search terms

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You can tell I got tired of messing with my zoo pics......  I still have one more post's worth of critters to process, so I can show them to you.

In the mean time, I've been trying to catch up in Emergence of Life. 

I've been thinking it would be fun to look at my search history.  I downloaded an add-on to Firefox that lets me see and control my online history better.

Here's a week's worth of searches:

Here we go through my last week of searches, from most recent to oldest.................

ungulate:  Did you know that "ungulate" is about feet?  I thought it was about eating (like "ruminant," I guess), so I was surprised to learn "ungulate" means "hoofed animal."

rabbit dentition:  The Emergence of Life (hereafter to be referred to as EoL for this post) lecture on groups of mammals said that lagomorphs (rabbits) have two sets of incisors on top.  Having only ever observed one set, in all the pics of rabbits I've seen, I wondered.  It seems rabbits have a second set of incisors, called "peg teeth," directly behind (inside the mouth) the incisors we can see.  Who knew.

prototheria:  We were learning about the groupings of mammals in EoL.  Living mammals are divided into Prototheria, Metatheria and Eutheria.  Theria is "wild beast,"  "proto" is "first" (platypus and echidna), "meta" is "changed" (marsupials), and "eu" is "true" (placental mammals).  It really helps me remember what these words mean, when I know what they mean.  If you know what I mean.  ;-)

For the sizes of the ancient elephants and rhinos, I wanted images I could post, which is why I was looking in Wikimedia commons.  I already knew the name of the enormous rhino (paraceratherium) from seeing the image in class, but had to diddle about to find a similar image of elephants.......  It wasn't till I looked for mastodons AND mammoths that I found an image similar to the rhino one.

In EoL he showed us a map showing the depth of sediment at the bottom of the ocean.  He didn't talk about the depth of the sediment, but he talked about how core samples of that sediment are a history of the Earth's climate.  Different sorts of one-celled critters thrive in different conditions, so if we know which critters proliferated at which times, we know what conditions (temperature, for example) prevailed at those times.

Ischium is one of the bones that makes up a pelvis.  Dinos were grouped into ornithischians and saurischians (bird-hipped and lizard-hipped, respectively).  Birds descended from lizard-hipped (saurischian) theropod (beast foot) dinos like velociraptor and T. rex.  I was looking up the spelling of "ischium"...........

I was wondering if all theropods were bipedal.  The answer is "no."  Nor were all bipedal dinos theropods (hadrosaurs were not only not theropods, but were ornithischians, not saurischians).

Prefix "syn" means "together," like "synonym" means "two words with the same meaning."  I was wondering why there were ANapsids (no "arches" [openings through the skull behind the eye sockets]) and DIapsids (2 "arches"), and SYNapsids (why not "MONOapsids" or something?  What DOES "syn" mean???).  Another example of wanting to know what it *means* because that helps me remember what it means..........  Sometimes Wikipedia entries give the derivation of a word at the beginning of an entry, and sometimes they don't.  The entry for "synapsid" does not.

I did a bunch of looking around for a clear description (or image) of how sound gets from the outside, through a turtle's skull, to the inside.  I found info about how turtles don't hear as well as mammals (no external ear, for one thing), and I heard/read that turtles get a good deal of their perceived vibration from their bodies (bone structure) rather than through their ears, but I remain unsatisfied that I understand anything about turtle hearing as well as I'd hoped I would.  I'd call this a "fail" to find what I wanted to know.  That's the only "fail" on this list......

Alas, I do not remember why I looked up "diapsid."  But since I looked it up a mere seven minutes after I looked up "piscivore," I bet it was for the same blog post.

"Piscivore" was for my post about the pterosaur at the Toledo Zoo -- I wasn't sure how to spell it.

I looked up Lucas the kid elephant because I couldn't remember how old he is.

I looked for "e acute" so I could spell Renée with her proper accent.

I looked up the cattle at the zoo because I couldn't remember that they were WATUSI cattle.

I wasn't sure how to spell "forfend."

I like to check out the animals that are available for adoption at my local shelter.  Just looking.  Imagining.  I am NOT serious about any more pets.

Whenever we get any prescription meds, I look them up to make sure that what we got is what we are supposed to have.  Especially when the size/shape changes from one refill to the next.  One of Bert's meds changed from round to "caplet," so I wanted to make sure we got the right thing at the right dose.  We did.

Mainstreet Motors are a bunch of nice, friendly guys who are taking good care of our cars.  I needed to make an oil-change appt, so I looked up their phone number.

An image of part of the article about chunking appeared in one of the videos for Learning How to Learn.  I wanted to read the article, so I googled it up............



And that's my most recent week's worth of searches!

Isn't it lovely to be able to look up all this stuff?  I am charmed and delighted that it is so easy for me to expand my knowledge and horizons in this way!  I have always had a million questions on the tip of my tongue.

How totally excellent that now I can answer essentially all of them in a minute with a few keystrokes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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