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A dragonfly in its radical final moult, metamorphosing from an aquatic nymph to a winged adult.. In biology, moulting (British English), or molting (American English), also known as sloughing, shedding, or in many invertebrates, ecdysis, is a process by which an animal casts off parts of its body to serve some beneficial purpose, either at specific times of the year, or at specific points in ...
Sleep can follow a physiological or behavioral definition. In the physiological sense, sleep is a state characterized by reversible unconsciousness, special brainwave patterns, sporadic eye movement, loss of muscle tone (possibly with some exceptions; see below regarding the sleep of birds and of aquatic mammals), and a compensatory increase following deprivation of the state, this last known ...
The kiwi is a family of nocturnal birds endemic to New Zealand.. While it is difficult to say which came first, nocturnality or diurnality, a hypothesis in evolutionary biology, the nocturnal bottleneck theory, postulates that in the Mesozoic, many ancestors of modern-day mammals evolved nocturnal characteristics in order to avoid contact with the numerous diurnal predators. [3]
Mammals evolved from cynodonts, a group of superficially dog-like therapsid synapsids that survived the Permian–Triassic mass extinction.The emerging archosaurian sauropsids, including pseudosuchians, pterosaurs and dinosaurs and their ancestors, flourished after the Early Triassic Smithian–Spathian boundary event and competitively displaced the larger therapsids into extinction, leaving ...
The reason why some researchers are skeptical about animals having a sense of humor is that it serves no evolutionary purpose. For humans, it's a bonding strategy. For humans, it's a bonding strategy.
This is the notion that animals need a more or less constant amount of sleep every day, so that if a subject is deprived of sleep one day, the amount of sleep tends to "rebound" (increase) the next few days. This has been observed in zebrafish. At night, zebrafish appear to float in the water column, either horizontally or with the head ...
A new study by CU Boulder engineers in the Science Advances journal suggests that a mechanism called diffusiophoresis may be the reason behind the sharp and detailed patterns found on even the ...
A draft horse sleeping while standing up. The stay apparatus is an arrangement of muscles, tendons, and ligaments that work together so that an animal can remain standing with virtually no muscular effort. [1] It is best known as the mechanism by which horses can enter a light sleep while still standing up. [2]