1.     The world’s tallest mountain is a little more complicated than it sounds. Mt Everest is the official highest peak, at 8,848m above sea level. But don’t forget it gets a significant leg up by being part of the massive Himalayan range, and the mountain peak is about 4000m above its base. For the largest mountain base to peak, you are looking at Mauna Kea on the main Hawaiian island. It is only 4,205m above sea level, however because it is a volcano it started right from the sea bed, making it around 10,200m all up.

Photo of Mt Everest by Pavel Novak

But why choose something arbitrary like sea level? How about looking at the thickness of the crust, the entire unit of rock? In that case the Himalayas win hands down. Continents have different crust to oceans. Because of plate tectonics ocean crust is constantly being recycled from long volcanoes called mid ocean ridges. It is relatively thin and slides under continents when they collide. Continents are the light, massive granite floating on top. They are a bit like foam on a pond – over billions of years they have been moved around and reformed, but because they are so thick it is very difficult to get them to go down. They are more likely to crumple up and build mountain ranges. They are also like the apocryphal iceberg – there is more of them below than on the surface.

The crust under the Himalayas is 50-70km thick. This is where the Indian plate has pushed everything north of it underneath Asia and now is still going. The Himalayas themselves, including Everest, are only the very top creases on these massive mountain building folds. Mauna Kea, on the other hand, sits on a measly 8-16km of ocean crust. In fact, there are two layers of crust under it, and it appears that the deeper layer is the original crust and the upper layer was formed from lava from the volcano, so you could argue that only the top layer is part of the mountain. Even at it’s maximum, this makes Mauna Kea about 26km high – half of the minimum of the Himalayas.

And shall we throw in another contender? The Andes were formed by a plate diving beneath a continent, and as it gets down into the mantle it melts and feeds a line of volcanoes. One of these is Mt Chimborazo in Ecuador. It is 6,268m above sea level, with a very respectable 70km crust underneath it. But it has one more thing going for it – spin. When things spin they tend to flatten out, think of twirling your pizza dough. The same thing happens to the earth, which means it has a slightly larger diameter at the equator than it does from pole to pole.

This means when you stand at the equator your head is around 21km further from the centre of the earth than if you were standing at the poles. For a mountain that’s practically on the equator that’s a large advantage over something as far north as the Himalayas. It makes the top of Mt Chimborazo the point furthest away from the centre of the earth, so in that sense it is the highest point on earth.

Take your pick. Everest, Mauna Kea and Chimborazo can all legitimately argue that they are the world’s tallest mountain.

2.    The Great Dividing Range is actually a series of ranges that dominates the east coast of Australia. Historically the search for a usable pass through the mountains was important in European settlement. It isn’t particularly tall, Australia’s highest mountain Mt Kosciuszko is only 2,228m above sea level, but it is home to many unique species that are remnants of Gondwana.

The Great Dividing Range was built during the Carboniferous about 300 million years ago, when the supercontinent of Pangaea was forming. There were a lot of mountains built at this time, because when continents collide the leading edge of the plates slow down, but the far edge is still being pushed so they have to go somewhere and crumple up. Eastern Australia was on the edge of the supercontinent and had a major subduction zone along the whole coast, with oceanic crust diving under the land. It was the equivalent of the modern Andes, where Pacific crust is diving underneath South America.

When they were forming the Great Dividing Range would have been as high as the modern Andes and Himalayas, but they have been eroded for 280 million years.

3.     Transhumance is a method of pastoralism where people move up and down mountains in different seasons. Their permanent homes and agriculture are lower down the mountains, but in summer they can take their flocks above the tree line onto the high meadows to feed on the grass.

The name ‘Alp’ actually comes from the word for these seasonal pastures – ‘the Alps’ is the mountain range that has lots of high meadows for cattle. Traditionally (and to a certain extent today) there was little competition between animals and crops – crops are grown where the climate and geography is right, animals live around the edges. In Australia grazing happens in mostly arid zones, in other countries it is on steep slopes. In the Alps crops can be farmed in the valleys where it is warmer and the soil is richer. Above the tree line it is too cold and dry for crops but the grasses can support cattle, goats, sheep and pigs during the summer. In winter they come down and are stabled in the valleys.

