 Lodge, T.S. (2017) 5 facts about elephant shrew.
Retrieved from
God created everything including living and non-living things.
This made up a complex relationship between human and ani-
mals. Animals are used for variety of purposes such as providing
food, acting as companion and using for scientific research. As
humans developed their skills, they started to domesticate ani-
mals. Livestock are domesticated animals raised in an agricul-
tural setting to produce commodities such as food, fiber and la-
bor.
As you go through the pages of this issue, be amaze with differ-
ent species that are rare, and weird but special. Other exciting
articles also await you inside!
EDITORIAL STUFF
Editor-in-Chief
Contributors / Logistics
https://africageographic.com/blog/5-facts-elephant-shrews/
 Elephant shrews face habitat fragmentation. Retrieved from https://
www.awf.org/wildlife-conservation/elephant-shrew
 Haiman, A.N.K (2015) Creature Feature: Panda Ant. Retrieved from
https://theethogram.com/2015/06/01/featured-creature-panda-ant/
 Mystery creature revealed – the panda ant. Retrieved from http://
sciencewows.ie/blog/panda-ant/
 Bernes, A. Panda Ants may look cute but they’re poisonous enough to
kill cows. Retrieved from http://boredomtherapy.com/panda-panda-
panda-panda/
 10 steps to save mother earth. Retrieved from https://
www.krautsource.com/blogs/news/10-steps-to-save-mother-earth
 Lanese, N. (2019) Lionfish: Beautiful and Dangerous Invaders. Re-
trieved from
 https://www.livescience.com/64533-lionfish.html
 Pappas, S. (2013) Phallus Worm fossils may be evolutionary missing
link, scientist say. Retrieved from https://
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/phallus-worm-
fossils_n_2868828.html
 Frontier Gap. (2018) 16 Unique facts about 16 unique animals. Re-
trieved from https://www.thedodo.com/16-amazing-animal-facts-
1094218100.html
 Smith, B. (2018) Ancient butchered rhino suggest human lived in the
Philippines 700,000 years ago . Retrived from https://
www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-05-03/ancient-rhinoceros-
humans-philippines-palaeontology-archaeology/9714634
 Laubscher, Dr. T. (2015) Basic Facts about rhinoceroses. Retrieved from
https://defenders.org/rhinoceros/basic-facts
 BASIC FACTS ABOUT RHINOCEROSES
Rhinoceroses are the largest land mammals after the elephant. There are
five species of rhinos, two African and three Asian. The African species
IN THIS ISSUE
are the white and black rhinoceroses, and both species have two horns.
Asian rhinos include the Indian (or great one-horned rhinoceros) and the Amazing Rare Animals
Javan, each with one horn, and the Sumatran, which has two.
You Need to Know
DIET
Rhinos are herbivores, meaning they eat only plants. White rhinos, with their 4
8
square-shaped lips, are ideally suited to graze on grass. Other rhinos prefer to
eat the foliage of trees or bushes.

REPRODUCTION
Males and females frequently fight during courtship, sometimes leading to seri-
ous wounds inflicted by their horns. After mating, the pair go their separate
14
ways. A calf is born 14 to 18 months later. Although they nurse for a year, calves
are able to begin eating vegetation one week after birth.
12
Incredible Fossils
Ever Unearthed

