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Western Long-beaked Echidna
The western long-beaked echidna (''Zaglossus bruijnii'') is one of the four extant echidnas and one of three species of ''Zaglossus'' that occurs in New Guinea. Originally described as ''Tachyglossus bruijnii'', this is the type species of ''Zaglossus''. Description The western long-beaked echidna is an egg-laying mammal. Unlike the short-beaked echidna, which eats ants and termites, the long-beaked species eats earthworms. The long-beaked echidna is also larger than the short-beaked species, reaching up to ; the snout is longer and turns downward; and the spines are almost indistinguishable from the long fur. It is distinguished from the other ''Zaglossus'' species by the number of claws on the fore and hind feet: three (rarely four). It is the largest extant monotreme. Distribution and habitat The species is found in the Bird's Head Peninsula and Foja Mountains of West Papua and Papua provinces, Indonesia, respectively, in regions of elevation between ; it is absent from ... [...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] |
British Museum Of Natural History
The Natural History Museum in London is a museum that exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is one of three major museums on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the others being the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Natural History Museum's main frontage, however, is on Cromwell Road. The museum is home to life and earth science specimens comprising some 80 million items within five main collections: botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology. The museum is a centre of research specialising in taxonomy, identification and conservation. Given the age of the institution, many of the collections have great historical as well as scientific value, such as specimens collected by Charles Darwin. The museum is particularly famous for its exhibition of dinosaur skeletons and ornate architecture—sometimes dubbed a ''cathedral of nature''—both exemplified by the large ''Diplodocus'' cast that domin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mammals Of Western New Guinea
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 Sauropsida ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endemic Fauna Of New Guinea
Endemism is the state of a species being found 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 be also be referred to as an ''endemism'' or in scientific literature as an ''endemite''. For example '' Cytisus aeolicus'' is an endemite of the Italian flora. '' Adzharia renschi'' was once believed to be an endemite of the Caucasus, but it was later discovered to be a non-indigenous species from South America belonging to a different genus. The extreme opposite of an endemic species is one with a cosmopolitan distribution, having a global or widespread range. A rare alternative term for a species that is endemic is "precinctive", which applies to s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monotremes Of New Guinea
Monotremes () are prototherian mammals of the order Monotremata. They are one of the three groups of living mammals, along with placentals (Eutheria), and marsupials (Metatheria). Monotremes are typified by structural differences in their brains, jaws, digestive tract, reproductive tract, and other body parts, compared to the more common mammalian types. In addition, they lay eggs rather than bearing live young, but, like all mammals, the female monotremes nurse their young with milk. Monotremes have been considered members of Australosphenida, a clade that contains extinct mammals from the Jurassic and Cretaceous of Madagascar, South America, and Australia, though this is disputed. The only surviving examples of monotremes are all indigenous to Australia and New Guinea, although there is evidence that they were once more widespread, as '' Monotrematum'' is known from the Paleocene of South America. The extant monotreme species are the platypus and four species of echidnas. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conservation International
Conservation International (CI) is an American nonprofit environmental organization headquartered in Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia. CI's work focuses on science, policy and partnership with businesses, governments and communities. The organization employs nearly 1,000 people and works with more than 2,000 partners in 29 countries. CI has helped support 1,200 protected areas and interventions across 77 countries, protecting more than 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of land and sea. History Conservation International was founded in 1987 with the goal of protecting nature for the benefit of people. In 1989, CI formally committed to the protection of biodiversity hotspots, ultimately identifying 36 such hotspots around the world and contributing to their protection. The model of protecting hotspots became a key way for organizations to do conservation work. On July 1, 2017, Peter Seligmann stepped down as CEO of CI and a new executive team made up of se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IUCN
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN; officially International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. It is involved in data gathering and analysis, research, field projects, advocacy, and education. IUCN's mission is to "influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable". Over the past decades, IUCN has widened its focus beyond conservation ecology and now incorporates issues related to sustainable development in its projects. IUCN does not itself aim to mobilize the public in support of nature conservation. It tries to influence the actions of governments, business and other stakeholders by providing information and advice and through building partnerships. The organization is best known to the wider ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Aboriginal Elder
Australian Aboriginal elders are highly respected people within Australia and their respective Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. An Elder has been defined as "someone who has gained recognition as a custodian of knowledge and lore, and who has permission to disclose knowledge and beliefs". They may be male or female, and of any age, but must be trusted and respected by their community for their wisdom, cultural knowledge and community service. Elders provide support for their communities in the form of guidance, counselling and knowledge, which help tackle problems of health, education, unemployment and racism, particularly for younger people. They may be distinguished as one of two types: Community Elders and Traditional Elders. Elders play an important role in maintenance of culture, songs, oral histories, sacred stories, Aboriginal Australian languages, and dance, and are also educators who demonstrate leadership and skills in resolving conflicts. Elders al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cave Painting
In archaeology, Cave paintings are a type of parietal art (which category also includes petroglyphs, or engravings), found on the wall or ceilings of caves. The term usually implies prehistoric origin, and the oldest known are more than 40,000 years old (art of the Upper Paleolithic), found in the caves in the district of Maros ( Sulawesi, Indonesia). The oldest are often constructed from hand stencils and simple geometric shapes.M. Aubert et al., "Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia", ''Nature'' volume 514, pages 223–227 (09 October 2014). "using uranium-series dating of coralloid speleothems directly associated with 12 human hand stencils and two figurative animal depictions from seven cave sites in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi, we show that rock art traditions on this Indonesian island are at least compatible in age with the oldest European art. The earliest dated image from Maros, with a minimum age of 39.9 kyr, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ectoparasite
Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has characterised parasites as "predators that eat prey in units of less than one". Parasites include single-celled protozoans such as the agents of malaria, sleeping sickness, and amoebic dysentery; animals such as hookworms, lice, mosquitoes, and vampire bats; fungi such as honey fungus and the agents of ringworm; and plants such as mistletoe, dodder, and the broomrapes. There are six major parasitic strategies of exploitation of animal hosts, namely parasitic castration, directly transmitted parasitism (by contact), trophicallytransmitted parasitism (by being eaten), vector-transmitted parasitism, parasitoidism, and micropredation. One major axis of classification concerns invasiveness: an endoparasite lives inside the host's body; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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