Amazing Nature
Re: Amazing Nature
Super volcano Toba, and they think Yellowstone, unzipped like that before going completely ballistic. This could turn into a really big deal.
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pharvey
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Re: Amazing Nature
Not 2 you would want to be caught between......
"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things" - Yma o Hyd.
Re: Amazing Nature
You wouldn't want to be caught in this either! 
EDIT" This is Pharvey's "Nature" so it fits here.
EDIT" This is Pharvey's "Nature" so it fits here.
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Source
Re: Amazing Nature
Hungry dugite eats tiger snake
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/regio ... ger-snake/
A Denmark(West Australia) man has taken some amazing photos of a snake eating another snake.
Basil Powley was riding his quad bike spraying lilies on his William Bay property when he came across the cannibal serpent.
Mr Powley said seeing snakes on his property was not unusual but he was surprised at the size of this snake, until he took a closer look.
I got off my bike and I thought, he`s a big bastard, he said.
As I got closer, I thought it looked like it had two bloody tails.Mr Powley realised it was big dugite with a tiger snake down its throat.
The dugite was measured at 1.7m while Mr Powley estimated the tiger was almost one metre long.
Both of these snakes are extremely venomous. The Dugite is common and not usually aggressive. The Tiger snake on the other hand, is extremely aggressive and will attack anyone and anything that comes near it.
(A small world: Basil is the brother of the farmhands wife that my Father employed when I was growing up not far from there!)
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/regio ... ger-snake/
A Denmark(West Australia) man has taken some amazing photos of a snake eating another snake.
Basil Powley was riding his quad bike spraying lilies on his William Bay property when he came across the cannibal serpent.
Mr Powley said seeing snakes on his property was not unusual but he was surprised at the size of this snake, until he took a closer look.
I got off my bike and I thought, he`s a big bastard, he said.
As I got closer, I thought it looked like it had two bloody tails.Mr Powley realised it was big dugite with a tiger snake down its throat.
The dugite was measured at 1.7m while Mr Powley estimated the tiger was almost one metre long.
- snake sml.jpg (61.74 KiB) Viewed 2043 times
- snake2 sml.jpg (55.74 KiB) Viewed 2043 times
(A small world: Basil is the brother of the farmhands wife that my Father employed when I was growing up not far from there!)
May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil know`s you`re dead!
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pharvey
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- Posts: 13893
- Joined: Sat Aug 29, 2009 10:21 am
- Location: Sir Fynwy - God's Country
Re: Amazing Nature
Quite incredible really..... 
Pufferfish Love Explains Mysterious Underwater Circles
"In 1995, divers noticed a beautiful, strange circular pattern on the seafloor off Japan, and soon after, more circles were discovered nearby. Some likened these formations to "underwater crop circles." The geometric formations mysteriously came and went, and for more than a decade, nobody knew what made them.
Finally, the creator of these remarkable formations was found: a newly discovered species of pufferfish. Further study showed these small pufferfish make the ornate circles to attract mates. Males laboriously flap their fins as they swim along the seafloor, resulting in disrupted sediment and amazing circular patterns. Although the fish are only about 12 centimeters (5 inches) long, the formations they make measure about 2 meters (7 feet) in diameter.
When the circles are finished, females come to inspect them. If they like what they see, they reproduce with the males, said Hiroshi Kawase, the curator of the Coastal Branch of Natural History Museum and Institute in Chiba, Japan. But nobody knows exactly what the females are looking for in these circles or what traits they find desirable, Kawase told LiveScience."
Full Story: - http://www.livescience.com/40132-underw ... rcles.html
Pufferfish Love Explains Mysterious Underwater Circles
- Circle1.JPG (35.35 KiB) Viewed 1981 times
Finally, the creator of these remarkable formations was found: a newly discovered species of pufferfish. Further study showed these small pufferfish make the ornate circles to attract mates. Males laboriously flap their fins as they swim along the seafloor, resulting in disrupted sediment and amazing circular patterns. Although the fish are only about 12 centimeters (5 inches) long, the formations they make measure about 2 meters (7 feet) in diameter.
When the circles are finished, females come to inspect them. If they like what they see, they reproduce with the males, said Hiroshi Kawase, the curator of the Coastal Branch of Natural History Museum and Institute in Chiba, Japan. But nobody knows exactly what the females are looking for in these circles or what traits they find desirable, Kawase told LiveScience."
Full Story: - http://www.livescience.com/40132-underw ... rcles.html
"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things" - Yma o Hyd.
