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Juan Fernández Fur Seal
The Juan Fernández fur seal (''Arctocephalus philippii'') is the second smallest of the fur seals, second only to the Galápagos fur seal. They are found only on the Pacific Coast of South America, more specifically on the Juan Fernández Islands and the Desventuradas Islands. There is still much that is unknown about this species. Scientists still do not know the average life span of this species, or the diet and behavior of males apart from the breeding season. Description The Juan Fernandez fur seal is part of the group of eared seals. Fur seals in general have thick insulating fur that protects the skin from cold water, they have small ear flaps on the side of their head, and they hold their weight on their front flippers which are also used for land locomotion. Fur seals are different from true seals because they have external ear flaps, but also true seals use their chest for support and movement, and fur seals walk on their front flippers. The Juan Fernandez fur seal is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilhelm Peters
Wilhelm Karl Hartwich (or Hartwig) Peters (22 April 1815 – 20 April 1883) was a German natural history, naturalist and explorer. He was assistant to the anatomist Johannes Peter Müller and later became curator of the Natural History Museum, Berlin, Berlin Zoological Museum. Encouraged by Müller and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Peters travelled to Mozambique via Angola in September 1842, exploring the coastal region and the Zambesi River. He returned to Berlin with an enormous collection of natural history specimens, which he then described in ''Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique... in den Jahren 1842 bis 1848 ausgeführt'' (1852–1882). The work was comprehensive in its coverage, dealing with mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, river fish, insects and botany. He replaced Martin Lichtenstein as curator of the museum in 1858, and in the same year he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In a few years, he greatly increased ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Plata Museum
The La Plata Museum () is a natural history museum in La Plata, Argentina. It is part of the (Natural Sciences School) of the National University of La Plata. The building, long, today houses three million fossils and relics (including 44,000 botanical items), an amphitheatre opened in 1992, and a 58,000-volume library, serving over 400 university researchers. Around 400,000 visitors (8% of whom are from outside Argentina) pass through its doors yearly, including a thousand visiting researchers. History Childhood excursions with his father and older brother led the 14-year-old Francisco Moreno to mount a display of his growing collection of anthropological, fossil and bone findings at his family's Buenos Aires home in 1866, unwittingly laying the foundations for the future La Plata Museum. Moreno spent the time between 1873 and 1877 exploring then-remote and largely unmapped Patagonia, becoming the first non-indigenous Argentine to reach Lake Nahuel Huapi, what was later name ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mammals Of Chile
A mammal () is a vertebrate animal of the class Mammalia (). Mammals are characterised by the presence of milk-producing mammary glands for feeding their young, a broad neocortex region of the brain, fur or hair, and three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles and birds, from which their ancestors diverged in the Carboniferous Period over 300 million years ago. Around 6,640 extant species of mammals have been described and divided into 27 orders. The study of mammals is called mammalogy. The largest orders of mammals, by number of species, are the rodents, bats, and eulipotyphlans (including hedgehogs, moles and shrews). The next three are the primates (including humans, monkeys and lemurs), the even-toed ungulates (including pigs, camels, and whales), and the Carnivora (including cats, dogs, and seals). Mammals are the only living members of Synapsida; this clade, together with Sauropsida (reptiles and birds), constitutes the larg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pinnipeds Of South America
Pinnipeds (pronounced ), commonly known as seals, are a widely distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic, mostly marine mammals. They comprise the extant families Odobenidae (whose only living member is the walrus), Otariidae (the eared seals: sea lions and fur seals), and Phocidae (the earless seals, or true seals), with 34 extant species and more than 50 extinct species described from fossils. While seals were historically thought to have descended from two ancestral lines, molecular evidence supports them as a monophyletic group (descended from one ancestor). Pinnipeds belong to the suborder Caniformia of the order Carnivora; their closest living relatives are musteloids (weasels, raccoons, skunks and red pandas), having diverged about 50 million years ago. Seals range in size from the and Baikal seal to the and southern elephant seal. Several species exhibit sexual dimorphism. They have streamlined bodies and four limbs that are modifi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mammals Described In 1866
A mammal () is a vertebrate animal of the class Mammalia (). Mammals are characterised by the presence of milk-producing mammary glands for feeding their young, a broad neocortex region of the brain, fur or hair, and three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles and birds, from which their ancestors diverged in the Carboniferous Period over 300 million years ago. Around 6,640 extant species of mammals have been described and divided into 27 orders. The study of mammals is called mammalogy. The largest orders of mammals, by number of species, are the rodents, bats, and eulipotyphlans (including hedgehogs, moles and shrews). The next three are the primates (including humans, monkeys and lemurs), the even-toed ungulates (including pigs, camels, and whales), and the Carnivora (including cats, dogs, and seals). Mammals are the only living members of Synapsida; this clade, together with Sauropsida (reptiles and birds), constitutes the large ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endemic Fauna Of The Juan Fernández Islands