Rhinos use their horns Rhino horns are made

16
not only in battles for
of keratin – the same
territory or females, but
also to defend them- substance that makes
18
selves from lions, tigers up human hair and
and hyenas.
fingernails 19
 Elephant Shrew
The new fossil haul isn't the first to be found on Luzon: a US team
found animal bones and stone tools back in the 1950s.
From these, palaeontologists suspected humans colonised the Phil-
The four-toed elephant shrew is one of the most widespread of the species, ippines back in the Middle Pleistocene, between around 780,000 and
occurring from Central and Eastern Africa to the Northeastern corner of South Afri-
ca. covered by leaf litter. The checkered elephant shrew is found in Central Africa;
120,000 years ago. But without accurate dating, they couldn't be
the golden-rumped elephant shrew is endemic to Kenya; the grey-faced shrew is sure. So the firmest earliest date for the human occupation in the
confined to two forests in Tanzania, and the black and rufous elephant shrew is Philippines was pegged at around 67,000 years ago, thanks to a foot
found in East Africa. Smaller elephant shrew species can be found in the uplands of
bone belonging to a Homo species found in a cave in Luzon's north.
southern, eastern, and northwestern Africa, in dry forests, scrub, savannas, and
open country covered by sparse shrubs of grass. In 2013, a team of palaeontologists including Dr van den Bergh,
Scientific Name Rhynchocyon cirnei knowing that fossils had been found in the area before, started exca-
vating in a valley in the neighbouring Kalinga province.
Weight 25 to 700 grams de-
pending on the spe- Three-quarters, in fact — the most intact skeleton found of the now-
cies extinct Rhinoceros philippinensis. Intriguingly, 13 of its bones
Size
showed clear cut marks. Two leg bones looked like they had been
22 to 30 centimeters
long smashed — one was completely shattered — presumably to get at
Life Span 2 to 4 years the marrow inside.

Habitat
The team also found other animal remains alongside stone tools, in-
Dense forest to open
plains cluding an extinct elephant called the stegodon, deer and monitor
Diet Insectivorous lizards. To find out how old their finds were, the researchers enlist-
ed the help of labs to deduce the age of the sediment surrounding
Gestation 45 to 60 days the artefacts, as well as directly dating a rhino tooth. Volcanic miner-
als gave a maximum age of 1 million years. The tooth and sediment
Predators Snakes, birds of prey, grains turned up dates of around 700,000 years, plus or minus
various carnivores 70,000.
 Early humans called the Philippines home as
far back as 700,000 years ago — and it ap- Elephant Shrew
pears they had an appetite for rhinoceros, ac-
cording to newly discovered fossils.
Elephant shrews are not, in fact, shrews.
A nearly complete fossilised rhinoceros Recent evidence suggests that they are more
skeleton was unearthed, with some bones closely related to a group of African mammals
showing signs of butchering. that includes elephants, sea cows, and aard-
varks. Elephant shrews (also called sengis) are
(Supplied: George Lyras) represented by a single family, the Macrosce-
lididae, including four genera and 19 living spe-
cies.
Hundreds of stone tools and animal bones, including the
They take their name from their long
best part of a rhino skeleton showing signs of butchering,
pointed head and very long, mobile, trunk-like
were unearthed on the island of Luzon.
nose. They have rather long, legs for their size,
Published in the journal Nature today, they push the date which move in a hopping fashion like rabbits.
of human occupation in the archipelago back hundreds of They have a hunchbacked posture and a long,
thousands of years. scaly tail. A gland on the underside of the tail
produces a strong scent used to mark territo-
Precisely who these rhino-eating colonisers were remains a ries. This musky smell serves as a deterrent
mystery, said study co-author Gert van den Bergh, a pal- against many carnivores.
aeontologist at the University of Wollongong, but there's
little chance they were of our species, Homo sapiens.
"This remains speculative because we don't have fossils
yet, but the dates pre-date modern humans," he said.
Even without fossils of the toolmakers themselves, the
work fits in with evidence of early humans on nearby
South-East Asian islands of Flores — home of Homo flo-
resiensis or the Hobbit — and Sulawesi, according to Gil-
bert Price, a palaeontologist at the University of Queens-
land who was not involved with the study.
 RHINOCEROS
PHILIPPINESIS

