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Taipan Day
Taipans are snakes of the genus ''Oxyuranus'' in the elapid family. They are large, fast-moving, highly venomous, and endemic to Australia and New Guinea. Three species are recognised, one of which, the coastal taipan, has two subspecies. Taipans are some of the deadliest known snakes. Taxonomy The common name, taipan, was coined by anthropologist Donald Thomson after the word used by the Wik-Mungkan Aboriginal people of central Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia. The Wik-Mungkan people used the name in reference to an ancestral creator being in Aboriginal Australian mythology known as the Rainbow Serpent. The genus name is from Greek ὀξῠ́ς (''oxys'': sharp, needle-like) and οὐρανός (''ouranos'': an arch, specifically the vault of the heavens), and refers to the needle-like anterior process on the arch of the palate, which Kinghorn noted separated the genus from all other elapids. The oft-quoted meaning "sharp-tailed" (based on a confusion with οὐρ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Roy Kinghorn
James Roy Kinghorn (12 October 1891 – 4 March 1983), generally known as Roy, or J. R. Kinghorn, was an Australian naturalist, a longtime curator at the Australian Museum, and a noted lecturer and broadcaster. Early years Roy Kinghorn was born in Richmond, New South Wales, the youngest of three children of Rev. James Kinghorn (1861–1912) and his wife (Bertha) Ethel, née Campbell (ca.1866–1942). He was educated at Ellengowan School, Bathurst, All Saints' College, Bathurst and the Sydney Church of England Grammar School.Rose Docker'Kinghorn, James Roy (1891–1983)' ''Australian Dictionary of Biography'', National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published in hardcopy 2007, accessed online 7 February 2014 In 1907 he was accepted as a cadet at the Australian Museum, Sydney, specialising in crustaceans. He attended lectures at Sydney University and studied part-time at Sydney Technical College, but after failing an examination at the College, was transferre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blood
Blood is a body fluid in the circulatory system of humans and other vertebrates that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells, and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. Blood in the circulatory system is also known as ''peripheral blood'', and the blood cells it carries, ''peripheral blood cells''. Blood is composed of blood cells suspended in blood plasma. Plasma, which constitutes 55% of blood fluid, is mostly water (92% by volume), and contains proteins, glucose, mineral ions, hormones, carbon dioxide (plasma being the main medium for excretory product transportation), and blood cells themselves. Albumin is the main protein in plasma, and it functions to regulate the colloidal osmotic pressure of blood. The blood cells are mainly red blood cells (also called RBCs or erythrocytes), white blood cells (also called WBCs or leukocytes) and platelets (also called thrombocytes). The most abundant cells in vertebrate blo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nervous System
In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes that impact the body, then works in tandem with the endocrine system to respond to such events. Nervous tissue first arose in wormlike organisms about 550 to 600 million years ago. In vertebrates it consists of two main parts, the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and spinal cord. The PNS consists mainly of nerves, which are enclosed bundles of the long fibers or axons, that connect the CNS to every other part of the body. Nerves that transmit signals from the brain are called motor nerves or '' efferent'' nerves, while those nerves that transmit information from the body to the CNS are called sensory nerves or '' afferent''. Spinal nerves are mixed nerves that serve both fu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neurotoxin
Neurotoxins are toxins that are destructive to nerve tissue (causing neurotoxicity). Neurotoxins are an extensive class of exogenous chemical neurological insultsSpencer 2000 that can adversely affect function in both developing and mature nervous tissue.Olney 2002 The term can also be used to classify endogenous compounds, which, when abnormally contacted, can prove neurologically toxic. Though neurotoxins are often neurologically destructive, their ability to specifically target neural components is important in the study of nervous systems. Common examples of neurotoxins include lead, ethanol (drinking alcohol), glutamate,Choi 1987 nitric oxide, botulinum toxin (e.g. Botox), tetanus toxin,Simpson 1986 and tetrodotoxin. Some substances such as nitric oxide and glutamate are in fact essential for proper function of the body and only exert neurotoxic effects at excessive concentrations. Neurotoxins inhibit neuron control over ion concentrations across the cell membrane, or com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bandicoots
Bandicoots are a group of more than 20 species of small to medium-sized, terrestrial, largely nocturnal marsupial omnivores in the order Peramelemorphia. They are endemic to the Australia–New Guinea region, including the Bismarck Archipelago to the east and Seram and Halmahera to the west. Etymology The bandicoot is a member of the Order (biology), order Peramelemorphia, and the word "bandicoot" is often used informally to refer to any peramelemorph, such as the bilby. The term originally referred to the unrelated Indian bandicota, bandicoot rat from the Telugu language, Telugu word ''pandikokku'' (పందికొక్కు). Characteristics Bandicoots have V-shaped faces, ending with their prominent noses similar to probosces. These noses make them, along with bilbies, similar in appearance to elephant shrews and extinct Leptictida, leptictids, and they are distantly related to both mammal groups. With their well-attuned snouts and sharp claws, bandicoot are fossoria ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mammal
Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or hair, and three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles (including birds) from which they diverged in the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. Around 6,400 extant species of mammals have been described divided into 29 orders. The largest orders, in terms of number of species, are the rodents, bats, and Eulipotyphla (hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and others). The next three are the Primates (including humans, apes, monkeys, and others), the Artiodactyla ( cetaceans and even-toed ungulates), and the Carnivora (cats, dogs, seals, and others). In terms of cladistics, which reflects evolutionary history, mammals are the only living members of the Synapsida (synapsids); this clade, together with Saur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilhelm Peters
Wilhelm Karl Hartwich (or Hartwig) Peters (22 April 1815 in Koldenbüttel – 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 g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick McCoy
Sir Frederick McCoy (1817 – 13 May 1899), was an Irish palaeontologist, zoologist, and museum administrator, active in Australia. He is noted for founding the Botanic Garden of the University of Melbourne in 1856. Early life McCoy was the son of Simon McCoy and was born in Dublin; some sources have his year of birth as 1823, however 1817 is the most likely. He was educated in Dublin and at Cambridge for the medical profession. Palaeontology career McCoy's interests, however, became early centred in natural history and, especially, palaeontology. At the age of eighteen he published a ''Catalogue of Organic Remains compiled from specimens exhibited in the Rotunda at Dublin'' (1841). He assisted Sir RJ Griffith by studying the fossils of the carboniferous and silurian rocks of Ireland, resulting in two publication: ''A Synopsis of the Character of Carboniferous Limestone Fossils of Ireland'' (1844) and ''Synopsis of the Silurian Fossils of Ireland'' (1846). In 1846 Sedgw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
