@PotteryWalrus My favourite baby toucan pic is this one, because it is clearly a picture taken by his mom before his first day of school Spoiler: humungo
TIL that Tennessee has 89 species of native crawdads and 52 species of native salamanders and I'm crying dude I'm a wildlife bio major but how the hell am I supposed to remember all these
TIL that while horses can output over a dozen horsepower at peak, 1 horsepower is actually roughly the correct unit for sustained output of a draft horse.
TIL that a buttload is an actual unit of measurement, equalling two hogsheads, or 126 gallons. "Butt" is a term for a type of barrel.
today i learned that young elephants have to learn how to use their trunks and are clumsy with them at first, and sometimes they trip over their own trunks!
Today I learned something pretty interesting: newly sequenced Archaea genomes place Eukaryota (the domain that we belong to) inside Archaea, rather than a separate branch. So we may really be just some very, very strange branch of Archaea that don't really resemble our single-celled cousins very much! Generally accepted modern 3-domain Tree of Life ToL generated with Candidate Phyla Radiation bacteria and ASGARD/DPANN archaea, showing Eukaryota as not a separate domain, but a branch within Archaea. (Figure from Castelle et al. 2018.)