Endemism is the state of a species being found only in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsewhere. For example, the Cape sugarbird is found exclusively in southwestern South Africa and is therefore said to be ''endemic'' to that particular part of the world. An endemic species can also be referred to as an ''endemism'' or, in scientific literature, as an ''endemite''. Similarly, many species found in the Western ghats of India are examples of endemism. Endemism is an important concept in conservation biology for measuring biodiversity in a particular place and evaluating the risk of extinction for species. Endemism is also of interest in evolutionary biology, because it provides clues about how changes in the environment cause species to undergo range shifts (potentially expanding their range into a larger area or becoming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arctocephalus
The genus ''Arctocephalus'' consists of the southern fur seals. ''Arctocephalus'' translates to "bear head." Taxonomy The number of species within the genus has been questioned, primarily based on limited molecular data. The issue is complicated because some of the species are able to produce fertile hybrids. A recent review recommended the retention of seven species, deprecating the New Zealand fur seals to a subspecies of the South American fur seal, while also questioning the status of the Guadalupe fur seal. Other recent studies have indicated the genus may be paraphyletic, and some taxonomic reshuffling was previously done to account for this; however, more recent studies support it being monophyletic In biological cladistics for the classification of organisms, monophyly is the condition of a taxonomic grouping being a clade – that is, a grouping of organisms which meets these criteria: # the grouping contains its own most recent co ..., with the alleged par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polygyny In Animals
Polygyny (; from Neo-Greek , ) is a mating system in which one male lives and mates with multiple females but each female only mates with a single male. Systems where several females mate with several males are defined either as promiscuity or polygynandry. Lek mating is frequently regarded as a form of polygyny, because one male mates with many females, but lek-based mating systems differ in that the male has no attachment to the females with whom he mates, and that mating females lack attachment to one another.Clutton-Brock T.H. (1989). ‘Review lecture: mammalian mating systems.' ''Proceedings of the Royal Society of London''. Series B, Biological Sciences 236: 339–372. Polygyny is typical of one-male, multi-female groupsBoyd, R., & Silk, J. B. (2009). How Humans Evolved (preferably the downloadable pdf version): WW Norton & Company, New York. and can be found in many species including: elephant seal, spotted hyena, gorilla, red-winged prinia, house wren, hamadryas bab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claudio Gay
Claude Gay, often named Claudio Gay in Spanish texts, (18 March 1800 – 29 November 1873), was a French botanist, naturalist and illustrator. This explorer carried out some of the first investigations about Chilean flora, fauna, geology and geography. The ''Cordillera Claudio Gay'' in the Atacama Region of Chile is named after him. He founded the Chilean National Museum of Natural History, its first director was another Frenchman Jean-François Dauxion-Lavaysse. Research and travels Gay first went to Paris to study medicine, but he quickly abandoned this idea to become a researcher in natural history. In 1828, he went to Chile to teach physics and natural history at a college in Santiago. In 1829, he accepted a position as a researcher for the Chilean government to carry out a scientific survey of the country. He returned to France in 1832, and gave his collections to the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. His botanical specimens can now be found throughout ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Otaria Ursina
The South American sea lion (''Otaria flavescens'', formerly ''Otaria byronia''), also called the southern sea lion and the Patagonian sea lion, is a sea lion found on the western and southeastern coasts of South America. It is the only member of the genus ''Otaria''. The species is highly sexually dimorphic. Males have a large head and prominent mane. They mainly feed on fish and cephalopods and haul out on sand, gravel, rocky, or pebble beaches. In most populations, breeding males are both territorial and harem holding; they establish territories first and then try to herd females into them. The overall population of the species is considered stable, estimated at 265,000 animals. Naming The South American sea lion was classified as ''Otaria flavescens'' by George Shaw in 1800 and as ''Otaria byronia'' by Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville in 1820. The two nomenclatures were historically used interchangeably, but ''O. flavescens'' has become the preferred name. The species is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Edward Gray
John Edward Gray (12 February 1800 – 7 March 1875) was a British zoologist. He was the elder brother of zoologist George Robert Gray and son of the pharmacologist and botanist Samuel Frederick Gray (1766–1828). The same is used for a zoological name. Gray was keeper of zoology at the British Museum in London from 1840 until Christmas 1874, before the natural history holdings were split off to the Natural History Museum. He published several catalogues of the museum collections that included comprehensive discussions of animal groups and descriptions of new species. He improved the zoological collections to make them amongst the best in the world. Biography Gray was born in Walsall, but his family soon moved to London, where Gray studied medicine. He assisted his father in writing ''The Natural Arrangement of British Plants'' (1821). After being blackballed by the Linnean Society of London, Gray shifted his interest from botany to zoology. He began his zoological ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Juan Ignacio Molina
Fr. Juan Ignacio Molina (; (June 24, 1740 – September 12, 1829) was a Chilean-Spanish Jesuit priest, natural history, naturalist, historian, translator, geographer, botanist, ornithologist, and linguist. He is usually referred to as Abate Molina (Abbot Molina), and is also sometimes known by the Italian form of his name, Giovanni Ignazio Molina. He was one of the precursors of the theory of the gradual evolution of species, 44 years before Charles Darwin, Darwin, who repeatedly quoted him in "The Origin of Species". Biography Early years Molina was born at Guaraculén, a big farm located near Villa Alegre, Chile, Villa Alegre (General Captaincy of Chile), where he lived until he was 5 years old. In the current province of Linares Province, Linares, in the Maule Region of Chile. His parents were Agustín Molina and Francisca González Bruna. From an early age he was attracted to the nature of his environment, and in addition to his school work, he enjoyed observing nature on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