Photo by Alex1011

Animals are extremely rich sources of high quality food, especially protein and fats. They can also be renewable sources through dairy, and sheep have other uses such as wool. They are land intensive but not labour intensive because a few herders can care for large herds for most of the year. Transhumance, vertical migration with the seasons, allowed far more people to inhabit the Alps by making use of the areas that were not suitable for agriculture.

4.     Pyramidal peaks or horns are tall, often triangular peaks that are shaped by glacial erosion. The permanent ice caps on mountains compress to form glaciers with complex, rotational pressure on them. These can drill out a cirque, a bowl shaped depression with a flatter lip the glacier flows over but a very steep headwall against the mountain. Three or four of these around a rise can erode a distinct peak with three relatively flat faces, the classic mountain peak most of us probably think of.

The Matterhorn by Stan Shebs

5.     The photo above is a satellite image of Mt Kilimanjaro, a volcano in the Rift Valley zone of East Africa. Unlike mountain ranges such as the Himalayas, Andes and Great Dividing Range this is a zone where a tectonic plate is splitting apart, rather than two pushing together. A large hot spot, like the one under Hawaii, pushes up continental crust and makes a dome. This splits into three rifts where the plate is being torn apart. There is a large dome under the Afar triangle in Ethiopia, the rifts are the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and East African Rift Valley.

As the plates are pushed apart magma comes up from below, forming new crust and fuelling volcanoes. Mt Kilimanjaro has three peaks, two are extinct and one dormant. It is also high enough to have a snow cap with glaciers that are around 11,700 years old. However since 1912 over 80% of the ice has melted, and at current rates it is expected to be ice free in the next 20 years.

And a quick general video on plate tectonics.

I‘ve always been a bit meh about natural and built landscapes. I mean it’s so obvious – do we seriously need to point this one out? But then a whole series of little things happened at once, as they do, and I realised that maybe it does need to be discussed. Not taught as such, because even toddlers work out the differences between plants and buildings pretty quickly, but part of the conversation – how do people change the environment? How is life different now to what it used to be? Don’t forget that as far as little kids are concerned the world has always been this way. And what messages are we subconsciously sending through our choices of images and activities?

When I look at my photos and craft, it is unrelentingly NATURE. I’m not certain why this is, although the fact that I choose to live in the middle of nowhere is probably a pretty good clue. But I ruthlessly crop photos and draw and paint trees, fish, flowers, butterflies or abstract patterns. No buildings or cars to be seen. And yet, I wouldn’t be here without the roads, power lines, cars and fences I don’t include. Air conditioning and houses. Schools.

Built things can be very, very good. And nature can be pretty darn annoying, as I run out and scare off the hawks for the umpteenth time today. So I set a little challenge – to include built things in our art and photos. To represent the world the way it is, rather than only bits and pieces of it. To stop treating some things as if they were bad and instead look at the whole. And to talk to my kids about it – how clever we are and how we have a responsibility to think.

The part of my backyard I usually crop. Home made piece-meal fences, the shadecloth is from an old chicken enclosure, the rest of it has been re-used. The rope across the gap is a temporary fence to stop horses coming into the house yard.

One thing that is unique about our place is that it is a hobby farm, and we inherited a truly mind-blowing amount of  stuff from the previous owners. There is an old climbing frame and part of a horse-yard in that picture as well.

The new chicken enclosure, mostly recycled materials. Star pickets, fences, a sheet of tin and some shadecloth. There is new bird netting for part of the roof and some new chicken wire fencing to fill in gaps and keep little chicks in. The bath wasn’t popular as a nest, but the old set of lockers is brilliant.

I’d love to have a pretty new enclosure and fences where everything matched, neat nests and roosts. I’m vaguely embarrassed by this one, because so much of it looks like it should be at the tip. But I’m secretly proud of the ingenuity and that we did it ourselves.

The cropped other half to one of last week’s sunset photos. You can see our shed, wheelie bin and the power poles marching along the road.

Big girl’s collage house and unfinished fence from one of our art sessions, my cityscape is up the top.

The built environment is here to stay. It’s mostly a good thing, or at least necessary because of our choices. And even if things aren’t pretty, they have history and reasons behind them that deserves to be shown as much as the lovely trees and clouds. My children need to learn about the whole environment, then they have a chance of seeing how things fit together and interact, and thinking critically about complex decisions.

It has come to my attention that some people think I can grow plants. In reality, I have a black thumb. I can germinate them, but then they always die, or go mouldy, or are blown away in a cyclone (seriously!) or are otherwise stunted and sickly.

