Deserts! Lizards, rattlesnakes, and cacti come to mind. Can anything else survive? Yes! Many animals have either learned how to cope or come equipped with ingeniously designed systems to “beat the heart.” Many animals cope by avoiding the heat as much as possible. They limit activity to the cooler morning or evening hours, and spend much of the day in a cool, moist burrow or in the shade of rocks or vegetation. Others minimize heat absorption by aligning themselves...
Read MoreArcherfish – God’s Sharpshooters
From the waters of Southeast Asia comes a strong testimony of the Creator’s ability to provide His creatures with all the necessary tools for survival. The intriguing archerfish has a unique method of catching its food. With amazing accuracy, it aims and fires its sniper weapon at an unsuspecting bug crawling on a leaf of a bush high above a pool of water. When the pulsating beads of water hit the mark (and the fish rarely misses up to 4 feet away), the bug falls off the...
Read MoreA Mammoth Problem
From the pages of the encyclopedias we are apt to read that mastodons and mammoths were ancient relatives of today’s elephants which have been extinct for about 10,000 years. This has been accepted by virtually all the “experts” today and consequently is taught at all levels of education. There are other experts, however, who suggest that these great creatures have been extinct for not more than a few hundred years. Many of these experts are historians who have read...
Read MoreManufacturing Body Parts
I was just given a link to information on amazing research that has been going on for quite a while. I had heard about portions of the research, but huge advancements have been made recently. The research involves making replacement body parts such as lungs, hearts, livers, kidneys, etc. The video shows the results of a successful replacement transplant of a woman’s damaged windpipe using the patient’s own cells that were grown over a precise scaffold of protein. At this...
Read MoreLiving Fossils
Living on this earth are some interesting creatures which, according to evolutionary theory, “should have” been extinct millions of years ago, yet they live on, virtually unchanged. Some of these include the opossum, the horseshoe crab, the snapping turtle, the cockroach, the platypus, and the famous coelacanth. The coelacanth is a strange fish that was thought to have become extinct along with the dinosaurs over 70 million years ago. It was known only from fossils until...
Read MoreMale Praying Mantis: Plight or Passion?
Personally, praying mantises give me the “creeps.” I am not like a friend of mine who, as a child, kept a praying mantis named, “Barbara” in his bedroom. To me, there has always been something sinister and austere about them. After reading about their reproductive habits, I had more reason to feel this way. As a part of the mating process, the male praying mantis is actually eaten by the female! If a male is lucky, the female will wait until during or after the ritual...
Read MoreThe Amazing Platypus
When specimens of the duckbill platypus were first sent to England in the late 1700’s, many English scientists thought it was a fraud. It plainly didn’t fit well in any of the categories of animals known at that time. Was it a bird, a reptile, a mammal or a combination of all of these? The platypus is an extremely interesting creature. It has fur like a mammal but it lays soft, leathery eggs like a reptile. Usually 1-3 eggs are laid in a nest built by the mother...
Read MoreAnts and Antifreeze
Pun intended, but ants really do produce antifreeze, too! Yep, it gets cold out there in the ground under a blanket of snow. Since the ants don’t have their own central heating systems, they need to have a way to keep from freezing during the winter. So the colder it gets, the more antifreeze is actually produced. Did this ability happen by chance over millions of years by mutation and natural selection as our evolutionist friends would claim? Scientists have long...
Read MoreAntarctic Fish with Antifreeze!
Think of how many times we have said, “It sure is cold this winter. Global warming nothing — it isn’t happening here!” Sometimes it would seem our blood is ready to freeze in our veins. So we crank up the heat in the house and head for the auto store to get extra antifreeze for the car. We throw extra blankets on the bed and snuggle in with a good issue of Think & Believe for comfort! Bears hibernate in their dens and other animals put on thicker fur coats, but what...
Read MoreThe Marine Iguana
Marine iguanas are found only on the Galápagos Islands located in the Pacific Ocean near Ecuador, South America. They are the only lizards that are able to live and feed in the sea. Marine iguanas are vegetarians. They feed on seaweed and algae which they find on rocks, in tidal pools, or in the sea. The adult males can grow to over 5 feet long and the females up to almost 4 feet. On land, marine iguanas are rather clumsy lizards, but in the water they are powerful,...
Read MoreBee Dances and Communication
Years ago, I saw a very interesting Moody Science film featuring the Dance of the Bees. Research first analyzed by Martin Lindauer 60 years ago showed that bees actually communicate by doing a type of energetic and vibrating waggle dance. This communicates the direction and the distance to a food source to other bees. (I wondered if they could actually talk but were just having fun doing some kind of charades at a bee party.) More recently, the Sept. 27, 2010, New York...
Read MoreMore “Living Fossils”
For the Laotian Rock Rat it was a day like any other. Then the men started chasing him. Running for his life, he was determined not to end up in a meat market like the rest of his family. Finally, he tired and was captured. Instead of knives, however, these men carried cameras. After some pictures, he was gently returned to the rocks from which he was taken. What was the occasion? Why the special treatment? Meanwhile, deep in the Coral Sea, an innocent shrimp-like...
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Friends - Richard's Life was Changed!! - And this is why he is leading AOI's Colorado Family Camp! Join us July 30 - Aug 4 - conta.cc/3X4JroB pic.twitter.com/u8j1AP1Pmu
