Month: August 2018

ainawgsd:

Tommy Tucker: The Famous Squirrel Who Cross-Dressed And Sold War Bonds

It is said that Tommy Tucker fell from a tree one fine afternoon in 1942 in the backyard of the Bullis’ house, in Washington, D.C., while he was still a blind and hairless baby. Zaidee Bullis, a childless mother and wife to a dental surgeon, adopted the tiny squirrel and made him a family pet. She fed him, bathed him, and put him to sleep on a tiny bed. But what Mrs. Bullis liked the most was dressing him up. Tommy Tucker had about thirty different costumes, and although Tommy was a boy, all his outfits were female for the simple reason that his tail would not fit in pants.

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rockin-reaper:

ordinarytalk:

rockin-reaper:

huskychronicles:

rockin-reaper:

I dont know too much about Dalmatians or what they were bred for so the other day i was talking to the security guard on campus about em and decided to google why they’re so aggressive and hard to handle and apparently its because they were bread as coach dogs, which means that they were trained to run alongside a coach or carriage and fucking attack anything that wasn’t their carriage. Like they were bonded to the horses used to pull the coach and to their handlers and other than that they would just jump anyone who came near em. If you had coach dogs you actually had to have someone who rode ahead and warned anyone coming toward you that you had coach dogs so they could move out of the way and not get attacked. So thats a mystery solved for me.

That’s fuckin wild I had no idea

*me, a Regency-era noble, displaying my wealth and status by releasing a large pack of dalmatians onto the street* fuck it up, boys

I grew up with dalmatians and yeah, they can be territorial if they’re not socialized and holy shit do they have so much energy, but.

But.

The best interaction I ever saw was the time my dog Maggie first met a horse. She was running around outside and some guy was riding a horse down our street because fuck it, I have a horse, I do what I want.

Maggie screeched to a halt, staring at the horse. I began running over there because I wasn’t sure if she was going to start barking or trying to chase it or what, and then I saw her whole body language sort of shift, like hundreds of years of selective breeding were making themselves known for the first time.

Her tail began wagging, very slowly. I could see her think, “Big…friend?” She got closer and her tail began wagging faster. “Big Friend!!” She began absolutely dancing around this horse, I have never seen her so happy.

She ran next to the horse for as long as I would let her (the rider thought it was hilarious), and she was incredibly disappointed when her Big Friend had to go home.

And that’s the story of how I tried to convince my mom we needed a horse for my dog.

That’s the best story I’ve ever heard

LET MAGGIE HAVE A HORSE

alphynix:

Almost-Living Fossils Month #25 –  Europe’s Fully Aquatic Frogs

The palaeobatrachids were a group of frogs, part of a fairly “primitive” lineage that also includes the living pipids. They first appeared in the fossil record about 70 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous, but may have actually originated much earlier, perhaps as far back as the Late Jurassic (~145 mya).

These frogs lived mainly in Europe, with a few possible remains also known from North America in the Cretaceous. They were fully aquatic, spending their entire lives in water, and fully-grown adults looked similar to modern Xenopus clawed frogs, with slightly flattened egg-shaped bodies, upwards-facing eyes, and long fingers and toes.

Some fossils preserve soft-tissue impressions, showing internal organs such as unusual bag-shaped lungs. Eggs and juveniles have also been found, and while most species’ tadpoles usually reached lengths of around 6cm (2.4″), a few were comparatively gigantic, growing to over twice that size.

The end-Cretaceous extinction (~66 mya) had little overall effect on the palaeobatrachids, and they continued to thrive in the warm wet environments of Europe during the early Cenozoic. But as climates in Western Europe gradually became drier and cooler starting in the Early Oligocene (~33 mya) they mostly disappeared from that region and instead shifted east towards Central and Eastern Europe, ranging as far as Russia.

By the Late Pliocene (~3 mya) they were struggling to cope with the ongoing cooling and drying, and the onset of the Pleistocene glaciations made things even worse for them.

Palaeobatrachus langhae was probably the last species of these frogs, known from the Early Pliocene to the mid-Pleistocene (~5 mya – 500,000 years ago). Growing to about 10cm long (4″), it lived in some of the final refuges of the palaeobatrachids in Eastern Europe, inhabiting inland temperate areas where winter temperatures weren’t too harsh.

Unfortunately the palaeobatrachids didn’t quite manage to make it through the Ice Age, ending up trapped by their fairly specialized habitat preferences. During repeated glacial periods the temperatures became too cold for them, freezing the water they depended on, but the warmer climates to the south were also too dry for them to migrate into – and with nowhere to go, they finally went completely extinct just half a million years ago.