– – When something has more than four legs, it generally tends to inspire a cringe factor. Something with 750 legs would definitely then register high on the creepy and gross-out scale, and this little beauty is so compact as well; a white millipede named Illacme plenipes, which is Latin for “the pinnacle plentiful feet,” and measures a mere 1 – 3 centimeters long.
Found only in a small area of Northern California and looking like a thread, the millipede also boasts a rudimentary fused mouth with no known function, and hairs on its back that produce a silk-like product.
A useless mouth, and 750 legs (at least in the females)! A related species in Puerto Rico only has 742. I thought you’d get a kick out of that…
– – Shut up and eat your creamed spinach! New research has suggested that early human ancestors in central Africa 3.5 million years ago ate a diet of mostly tropical grasses and sedges before evolving a taste for meaty flesh.
– – We had earlier posted on how a Beluga whale had learned to imitate human speech, and now we may add the Asian elephant to the list of species capable of mimicking speech…in Korean, yet! 
– – We all know that parrots and mynah birds can mimic human speech. A memorable Far Side cartoon depicted a carload of cows driving past a field of wandering humans, one cow leaning out the window and mocking the “yackety-yack” speech of people. Well, it seems that we can add another species to the short list of those now know to be capable of speech mimicry..the beluga whale!
– – A not-so giant mammoth excavated from the Siberian permafrost in late September 2,200 miles northeast of Moscow near the Sopochnaya Karga cape was a 16-year-old at the time of his death who stood two meters tall (6’6″) and weighed 500 kilograms (1,100 lbs). He was named Jenya after the 11-year-old Russian boy who found the animal’s limbs sticking out of the frozen mud. Jenya was missing a left tusk, a fact which handicapped him for fighting and may have contributed to his early death tens of thousands of years ago.
– – Just when the Jurassic Park films had us hoping for such a real-life scenario, it turns out to be virtually impossible owing to the calculated half-life of DNA, which figures out to be only around 521 years. 
– – They sound like the perfect subject for a Saturday night original movie on the Syfy Channel: The Vampire Squid from Hell (Vampyroteuthis infernalis). They rather look like a bad movie monster, too, having a type of cloak-like webbing, unusually large deep blue or red eyes, and light-producing organs covering its entire body which it can flash! 
– – I, for one, will sleep more easily tonight knowing that engineers have finally built a better worm! Your tax dollars have been hard at work as engineers have created a robot that mimics a worm’s movements, and is capable of crawling along surfaces by contracting segments of its body.
FOXSYLVANIA 
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