Tag Archives: Virginia Living Museum – Newport News

Packrat

Pack Rat

I’d never actually seen a packrat before. Very few zoos have rats*, and those that do tend to have them in nocturnal exhibits. So you often either get a photo of a sleeping ball of fur, or you get a dark blurry photo of an awake rat. These guys were a bit more cooperative and stood right in the light for me.

*Eell, OK, all zoos have rats. Very few of them are intentionally on exhibit.

Aenenome

Aenenome

This aenenome was about the size of a dime*.

* US *or* Canadian. They’re pretty much the same size in both countries**.

** Can you believe that only two countries have a dime coin? Turns out that the first people to suggest a decimal-based were Thomas Jefferson***, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton***, and David Rittenhouse in 1783. That’s right, the country that invented decimal money is one of the last in the world to adopt metric measurement.

*** Dude can rap like you wouldn’t believe.

Long Tailed Salamander

Long Tailed Salamander_2

This salamander is wondering why narrators are always talking about how this building or that can “be seen from space”.

“If we can see can see OGLE-2014-BLG-0124Lb, 76,422,100,000,000,000 miles* away, seeing something from orbit is nothing to brag about.
Even factoring in relative sizes, at half the mass of Jupiter, assuming similar density, OGLE-2014-BLG-0124Lb would have a diameter of 68,957.812 miles.
So, from a low earth orbit of 200 miles up, you should be able to see things that are 0.0000000001805 miles wide. That’s 0.00001143 inches … smaller than a human hair.”

Salamanders think they understand satellite imagery, but they really don’t.

* Converted to Western measurement for American readers. Salamanders still work in aṅgulas.