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pharvey
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Re: Amazing Nature
Not something you see everyday... 
Incredible really.
Weasel Photographed Riding on a Woodpecker's Back
(Better quality size on website.. 
)
Amateur photographer Martin Le-May, from Essex, has recorded the extraordinary image of a weasel riding on the back of a green woodpecker as it flies through the air.
The photograph was taken at Hornchurch Country Park in east London on Monday afternoon.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr Le-May said he had managed to capture the moment while he was out walking with his wife Ann.
He said: "I heard a distressed squawking noise and feared the worst.
"I soon realised it was a woodpecker with some kind of small mammal on its back.
Here's hoping the woodpecker threw the little bugger off...!!
[EDIT] And as BBC news advises..... a clean getaway for Woody!!
Full story: - http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31711446
Incredible really.
Weasel Photographed Riding on a Woodpecker's Back
- Capture.PNG (138.52 KiB) Viewed 1824 times
)Amateur photographer Martin Le-May, from Essex, has recorded the extraordinary image of a weasel riding on the back of a green woodpecker as it flies through the air.
The photograph was taken at Hornchurch Country Park in east London on Monday afternoon.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr Le-May said he had managed to capture the moment while he was out walking with his wife Ann.
He said: "I heard a distressed squawking noise and feared the worst.
"I soon realised it was a woodpecker with some kind of small mammal on its back.
Here's hoping the woodpecker threw the little bugger off...!!
[EDIT] And as BBC news advises..... a clean getaway for Woody!!
Full story: - http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31711446
"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things" - Yma o Hyd.
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pharvey
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- Location: Sir Fynwy - God's Country
Re: Amazing Nature
Not a happy kitty...... great photo though!!
- Capture.PNG (191.28 KiB) Viewed 1426 times
"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things" - Yma o Hyd.
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pharvey
- Moderator
- Posts: 13893
- Joined: Sat Aug 29, 2009 10:21 am
- Location: Sir Fynwy - God's Country
Re: Amazing Nature
Truly spectacular.... and what a view!! "Eaglecam" - captures stunning footage of an imperial eagle descending over 2,700 ft (830 m) from the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai.
"An imperial eagle named Darshan captured phenomenal views of the capital of the United Arab Emirates while taking cues from his trainer on the ground. The eagle flight was arranged by the nature conservation group Freedom Conservation with the purpose of drawing attention to eagle conservation. This white-tailed eagle has been critically endangered for the last 50 years. With a height of 2,722 feet (830 m), the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates is currently the world’s tallest building. Camera: Sony ActionCam Mini"
"An imperial eagle named Darshan captured phenomenal views of the capital of the United Arab Emirates while taking cues from his trainer on the ground. The eagle flight was arranged by the nature conservation group Freedom Conservation with the purpose of drawing attention to eagle conservation. This white-tailed eagle has been critically endangered for the last 50 years. With a height of 2,722 feet (830 m), the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates is currently the world’s tallest building. Camera: Sony ActionCam Mini"
"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things" - Yma o Hyd.
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dalmatiandave
- Professional
- Posts: 270
- Joined: Fri Jul 05, 2013 9:57 pm
Re: Amazing Nature
Army ants build bridge to invade wasps' nest.
I don't trust children. They're here to replace us.
Re: Amazing Nature
Mystery Antarctic fossil is massive egg
https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/19369 ... assive-egg. (Photo at link)
TOKYO: Scientists had nicknamed it "The Thing" - a mysterious football-sized fossil discovered in Antarctica that sat in a Chilean museum awaiting someone who could work out just what it was.
Now, analysis has revealed the mystery fossil to be a soft-shelled egg, the largest ever found, laid some 68 million years ago, possibly by a type of extinct sea snake or lizard.
The revelation ends nearly a decade of speculation and could change thinking about the lives of marine creatures in this era, said Lucas Legendre, lead author of a paper detailing the findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"It is very rare to find fossil soft-shelled eggs that are that well-preserved," Legendre, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, told AFP.
"This new egg is by far the largest soft-shelled egg ever discovered. We did not know that these eggs could reach such an enormous size, and since we hypothesise it was laid by a giant marine reptile, it might also be a unique glimpse into the reproductive strategy of these animals," he said.
The fossil was discovered in 2011 by a group of Chilean scientists working in Antarctica. It looks a bit like a crumpled baked potato but measures a whopping 28 by 18 centimetres.
For years, visiting scientists examined the fossil in vain, until in 2018 a palaeontologist suggested it might be an egg.