So here I am very proudly showing off the first time ever I have had plants live long enough to produce flowers and baby tomatoes. I’ll be stoked if we get to eat any of them, but I’m not counting any chickens until they are bright red and in the salad. The girls are eating the basil leaves up the top already – they think they are being very sneaky. Which is hilarious, because in food they flatly refuse to go near herbs.

I think the secret to my success this time is that these plants seem to be bomb-proof. This one had a water bottle dropped on it and snap it off completely, and now it’s sprouting new leaves!

Usually I can’t keep them alive at any price, now I have zombie plants.

I live in one of the flattest areas of the flattest continent, so mountains are mainly pretty pictures to me.

1. What is the tallest mountain on earth?
2. What formed the Great Dividing range?
3. How did transhumance allow the Alps to be exploited?
4. How do pyramidal peaks or horns form?
5. What is shown in the satellite photo above?

Answers Friday

These pop up all the time, the moon has been just a little bit important in human history and we’ve had lots of time to tell myths about it. It would be nice to think that as a group we’ve grown out of werewolves and love spells, except we’re still doing it. There are new moon myths, given a modern spin with a bit of astronomy or biology, that are being spread around you right now, you possibly believe some of them yourself.

The moon has an affinity with water

Usually paired with the fact that people are 70% water, therefore the moon has a magical effect on us.

No. It just doesn’t.

This one obviously comes from the tides. The theory goes that if the moon is pulling water up towards it, then it must have an affinity sort of like a magnet with metal. In reality, water just moves easily because it’s a fairly light liquid.

Photo courtesy of Bidgee

The moon is very large and has a gravitational pull on the earth. It pulls whatever it happens to be above up towards it, whether that’s water or rock. There are land tides just like ocean tides, but they are so small they aren’t as noticeable. A couple of thought experiments tells you why.

First, think of balancing a bucket of water against a bucket of rocks. Gravity works on masses, and a given mass of rocks will be much, much smaller than the same mass of water. So less land moves than water for the same gravitational pull – it’s not an affinity with water, it’s just lighter than rocks.

Secondly, imagine lying underneath a balanced paddling pool and pushing up – you can easily make a large lump of water in the middle that sloshes out to the edges. Congratulations, you just modelled an ocean tide.  Now imagine lying underneath a large, balanced slab of rock and pushing up on it. How much does it move? That’s an earth tide.

There is no affinity with water. The moon pulls on all of earth equally, it’s just that water is lighter and moves more easily than rocks. You may be 70% water but you aren’t about to go floating into the air any time soon.

The Full Moon

This one gets mixed up with the last one, in some giant mishmash of water and light and tides and it just affects us.

Firstly, there is a relationship between the full moon and the tides. But there’s also a relationship between the new moon and tides, and people don’t get all excited about that one. Basically when the earth, sun and moon all line up, which is full and new moon, there are larger tides because the gravitational influence of the sun and moon add up. When the moon is out to the side at the first and third quarter then they cancel out and tides are lower.

But, werewolves! Cops! Hospitals! Lunatics! Things happen at the full moon!

That’s not what the stats say. Epilepsy, psychiatric emergencies, emergency room visits, surgery, crime, homicides, dog bites, births and suicides have all been studied. There have occasionally been positive results, but on further examination they are either inconsistent or there are statistical errors. In short, the moon does not affect our behaviour.

So why do so many people think they do? There are probably a couple of different psychological effects at work here.

• Confirmation bias - we remember or notice things that agree with what we already think. You have a busy night at work, look up as you are leaving and see a half moon and promptly forget about it. You have a busy night at work, look up and see a full moon and see?! It justifies what you thought all along! Full moons are terrible! Or the opposite happens – you know it’s going to be a full moon so you notice every little detail that you would normally brush away, thus confirming that full moons are hard work, even if it was just a normal night.
• Isolation effect - we remember things that stick out. A full moon is very noticeable, so it is more likely to be seen and remembered than a half moon or cloudy skies.
• Timing - I don’t know if this has a name or is just statistics. The moon is only completely full for one night, but for a few days on either side it’s pretty close if you’re just glancing at it. Then add a few more days when it’s nearly full. You can easily end up with over a week when people will happily attribute strange happenings to ‘the full moon.’ But then you realise that the lunar cycle is only 4 weeks long, so ‘over a week’ is a fair chunk of it. The chances of a strange event falling within that time are pretty high – between 25 and 50%. Which makes the most likely thing that it was just co-incidence.

