› added 4 months ago

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TIL of the saola aka 'the Asian unicorn'. It is one of the world's rarest large mammals and is a forest-dwelling bovine native to Vietnam and Laos. It was first described and photographed in 1993. Saolas have since been kept in captivity multiple times, but they died within weeks and months.

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wowQ8 TIL Biting insects continue to be used as sutures in parts of Africa and South America. The edges of the wound are brought together, and an ant is allowed to bite through both ‘lips’; when its jaws are firmly locked, the insect’s thorax and abdomen are broken off, leaving the head and jaws.
d8oaj TIL that even though seed-bearing plants evolved ~360 million years ago, all plants that bare flowers or fruits have only existed for the past ~140 million years. Before seeds, plants used to reproduce through spores. The only living ancestors of these plants are ferns, horsetails, lycophytes.
VO5B TIL In Australia, cavities in the ground left by fossils will sometimes fill with a liquid containing dissolved opals. When the liquid evaporates, the opal remains, forming opalised fossils. The best example of this is a 6m long Plesiosaur skeleton, completely made of opal (more sources in comments)
LQvdm TIL As a teenager Bernhard Riemann finished all 900 pages in Legendre's book on the Theory of Numbers in six days. Riemann later challenged what the dimension of real space was and what geometry described real space, ideas too far ahead of its time to be appreciated by most scientists of that time
a8o7M TIL that famous BBC DJ John Peel loved the song 'Teenage Kicks' by The Undertones so much he had the first line engraved on his tombstone