- A mammoth find -
It wasn't the most obvious hypothesis given its size and appearance, and there was no skeleton inside to confirm it.
Analysis of sections of the fossil revealed "a layered structure similar to a soft membrane, and a much thinner hard outer layer, suggesting it was soft-shelled," Legendre said.
Chemical analyses showed "the eggshell is distinct from the sediment around it, and was originally a living tissue."
But that left other mysteries to unravel, including what animal laid such an enormous egg -- only one bigger has been found, produced by the now-extinct elephant bird from Madagascar.
The team believe this egg was not from a dinosaur -- the types living in Antarctica at the time were mostly too small to have produced such a mammoth egg, and the ones large enough laid spherical, rather than oval-shaped, ones.
Instead they believe it came from a kind of reptile, possibly a group known as Mosasaurs, which were common in the region.
- Soft-shelled dinosaur eggs -
The paper was published in Nature along a separate study that argues that it wasn't only ancient reptiles that laid soft-shell eggs -- dinosaurs did too.
For years, experts believed dinosaurs only laid hard-shelled eggs, which are all that had been found.
But Mark Norell, curator of palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History, said the discovery of a group of fossilised embryonic Protoceratops dinosaurs in Mongolia made him revisit the assumption.
"Why do we only find dinosaur eggs relatively late in the Mesozoic and why only in a couple groups of dinosaurs," he said he asked himself.
The answer, he theorised, was that early dinosaurs laid soft-shell eggs that were destroyed and not fossilised.
To test the theory, Norell and a team analysed the material around some of the Protoceratops skeletons in the Mongolia fossil and another fossil of two apparently newborn Mussaurus.
They found chemical signatures showing the dinosaurs would have been surrounded by soft, leathery eggshells.
"The first dinosaur egg was soft-shelled," Norell and his team conclude in the paper.
Norell's findings may have implications for the fossil once named "The Thing" -- which is now known as Antarcticoolithus, according to a review of the studies published in Nature.
They "could implicate some form of dinosaur as the proud parent," wrote Johan Lindgren of Lund University and Benjamin Kear of Uppsala University.
"Let us hope that future discoveries of similarly spectacular fossil eggs with intact embryos will solve this thought-provoking enigma."
https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/19369 ... assive-egg. (Photo at link)
TOKYO: Scientists had nicknamed it "The Thing" - a mysterious football-sized fossil discovered in Antarctica that sat in a Chilean museum awaiting someone who could work out just what it was.
Now, analysis has revealed the mystery fossil to be a soft-shelled egg, the largest ever found, laid some 68 million years ago, possibly by a type of extinct sea snake or lizard.
The revelation ends nearly a decade of speculation and could change thinking about the lives of marine creatures in this era, said Lucas Legendre, lead author of a paper detailing the findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"It is very rare to find fossil soft-shelled eggs that are that well-preserved," Legendre, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, told AFP.
"This new egg is by far the largest soft-shelled egg ever discovered. We did not know that these eggs could reach such an enormous size, and since we hypothesise it was laid by a giant marine reptile, it might also be a unique glimpse into the reproductive strategy of these animals," he said.
The fossil was discovered in 2011 by a group of Chilean scientists working in Antarctica. It looks a bit like a crumpled baked potato but measures a whopping 28 by 18 centimetres.
For years, visiting scientists examined the fossil in vain, until in 2018 a palaeontologist suggested it might be an egg.
- A mammoth find -
It wasn't the most obvious hypothesis given its size and appearance, and there was no skeleton inside to confirm it.
Analysis of sections of the fossil revealed "a layered structure similar to a soft membrane, and a much thinner hard outer layer, suggesting it was soft-shelled," Legendre said.
Chemical analyses showed "the eggshell is distinct from the sediment around it, and was originally a living tissue."
But that left other mysteries to unravel, including what animal laid such an enormous egg -- only one bigger has been found, produced by the now-extinct elephant bird from Madagascar.
The team believe this egg was not from a dinosaur -- the types living in Antarctica at the time were mostly too small to have produced such a mammoth egg, and the ones large enough laid spherical, rather than oval-shaped, ones.
Instead they believe it came from a kind of reptile, possibly a group known as Mosasaurs, which were common in the region.
- Soft-shelled dinosaur eggs -
The paper was published in Nature along a separate study that argues that it wasn't only ancient reptiles that laid soft-shell eggs -- dinosaurs did too.
For years, experts believed dinosaurs only laid hard-shelled eggs, which are all that had been found.