There are no werewolves. There are no lunatics. And if there ever was a reason for bad guys to be out during the full moon a little invention called electric street lighting got rid of it long ago. There’s only our own minds tricking us and wanting to believe in something out of the ordinary.

The Supermoon

As far as I know this is the most recent of moon myths, only starting up a few years ago. It’s mainly a New Agey thing linked to the other ideas of the moon affecting us, as sometimes the moon is closer and brighter than normal, so it must have even more effect then!

The basis of it is true and has been known for a long time – the moon does get closer and further away. This is because it doesn’t orbit the earth in a perfect circle, but an oval. When it is closest to the earth it is called the perigee, furthest from the earth is called the apogee. Sometimes the full moon will line up with the perigee, roughly once a year. Astrologists and the media might call this a supermoon, astronomers do not.

It hasn’t been tied to any effects more than any other moon has – not at all. Remember the moon gets roughly this close to earth every month, even if it isn’t a noticeable full moon. And while there is a measurable difference in the appearance of the moon, as I pointed out the other day you probably won’t see it because we’re talking about millimetres.

Moon Landing Hoax

Just about every significant event in the last century seems to have attracted its own conspiracy theory, and the moon landing is no different. Every time an objection is answered another one seems to pop up, and there really isn’t a way to answer them – conspirators won’t take the word of the people who were actually there, and every film or photo can be dismissed as doctored by people determined not to believe.

But if you aren’t too far down the rabbit hole already there is plenty of evidence that NASA did reach the moon. My favourite starting point is Bad Astronomy, as you can see from the site design it’s old but it has been updated into a book and was the basis for the Mythbusters special. You may not trust the US government, but they didn’t fake the moon landings to put one over the Russians.

Conclusion

I like watching the moon, it’s pretty and my children like it. And I’m fascinated by what our modern myths and superstitions say about us – the way we think, how we construct knowledge and create patterns. Even how our distrust of particular groups plays out. Ultimately, I like that it reminds us that for all our technology, scratch the surface and we’re still the same as our ancestors who believed in magical spirits looking down on us.

We had another couple of days without internet which is why there was no quiz posted on Tuesday. Even the trusty 3G failed so no mobile devices either. It gave me an excuse for a trawl on YouTube to find some fun and interesting videos to share instead. An easy way to finish the week.

More maths than science but this is one of the big girl’s favourites – From They Might Be Giants, Triops Has Three Eyes.

Another TMBG, I like that this one can be done as a round. And as someone who struggles every week to make things simple but keep their accuracy, this is a pretty darn good explanation of shooting stars.

Enjoyable but esoteric, I’m impressed that someone put the time in for this. Taking a set of nonsensical letters and somehow making them fit a rhythm and melody then pronouncing them must have been a challenge. It’s actually the symbols of the periodic table of elements in order.

I love any excuse for pulling out the Symphony of Science.  These are amazingly well done, pulling out significant quotes that fit and the video adds to it. It’s not something I’m good at myself, but I love seeing different and artistic ways of exploring complex things.

It’s one of the classics – give children a pile of objects, such as newspaper, straws or pipecleaners, and tell them that they have to make a bridge across a gap that will carry a certain weight. I’m not suggesting you try that with little kids, but we did have a fun time trying to ‘get Barbie to the other side’ and I was impressed with the different suggestions the girls came up with.

So Daredevil Barbie went ballooning,

rode flying horses,

and swung across.

Bridges made it easier for her,

and a flat bridge was even better.

But then the cliffs crumbled and the gap got wider.

A nice level bridge meant even the cars could get across.

For some fun using only things you have lying around and some imagination, it lasted a long time and spawned lots of games. Plus there were lots of questions about ‘what do you think?’ and ‘would that work for us?’

We were outside on Sunday night so I grabbed the camera and got some shots of the spectacular moon rising. I didn’t grab the tripod, so sorry for the fuzziness.

This is an actual photo, not a white dot on a cheap graphics program. I need to learn about using the camera on manual if I’m going to do more of these.

