over the past decade, pigmentation has been discovered in several dinosaur genera. here they are:
— anchiornis, a small four-winged aviraptoran, had black, gray, and white feathers with a red crest.
— sinosauropteryx, a compsognathid, had orange feathers with a mask and a lemur-like striped tail.
— archaeopteryx, widely regarded as the first bird, had at least some black flight feathers.
— microraptor, another avian intermediary, had iridescent black feathers akin to a blackbird's.
— caihong, a relative of anchiornis, had black and iridescent feathers as well.
— psitaccosaurus, a bipedal ceratopsian, had countershaded skin adapted to forest dwelling.
— and finally, nodosaurid boreopelta was reddish-brown and adapted for camouflage.

here is some really rad artwork i found that depicts a few of the colorful friends above!

Horses, in general, have very little problem handling even bitterly cold weather assuming they're well-fed. They have incredible thermoregulatory abilities and can survive just about anywhere. That isn't just down to body fat: a horse can just burn additional calories to ramp up their body temperature. Younger or malnourished horses might freeze to death in terrible weather, but a well-fed horse just... gets warmer.

Some cats change color! Cats who carry the colorpoint gene (siamese cats are the best example) get darker in the winter and lighter in the summer because their point markings are temperature-based, hence why they're in places that get cold -- nose, ears, feet, and tail! Interestingly though, if you raise a colorpoint cat in a warm enough place, they'll stay completely white* their entire lives, and the same goes for cold enough and being completely the color of their point (although that's harder to achieve without killing your cat unfortunately).


*the color appears to be white, but it's actually just a pale version of the colorpoint most of the time.

while people like to say chickens are a descendant of the T-rex, there is evidence to believe that ostriches also share that spotlight, and i feel like they deserve it more, they are terrifying

So this is something fairly interesting
In 1834, ketchup was sold as a cure for indigestion by an Ohio physician named John Cook. Tomato ketchup was popularized as a condiment commercially in the late 1800's and today Americans purchases 10 billion ounces of ketchup annually.

Ketchup as medicine. Huh!

If a nerve in your body is severed, it can be replaced with a nerve from another part of your body. This can help to return feeling to a damaged area.(knows about this from personal experience.)

you can't feed hamsters to snakes. hamsters are so god damn delicious that if a snake happens to eat one, it'll refuse to eat literally anything else and live on a diet purely of hamsters. if you don't want to feed your snake hamsters for the rest of its life then it just starves and dies

the first european to perform a successful c-section in africa (with both mother and child surviving) was most likely a trans man! he went to extensive lengths to make sure his birth gender wasn't identified and was only known to be female postmortem, which was discovered after his death certificate was declared.

(i don't know much my brain is filled with chests with very abstract keys)

also another siamese fact- it's linked to the gene that typically causes albinism! there are two separate point genes (burmese and siamese) that can be inherited together to create a third between the contrast of the two called mink or tonkinese.

Crows have been seen to be intelligent enough to copy tools!

Now, this not sound like much. Originally it was thought that crows could only learn, or that the knowledge was somehow hardwired into their genetics. But, its been observed that crows will substitute and ALTER parts of tools if they don't have the exact item, or possibly substitute one that would suit the current issue more!

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-crows-reverse-tools-memory.html

There is a gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius B2, that contains ethyl format, which makes it smell like rum and taste like raspberries! It also contains cyanide, however, so if you tried to test it, you'd probably die.