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A so-called "cathedral" mound produced by a termite colony. Structures built by non-human animals, often called animal architecture, [1] are common in many species. Examples of animal structures include termite mounds, ant hills, wasp and beehives, burrow complexes, beaver dams, elaborate nests of birds, and webs of spiders.
Termite mounds are made of dirt, spit, and feces. ©BEJITA/Shutterstock.com Every mound-building termite species creates its home using excrement, mud from deep underground, and their own saliva.
Some of the mounds are 3 m (10 ft) tall and 10 m (33 ft) wide, and they are spaced about 20 m (66 ft) apart. Underneath the mounds are networks of tunnels that required the excavation of 10 cubic kilometres (2.4 cu mi) of dirt. Scientists performed radioactive dating on 11 mounds. The youngest mound was 690 years old.
Some effigy mounds were constructed in the shapes or outlines of culturally significant animals. The most famous effigy mound, Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, ranges from 1 foot (0.30 m) to just over 3 feet (0.91 m) tall, 20 feet (6.1 m) wide, more than 1,330 feet (410 m) long, and shaped as an undulating serpent .
The earliest mounds are 'conical'; they are essentially bumps of earth - the simplest and arguably the most intuitive kind of burial. Successive conicals likely evolved into linear mounds. Bird mounds likely came next as modifying a linear mound to make a bird mound required only the addition of a head and a tail.
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The Nazca lines (/ ˈ n ɑː z k ə /, /-k ɑː / [1]) are a group of over 700 geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. [2] [3] They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed. [4]
The surface of the lotus plant’s leaves repels dirt and water so well that this self-cleaning quality was dubbed the “lotus effect” in 1977. In 1999, the German building company Sto released ...