But Mark Norell, curator of palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History, said the discovery of a group of fossilised embryonic Protoceratops dinosaurs in Mongolia made him revisit the assumption.
"Why do we only find dinosaur eggs relatively late in the Mesozoic and why only in a couple groups of dinosaurs," he said he asked himself.
The answer, he theorised, was that early dinosaurs laid soft-shell eggs that were destroyed and not fossilised.
To test the theory, Norell and a team analysed the material around some of the Protoceratops skeletons in the Mongolia fossil and another fossil of two apparently newborn Mussaurus.
They found chemical signatures showing the dinosaurs would have been surrounded by soft, leathery eggshells.
"The first dinosaur egg was soft-shelled," Norell and his team conclude in the paper.
Norell's findings may have implications for the fossil once named "The Thing" -- which is now known as Antarcticoolithus, according to a review of the studies published in Nature.
They "could implicate some form of dinosaur as the proud parent," wrote Johan Lindgren of Lund University and Benjamin Kear of Uppsala University.
"Let us hope that future discoveries of similarly spectacular fossil eggs with intact embryos will solve this thought-provoking enigma."
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Source
Re: Amazing Nature
700km lightning bolt, longest ever recorded
https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/19414 ... r-recorded
GENEVA: The UN's weather agency announced Thursday the longest lightning bolt on record -- a single flash in Brazil on Oct 31, 2018 that cut the sky across more than 700 kilometres.
That is equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington DC in the United States, or between London and Basel, Switzerland, the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement.
WMO's committee of experts on weather and climate extremes also reported a new world record for the duration of a lightning flash, with a single flash that developed continuously over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019 lasting for a full 16.73 seconds.
The new "megaflash" records, which were verified with new satellite lightning imagery technology, were more than double the previous known record-holders, WMO said.
The previous record for the longest detected distance for a single lightning flash was 321 kilometres (199 miles), measured on June 20, 2007 in the US state of Oklahoma, WMO said.
The previous duration record was 7.74 seconds, measured on August 30, 2012 in southern France, it said.
'Extraordinary records'
The new measurements reveal "extraordinary records from single lightning flash events," Randall Cerveny, the chief rapporteur in the WMO expert committee, said in the statement.
"It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as lightning detection technology improves," he said.
The previous records were assessed using data collected by ground-based so-called lightning mapping array networks, which many lightning scientists acknowledge face upper limits in the scale of lightning that can be observed, WMO said.
It hailed recent advances in space-based lightning mapping that allow for measuring "flash extent and duration continuously over broad geo-spatial domains."
This has allowed for the detection of "previously unobserved extremes in lightning occurrence, known as 'megaflashes'," Michael J. Peterson, of the Space and Remote Sensing Group of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, said in the statement.
Megaflashes, he said, "are defined as horizontal mesoscale lightning discharges that reach hundreds of kilometres in length."
The UN agency occasionally reveals quirky weather-related milestones, like in 2016 revealing a record wave measurement of a behemoth that towered 19 metres (62.3 feet) -- taller than a six-storey building -- above the North Atlantic.
All such records are stored in the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes.
The archive currently includes two other lightning-related extremes.
One is for the most people killed by a single direct strike of lightning, when 21 people died in Zimbabwe in 1975 as they huddled for safety in a hut that was hit.
The other is for an indirect strike, when 469 people died in Dronka, Egypt when lightning struck a set of oil tanks in 1994, causing burning oil to flood the town.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/19414 ... r-recorded
GENEVA: The UN's weather agency announced Thursday the longest lightning bolt on record -- a single flash in Brazil on Oct 31, 2018 that cut the sky across more than 700 kilometres.
That is equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington DC in the United States, or between London and Basel, Switzerland, the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement.
WMO's committee of experts on weather and climate extremes also reported a new world record for the duration of a lightning flash, with a single flash that developed continuously over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019 lasting for a full 16.73 seconds.
The new "megaflash" records, which were verified with new satellite lightning imagery technology, were more than double the previous known record-holders, WMO said.
The previous record for the longest detected distance for a single lightning flash was 321 kilometres (199 miles), measured on June 20, 2007 in the US state of Oklahoma, WMO said.
The previous duration record was 7.74 seconds, measured on August 30, 2012 in southern France, it said.
'Extraordinary records'
The new measurements reveal "extraordinary records from single lightning flash events," Randall Cerveny, the chief rapporteur in the WMO expert committee, said in the statement.