I know there’s no scale on here to show how large the moon is, so I looked up some things on the ‘supermoon.’ It looks around 14% larger. Now the size of the moon changes according to how high it is, so I’m working with very rough figures here, but I make that about 3mm wider in diameter than it normally appears. Or maybe half a square centimetre larger area. NASA really needs to clarify what they mean by ‘larger’ because there are two completely different sizes we’re talking about here, even if they are all practically the same.

[Yes this is maths geeky and tangential. And how big the moon appears is completely irrelevant to pretty much everything. But putting numbers on something makes it sound official and important, so if you're going to do that you should at least tell us what the number relates to. How will we ever convince people that some numbers really are important when NASA of all places is giving out meaningless ones?]

Supermoon?

It was still pretty, as was the sunset in the opposite direction.

I think I can see a post on Moon Myths in the near future.

I didn’t start on purpose, but this is turning into a little series on how some of the things we use the most have developed and changed. So far I’ve looked at cheese and milk bottle packaging. I enjoy history and archaeology, and I think the way we use materials and the effects of social changes on our priorities is very interesting, when I put the schedule together it just happened. Today I’m going to look at the things we write on before they disappear into the past and the paperless office becomes reality.

Humans have been recording things for thousands of years – it’s part of being human to collect and pass information on, whether you think you are passing it to your relatives or the future. The first records that we can find are carved artefacts and cave paintings, but they must have been accompanied by a rich oral tradition. In order for oral cultures to work, knowledge is passed on far more formally than most of us imagine. The songs, chants and stories of traditional Aboriginal society weren’t just fun ways to pass the evening but contained a wealth of knowledge on how to survive in the area in good times and bad. The chants and social rules, along with traditional patterns, dances and drawings were directly taught mnemonics. It is possible that this type of mnemonic aid to oral systems is behind monumental architecture across the world, including Stonehenge.

At the same time, there is intriguing new evidence of symbols in cave art. Repetition of simple circles and triangles, use of symbols such as mammoth tusks, and double figures reminiscent of early pictographs seem to be common to different sites across France. It’s not epic prose, but rather the same type of reminders for oral traditions gradually becoming more like writing.

The earliest writing we know of was inventories and lists in Sumeria. This fits with the oral mnemonic idea – for relatively static and important information like the cycle of seasonal changes or animals in the area it makes sense to build a monument or a song cycle. But not for the amount of wheat you harvested this year. That type of ephemeral information is not something a large group of people need to learn and remember, so why not write it down. These early records were punched into clay with a stylus.

As records became more complicated and writing more important, something easier than clay was needed. In Egypt in the Nile delta there is a reed called papyrus. After cutting the outer rind off, the inner pith is sticky and can be cut into long thin strips. These were laid on a flat surface slightly overlapping each other. Then another set of strips were laid across the top in the other direction so there were fibres going both ways for strength. They were pressed together and hammered, then dried to form long scrolls. These worked well in a dry climate like Egypt, but in wetter Europe they soon rotted.

This is an early example of the pressure of monopolies and resource over-use. Papyrus reeds became increasingly over-harvested and scarce, eventually becoming extinct in Egypt (although they have now been re-introduced). The uncertainty of supply and reliance on a single source encouraged people to experiment with other media for recording.

A better alternative in Europe was parchment or vellum, made from sheep, goat or calf skin. They were treated differently to leather and not tanned, and they could be folded to make books rather than scrolls. They lasted far longer than papyrus and could be made anywhere. Skins contain a lot of collagen fibres and a natural glue, similar to the sticky, fibrous papyrus. They were treated in a variety of ways to allow ink to penetrate them.

Paper was invented in China around 105 AD, credited to a government official called Ts’ai Lun. He used basically the same technique you can use today, soaking finely cut rags and bark for fibres, then packing them onto a frame, pressing and drying them. It spread through imperial China, with many people experimenting with different fibres and coatings to produce paper for different purposes. As papermaking spread through Arabia and into Europe parts of the process were mechanised to make it easier and quicker.

For a long time paper was still made of old rags, but these could be difficult to come by. The Black Death ‘helped’ as it meant tons of rags and old clothes were available, right around the time printing presses became widely used. (Printing was also invented in China.) People searched for a substitute source of fibres, but the next step forward in paper production came from watching paper wasps. They chew up wood to produce their nests, and in 1843 Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented a wood grinding machine to make pulp. Only a few years later in 1854 Hugh Burgers and Charles Watt produced chemical wood pulp. Combined with the paper making machines of the industrial revolution, this allowed commercial scale paper production such as we have today.

