What plant may cure Alzheimer's disease, increase circulation, tastes like almonds and smells like rancid butter? This plant is none other than Ginkgo biloba. Ginkgo extracts have played a crucial role in Chinese herbal medicine for many centuries. Only recently has western medicine began to...
The adjective which best describes the Myxini is "Lovecraftian". Hagfish are long, slender and pinkish, and are best known for the large quantities of sticky slime which they produce. Hagfish have three accessory hearts, no cerebrum or cerebellum, no jaws or stomach, and will "sneeze" when their...
They've got legs. . . they know how to use them. . . Click on either of these images to view an enlarged version! Nearly 13,000 species of arthropod are classified in the Myriapoda, the "many-legged ones." All myriapods are terrestrial forms. Like insects and other uniramian arthropods, myriapods...
Great plant-eating dinosaurs roaming the earth, feeding on lush growths of ferns and palm-like cycads and bennettitaleans. . . smaller but vicious carnivores stalking the great herbivores. . . oceans full of fish, squid, and coiled...
The Sphagnopsida are the peat mosses, the most important mosses today both ecologically and economically. For instance, peat-burning provides one-third of Ireland's energy requirements, and unlike fossil fuels, peat is a renewable resource when properly managed. In addition, peatlands are the...
crown of large compound leaves and a stout trunk. They are a minor component of the flora in tropical and subtropical regions today, but during the Jurassic Period, they were a common sight in many parts of the world. For this reason, the...
The Cretaceous is usually noted for being the last portion of the "Age of Dinosaurs", but that does not mean that new kinds of dinosaurs did not appear then. It is during the Cretaceous that the first ceratopsian and pachycepalosaurid dinosaurs appeared. Also during this time, we find the first...
The genus Ginkgo, represented today by the widely-cultivated Chinese species Ginkgo biloba, has an evolutionary lineage that dates back to the Lower Jurassic, about 190 million years ago. Although this genus has undergone much change over this length of time, fossilized leaf material from the...
a large number of other insect taxa collectively referred to as wasps. The Hymenoptera include famous examples of social insects, such as honeybees and true ants; these insects have developed regimented social systems in which members are divided into worker, drone, and queen castes. Such social...
Ctenocephalides felis, the cat flea shown here, is a typical member of the Siphonaptera ("sucking-wingless"), the fleas. Although known to be related to the true flies (the Diptera) by details of internal structure, the Siphonaptera are...