"It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as lightning detection technology improves," he said.
The previous records were assessed using data collected by ground-based so-called lightning mapping array networks, which many lightning scientists acknowledge face upper limits in the scale of lightning that can be observed, WMO said.
It hailed recent advances in space-based lightning mapping that allow for measuring "flash extent and duration continuously over broad geo-spatial domains."
This has allowed for the detection of "previously unobserved extremes in lightning occurrence, known as 'megaflashes'," Michael J. Peterson, of the Space and Remote Sensing Group of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, said in the statement.
Megaflashes, he said, "are defined as horizontal mesoscale lightning discharges that reach hundreds of kilometres in length."
The UN agency occasionally reveals quirky weather-related milestones, like in 2016 revealing a record wave measurement of a behemoth that towered 19 metres (62.3 feet) -- taller than a six-storey building -- above the North Atlantic.
All such records are stored in the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes.
The archive currently includes two other lightning-related extremes.
One is for the most people killed by a single direct strike of lightning, when 21 people died in Zimbabwe in 1975 as they huddled for safety in a hut that was hit.
The other is for an indirect strike, when 469 people died in Dronka, Egypt when lightning struck a set of oil tanks in 1994, causing burning oil to flood the town.
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Source
Re: Amazing Nature
Cloud waterfalls, the beautiful result of sinking air, not that uncommon but rare to see
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-28/ ... s/12396622
When Cameron Bostock made his way up through the clouds to summit Bluff Knoll in southern Western Australia, he was met with a remarkable sight.
"We got to the top and it was just unreal. A massive, endless sea of clouds, and it waterfalled over the mountain face," Mr Bostock said.
"It was pretty special."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-28/ ... s/12396622
When Cameron Bostock made his way up through the clouds to summit Bluff Knoll in southern Western Australia, he was met with a remarkable sight.
"We got to the top and it was just unreal. A massive, endless sea of clouds, and it waterfalled over the mountain face," Mr Bostock said.
"It was pretty special."
May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil know`s you`re dead!
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barrys
- Legend
- Posts: 2282
- Joined: Fri Sep 23, 2005 1:52 pm
- Location: Enjoying the sea air on a boat around Pak Nam Pran
Re: Amazing Nature
That is absolutely stunning.........
Re: Amazing Nature
Rare big cats spotted in Thai national park
https://thethaiger.com/hot-news/environ ... ional-park
The Facebook page of Khlong Lan National Park in Thailand’s northwestern Kamphaeng Phet province, report that camera traps, set up to track the population of tigers, instead managed to capture a sighting of a black panther and leopard.
“The appearance of the panther and leopard prove that the forest has become more abundant and attracted the return of these animals after no sightings were reported for several years. This is the fifth time this year that we have set camera traps, and though we haven’t found any tigers, the sighting of the panther and leopard gives us hope that the Khlong Lan forest can still be home to endangered wildlife.”
The 420 square kilometre park covers the Dawna mountain range in Kamphaeng Phet’s central city and Khlong Lan districts.
“The population of tigers in Thailand’s forests has been dropping significantly over the past decades and they have been classified as an endangered species. The 3 main reasons for this are diminishing natural habitat, hunting and lack of food.”
The Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation in cooperation with WWF Thailand, has set up camera traps covering 1,200s square kilometres of Mae Wong and Khlong Lan national parks, which are believed to have the most tigers in the country.
https://thethaiger.com/hot-news/environ ... ional-park
- Cats-1.jpg (128.83 KiB) Viewed 326 times
The Facebook page of Khlong Lan National Park in Thailand’s northwestern Kamphaeng Phet province, report that camera traps, set up to track the population of tigers, instead managed to capture a sighting of a black panther and leopard.
“The appearance of the panther and leopard prove that the forest has become more abundant and attracted the return of these animals after no sightings were reported for several years. This is the fifth time this year that we have set camera traps, and though we haven’t found any tigers, the sighting of the panther and leopard gives us hope that the Khlong Lan forest can still be home to endangered wildlife.”
The 420 square kilometre park covers the Dawna mountain range in Kamphaeng Phet’s central city and Khlong Lan districts.
“The population of tigers in Thailand’s forests has been dropping significantly over the past decades and they have been classified as an endangered species. The 3 main reasons for this are diminishing natural habitat, hunting and lack of food.”
The Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation in cooperation with WWF Thailand, has set up camera traps covering 1,200s square kilometres of Mae Wong and Khlong Lan national parks, which are believed to have the most tigers in the country.
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Source