Paper wasp by Sanjay Acharya

The paperless office was supposed to arrive a couple of decades ago, but I think we use even more now. Who knows, with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and storage in the cloud it might actually happen. That probably won’t be the end of paper, but it will move on to different uses. Waterproof papers for packaging, smart paper to detect heat and chemicals or embedded circuits for simple disposable machines might be the future of paper.

1.     Amphibians are the only group of animals with legs like us (bones, organs etc – the tetrapods) that are not adapted to have young on dry land. Although this breaks down a little because there are some who have live young, such as stomach-brooding frogs or some caecilians. It’s nice and simple for us to think of eggs or frogs as ‘primitive’ and live births as ‘advanced,’ but the world doesn’t obligingly do what we want. Even some of the egg layers provide parental care, moving their tadpoles and laying unfertilised eggs for them to feed on.

There are three types of amphibians, frogs and toads, newts and salamanders (which look like lizards), and caecilians. I’d never heard of caecilians before, but they are completely legless and look like worms or slippery snakes. Some of the features of amphibians are:

• They go through a larval stage with gills (although this might be inside a parent).
• Their eggs have a simple membrane and need to be in water or wet soil.
• Their skin doesn’t have scales or keratin to protect it, so it needs to stay moist. They can breathe through it, although they generally have lungs as well.
• They cannot maintain their body temperature above their surroundings, so their activity depends on high temperatures. The advantage is that they need less food because they don’t have to generate their own heat.
• Adults are carnivores.

2.     The thin skin is great to allow them to hibernate at the bottom of ponds, but it doesn’t give them protection from predators in the way scales or fur does. So all amphibians have developed toxins of some sort. This does not mean they are all poisonous to humans, but are aimed at their main predators. Some, such as the Golden Poison Frog are highly poisonous to humans.

Photo courtesy of H. Crisp

Many of the poisonous amphibians are brightly coloured to warn off predators, the same way butterflies and caterpillars are. Have a look at the video for some interesting colours.

Cane toads are the most commonly known poison amphibian in Australia. The eggs and tadpoles are extemely toxic, but young toadlets are not. It isn’t until they are mature that they start to produce their own toxin. Some crows have discovered that the belly skin does not have poison glands, and have been known to flip the toads over and eat them from the belly side.

3.     Newts are the only vertebrates capable of regenerating complex structures such as limbs. We have very limited regeneration ability, only being able to heal things like skin, the liver and some bones. Interestingly, children do appear to be able to regrow fingertips, and there have been isolated cases in adults as well.

4.     Modern amphibians tend to be small, with the largest up to around 50cm for toads with stretched legs. But in the past some were much bigger, even several metres long. There is nothing inherently ‘works better when small’ about amphibians, although certain shapes are needed for large, cold-blooded animals. During the Carboniferous they were the top land predators and filled the same niches as crocodiles today, with roughly the same size and shape. But during the Triassic reptiles and mammals evolved.

These two aren’t tied to the water in the same way as amphibians are, who need it for their young. Mammals and reptiles have eggs that take the water with them or hold it inside themselves and thick skin, which allowed them to move away from rivers and lakes. With so many more places to live, reptiles took over many of the larger niches and pushed amphibians into the smaller ecological zones.

5.     Up the top is an axolotl, or Mexican Walking Fish. They are a type of salamander that stays in the water their whole life, becoming sexually mature while they still looking and living like larvae. The frills behind its head are its gills, which are usually lost in adult amphibians. It’s a bit like a caterpillar that doesn’t bother turning into a butterfly. With great difficulty some can be forced to ‘grow up,’ but most die and the ones who change die far, far more quickly.

Staying like a juvenile while being sexually mature is quite common and is called neoteny (nee-O-tenee). It demonstrates that a small tweak in a genetic or developmental pathway can cause very large changes in the final adults, as you can see when you compare the Axolotl to the closely related Tiger Salamander adult.

Tiger Salamander by Carla Isabel Ribeiro

A neotenous animal we all know well are humans. So many of our features, from bones in our feet, to relative hairlessness, to teeth, to rapid brain growth are like juvenile apes rather than adults. I’m certainly not saying we’re just baby apes, but a general stretching of development and staying more like a juvenile has been very important in human evolution.

Brightly coloured poisonous frogs, rather than hiding they warn predators off.