bogleech: bogleech: bogleech: bogleech: I love what fleas look like from above vs. from the side I d
bogleech:bogleech:bogleech:bogleech:I love what fleas look like from above vs. from the sideI didn’t realize this was surprising to so many people!This lateral flattening allows the flea to “swim like a fish” through fur, aided by the many backwards-facing barbs and hairs along their sides.If you’ve ever tried to pick them off a dog or cat you’ve seen this in action, it really is like they’re gliding through a liquid environment and amazingly fast, hardly even using their legs to do it.This is also why they don’t have wings, which would get in the way of this trick, but they compensated with incredible jumping ability that may as well be flight.Hundreds of millions of years ago, though, fleas couldn’t jump and they were flattened top-down:This is because fleas were originally parasites of dinosaurs, and while dinosaurs often had feathers, feathers have a different density and the “fur swimming” wouldn’t have worked yet.The first fleas similar to today’s fleas probably began evolving towards the end of the dinosaur’s run, adapting to the increasing number of our ancestral mammals. Dinosaurs shrank into modern birds so rapidly, it seems, that their original fleas vanished entirely.So basically whenever you get bit by a flea, you caught that from a dinosaur.I was thinking about this again earlier and do that many people also know that a sperm whale’s mouth has the same flatness?every single cartoon and game assumes they have this huge wide gaping maw because I guess you usually see a side view and just assume there’s more of a third dimensionALSO IMPORTANT:They have only lower teeth, no upper teeth, and a teeny tiny throat. This set up is for slurping up squids like pasta and nothing else.Basically no big whale exists on our planet at all with the giant, open toothy mouth of Monstro. -- source link