Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Beavers have been featured as companions in some stories, including a Lakota tale where a young woman flees from her evil husband with the aid of her pet beaver. [ 138 ] Europeans have traditionally thought of beavers as fantastical animals due to their amphibious nature.
Convergent evolution—the repeated evolution of similar traits in multiple lineages which all ancestrally lack the trait—is rife in nature, as illustrated by the examples below. The ultimate cause of convergence is usually a similar evolutionary biome , as similar environments will select for similar traits in any species occupying the same ...
The list of organisms by chromosome count describes ploidy or numbers of chromosomes in the cells of various plants, animals, protists, and other living organisms.This number, along with the visual appearance of the chromosome, is known as the karyotype, [1] [2] [3] and can be found by looking at the chromosomes through a microscope.
Castoridae is a family of rodents that contains the two living species of beavers and their fossil relatives. A formerly diverse group, only a single genus is extant today, Castor . Two other genera of "giant beavers", Castoroides and Trogontherium , became extinct in the Late Pleistocene .
The minimal superficial changes to living fossils are mistakenly declared as an absence of evolution, but they are examples of stabilizing selection, which is an evolutionary process—and perhaps the dominant process of morphological evolution. [4] The term is currently deprecated among paleontologists and evolutionary biologists.
An animal may shake, lengthen, or spread out its ornament in order to get the attention of the opposite sex, which will in turn choose the most attractive one with which to mate. Ornaments are most often observed in males, and choosing an extravagantly ornamented male benefits females as the genes that produce the ornament will be passed on to ...
Amblyrhiza inundata from the family Heptaxodontidae was a massive animal, it weighed 50–200 kg (110–440 lb). [210] [209] The largest beaver was the giant beaver (Castoroides) of North America. It grew over 2 m in length and weighed roughly 90 to 125 kg (198 to 276 lb), also making it one of the largest rodents to ever exist.
Besides providing a safe home for the beaver, beaver ponds also provide habitat for waterfowl, fish, and other aquatic animals. Their dams help reduce soil erosion and can help reduce flooding. However, beaver dams are not permanent and depend on the beavers' continued presence for their maintenance.