Photo by Fausto García on Unsplash Right now, giraffes are the tallest animals on Earth. Growing to a height of up to 6m, they're huge, right!? Now, imagine 3 giraffes all stood on top of eachother. Seems silly but that's the estimated height of the tallest dinosaur – Sauroposeidon [1]. Animals of this size haven't roamed the Earth since the extinction of the sauropod dinosaurs ~145 million years ago, not even the more recently extinct megafauna were so big. Now, why is that? What made the dinosaurs so special that they were able to grow so large? One suggestion as to how these creatures managed to tower over others is that they were, well, full of air. Okay, maybe not quite ‘full’, but the fossilised bones of various dinosaur species have shown evidence of pneumatisation (the presence of air). Sauropods especially have been found to have had a large number of air sacs in their vertebra. What does this have to do with height? Well, the presence of air sacs in
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash I’ll hold my hands up and say it – I’m scared of bees. Yes, I know it’s silly, they’re kinda cute and they’re incredibly important pollinators, but stinging, flying insects are a still a no from me. Despite this fear, I do think that bees are pretty darn cool! Honeybees, of the genus Apis , are eusocial insects, meaning they have a high level of organised sociality. The characteristics needed for an insect to be considered eusocial are as follows: Cooperative brood care Division of labour (reproductive/non reproductive groupings) Overlapping of generations But we’ll cover the whole eusociality thing in more detail some other time (it’s fascinating!) Honeybees are actually able to communicate through two forms of dance, known as the waggle dance and the round dance, which are currently the only forms of symbolic communication known to exist in invertebrates. The waggle dance is used to point other members of the hive to valuable reso