hour

gynandromorphism in spiders

a gynandromorph is an organism that exhibits male and female characteristics. bilateral asymmetry can occur wherein one “side” of the animal is female and the other is male, mosaicism can occur wherein the characteristics are distributed in patches. in spiders, this phenomenon can present itself through presence of both testes and overies and split colouration. cases can also occur where, although parts of the spider are clearly male or female, the divisions can be less definite; certain reproductive organs like the palps and epigyne may be very poorly developed or completely absent. these individuals are referred to as intersexes. gynandry and intersexuality can occur in the same individual.

pictured: lampropelma nigerrimum, pamphobeteus sp. mascara, poecilotheria ornata, thyene imperialis.

One of these things is not like the others!

This handsome skull belongs to an iguana.

These all belong to water monitors.

And this one belongs to a tegu.

The tegu’s skull is missing a hole!

Those little openings on the top of the monitors’ heads and the iguana’s is where the pineal eye is located. The pineal eye can distinguish between light and dark, and helps with thermoregulation. But tegus don’t have it! They lost their pineal eye sometime during the course of their evolution- which is evidence of how even though they might look a bit like monitors, they really aren’t that closely related!

Hey so what the FUUUUUUCK happened in this beetle’s evolution??? For that matter why didn’t I know about these if they’re a “common wood-boring pest???”

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep27364 Under “normal” circumstances, they don’t form adults and the larva simply clones new larvae that eat their way out of the “mother larva.” If exposed to extreme heat, they’ll pupate and turn into little beetles like their ancestors did, and the little beetles go through a whole elaborate courtship period where the females fight with each other over territory and try to mount males or each other (apparently the first time same-sex coupling was observed in a beetle), with both sexes having unique little dances to communicate with each other. If I’m reading correctly the male has a mating display while the female has like a little “rejection dance” I think? And then it doesn’t matter because all adults are sterile so the population just dies off.