Hey kids, can you think of something an animal makse that can stretch 1½ times its original size, is incredibly lightweight, and is stronger that steel? The answer is spider silk!

Spiders are amazing animals. Although there is one vegetarian species of spider we know of, most spiders are deadly predators. They stalk prey on their eight legs, and when they catch a juicy insect, they wrap it up in silk, pierce it with their fangs, and pump it full of deadly venom. The venom paralyses the prey, and the spider uses a special digestive fluid, like stomach acid, to turn the insides of the insect into a liquid that the spider can slurp up as a snack!

Most spiders have four pairs of eyes – two big eyes and six little eyes – that they use to help them spot their prey. Jumping spiders leap for their prey, and can jump up to 50 times the length of their bodies! That would be like you making a jump of about 76 metres, or 250 feet!

Trapdoor spiders dig a hole in the ground and then cover it with a lid on a hinge of spider silk. They hide inside the hole, and when an unsuspecting insect wanders by, they leap out and grab it!

But one of the most amazing and interesting facts about spiders is that they can spin a web of sticky strands to catch their prey. When an insect gets stuck in a web, vibrations the trapped insect make send a message through the web to the spider telling it exactly where to find the intruder.

Spider silk is incredible stuff. If you make a wire out of steel as thin as a strand of spider silk, the spider silk is stronger. The steel would snap under pressure, but the spider silk can stretch up to 1 ½ times its size, and it’s so light that if you stretched spider silk into a strand long enough to wrap around the whole Earth, it would only weigh 450 grams!

But silk isn’t just used for hunting. Baby spiders make non-sticky silk into a parachute that lets them drift around on the wind. Spiders attach themselves to their webs with a strand of dragline silk, that catches them if they fall just like a bungee cord. They can even make a stiff, hard kind of silk to wrap up a sac of eggs that will hatch into thousands of baby spiderlings.

Here are some more interesting facts about spiders:

The Goliath Bird-Eating Tarantula sounds scary, but it’s pretty harmless to humans. In fact, a tarantula bite is about as bad as a bee sting. But this spider is the biggest in the world — as big as a dinner plate! It can shoot sharp, irritating hairs from its body at anything it thinks is a danger (including humans), hisses at a threat so loudly that you can hear it 15 feet away, and can eat anything from beetles to frogs, small snakes, lizards, bats, and even climbs into nests to grab baby birds!

The smallest spider in the world is almost impossible to spot. It’s called Patu digua, from Borneo, and it’s so small at 0.37 mm that it would easily fit on the head of a pin!

The most venomous spider in the world actually has a Guiness World Record. The Brazilian wandering spider has venom so dangerous that a tiny drop, only 0.006 mg, is enough to kill a mouse!

Post by Sarah

Everyone knows that all the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, right? Wrong! The truth is, dinosaurs are alive and well today, and living in disguise – right in your own backyard.

How is this possible? It’s possible because living things change over very long periods of time. Think about your own family. You have great-great-great-great-great-great-(lots of greats) grandparents who lived hundreds, or even thousands of years ago. They may have looked different from you, lived in a different place than you, or spoken a different language, but they are still your ancestors. They are still a part of your family.

And as it turns out, dinosaurs have a very large family.

We’ve known a lot about dinosaurs for a while now, because they left behind some fun facts for us to find, like clues in an ancient treasure hunt. After millions of years, the traces that the dinosaurs left behind turn into rocks, or fossils. We found fossil nests that tell us dinosaurs laid eggs with hard shells. We found fossil footprints that tell us dinosaurs walked on three toes. We even found fossilised dinosaur poop that tells us what the dinosaurs used to eat.

But one of the most exciting dinosaur discoveries happened in the province of Liaoning in China, at the site of an ancient lake. Palaeontologists, or scientists who study fossils, discovered the impression of feathers on the skeleton of a velociraptor. This tells us that some dinosaurs evolved the ability to fly!

It turns out that feathers have been around for millions of years. Feathers are really just very highly developed scales, and a lot of dinosaurs had them. In fact, because most of Tyrannosaurus Rex’s very close dinosaur relatives had feathers, some palaeontologists now believe that baby Tyrannosauruses had a coating of downy feathers, like a baby chick. Somehow, T-Rex doesn’t seem as scary if you picture him covered in baby fuzz, does he?

From the clues that palaeontologists have uncovered, downy feathers would have been the first kind of feathers dinosaurs developed. Generations later, some of those downy feathers would have started sticking together and becoming bright and colourful. They still wouldn’t have been any good for flying, but would have been great for showing off and putting on spectacular displays. This is what velociraptors probably used their feathers for; at the size of a turkey, they were far too big to get off the ground! Finally, generations after the first display feathers, our fossil evidence shows strong feathers with the right shape and size for flight.

Have you figured it out yet? What animals do you know of that lay hard-shelled eggs in a nest, walk on three toes, and fly on wings with feathers? You guessed it – birds! Birds are the last surviving members of the dinosaur family. They may look different, sound different, and move differently than their ancient relatives, but they are still part of the family. They’re still dinosaurs.

So next time you feed the ducks at the park, or watch a flock of geese flying overhead, remember: there are dinosaurs in your backyard.

Post by Sarah