When I was fishing on the West coast this summer I made a comment about how cool it would be to see some Orcas. The guides were like, "No, hopefully we don't see them. They can be tough to get away from in open water and if they want to flip your boat and find out if you're food, they will."
A shark with a less-than-ferocious mien was caught by marine biologists tagging and surveying sea life off the coast of Scotland.
The creature with the homely features is a false catshark (Psuedotrakias microdon), Dailymail reports. It's about 6 feet long and 132 pounds and was caught off the Isle of Barra.
Its lumpy look when lying still drove scientists to nickname it "sofa shark," as if the fish did not already have ample cause to harbor self-esteem issues.
In one of the great success stories of interspecies animal breeding, the coyote-wolf hybrid ‘coywolf’ can now count its numbers in the millions.
This new animal, which has emerged in the eastern part of North America over the last century or so, is better than both its predecessors.
At 25kg, it’s twice the size of a coyote; it has larger jaws and bigger muscles meaning it can take down deer; it’s equally adept at hunting in forests and open terrain.
It’s also got some dog in it, about a tenth. With 25 per cent wolf DNA, coyote is the dominant species, according to research by Javier Monzón from Stony Brook University in New York.
That dog DNA means it can get along with people better than either a wolf or coyote, and consequently it can increasingly be seen in urban environments.
What’s extraordinary about this isn’t that it came into existence - the changing landscape of the United States forced canines to broaden their mating horizons - but that it has multiplied so rapidly.