Ancient butchered rhino suggests

humans lived in the Philippines
700,000 years ago
1. Elephant shrews are 4. Females have a
only found in Africa, where similar menstrual cycle
they are widespread though to humans, though ges-
not particularly common tation is only 45-60
anywhere.
 Stone tools and animal remains,
days. Litters are quite
including a nearly a complete an-
2. They are so-called
small with between one
and three youngsters.
cient rhino skeleton, were found on
because of their rather the island of Luzon in the Philip-
long and flexible noses 5. As well as eating in- pines
looking superficially
vertebrates and sundowner  The fossils were dated to around
similar to an elephant’s snacks, elephant shrews al-
700,000 years old, which pre-dates
trunk. so eat fruits, seeds and modern humans
3. They’re also known as
leaves. Females carry food
in their cheek pouches
 How these early humans and ani-
sengis and aren’t in fact re- when their young are mals arrived at the island is un-
lated to shrews at all, but weaned after around five known, but they may have been
are a species on their own. days. carried across by a tsunami
 5 Unique Facts About Why is the golden rumped elephant shrew
5 Unique Animals endangered?
1. The heart of a
The golden-rumped elephant shrew is clas-
shrimp is located
sified as endangered largely due to a frag-
in its head.
mented forest environment and anthropo-
genic factors. Their most notable popula-
3. The finger- tion is in the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest in
prints of a koala 2. A snail can Kenya. They are subject to being caught in
are so indistin- traps, but are not targeted for a source of
sleep for three food because of its poor taste
guishable from
humans that they years.
have on occasion
been confused at
a crime scene. 4. Slugs have four
noses.
5. Elephants
are the only
animal that The mating period for elephant shrewslasts for several
can't jump. days. After a pregnancy gestation period (the time the
babies remain in the mother's body), varying from 45 to
60 days, females give birth to a litter of one to three
young. She may have litters several times a year.

There are some really cute insects out there, and one
genus of especially cute insects is the genus Euspinolia,
called the Panda Ants. Panda Ants are actually not ants at
all, but instead are wasps of the family Mutillidae, com-
monly called the Velvet Ants. The Panda Ant was first de-
scribed to science in 1938 and is found in dry coastal regions
of Chile. Like many wasp species, and unlike true ants, Pan-
da Ants do not live in colonies and also do not have queens
and drones and workers. Panda Ants get their name from
the dramatic black and white coloration of the females.
However, don’t get too comfortable around a Panda Ant be-
cause they get their other common name of Cow Killer Ants
from the incredibly painful sting they can deliver from their
unusually long and maneuverable stinger.
‘Phallus’ Worm Fossils
May Be Evolutionary
Missing Link,
Scientists Say
An overlooked link
The links between these two groups are mysterious, but now scientists
from the Royal Ontario Museum, the University of Cambridge and the
University of Montreal say they may have found the connection in the
Burgess shale. This formation in the Canadian Rockies holds fossils
from the middle Cambrian Period, about 505 million years ago.
Previously, the oldest acorn worms, or enteropneusts, dated back about
300 million years, said study researcher Jean-Bernard Caron, the cura-
tor of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
But the 505-million-year-old Burgess shale held enteropneusts much
older than that.
A modern pterobranch, Rhabdopleura normani. Each of these tube-dwelling worms
is only 0.02 inches (0.5 mm) long.
In fact, the specimen, now named Spartobranchus tenuis, is one of the
most common fossils found in the Burgess shale, Caron told LiveSci-
ence. Smithsonian Institution paleontologist Charles Walcott first report-
ed the discovery of the worms in 1911. [See Photos of the Phallic Worm]
“He just wrote three lines about this worm,” Caron said. “He was not
sure what it was. And basically nothing was done since.”
 PHALLUS– SHAPED
WORM FOSSIL
A fossilized Spartobran-
chus tenuis from the Bur-
gess shale in Canada. The
animal contains features of
modern acorn worms and
modern tube worms called
pterobranches
Pterobranches are part of a
group called the hemichordates,
along with another bunch of
wormy sea creatures called en-
teropneusts, or acorn worms.
But while pterobranches are tiny
and stay in one place, filter-
feeding from colonies of tubes
on the seafloor, solitary acorn
worms move about in burrows,
feeding on organic material that
drifts down to the ocean floor.
The fossils, more than 9,000 speci-
mens in all, reveal a wormlike animal
with an “elongate posterior trunk ending
in a bulbous unit,” as researchers de-
scribe it in this week’s issue of the jour-
nal Nature. The animal appears to be a
transition in the evolution of wormlike
tube feeders known as pterobranches.
Pterobranches are part of a group
called the hemichordates, along with
another bunch of wormy sea creatures
called enteropneusts, or acorn worms.
But while pterobranches are tiny and
stay in one place, filter-feeding from
colonies of tubes on the seafloor, soli-
tary acorn worms move about in bur-
rows, feeding on organic material that
drifts down to the ocean floor. Acorn
worms range in size from a few millime-
ters to a few meters long.
Only females can sting since the stinger in these wasps is a modification of
the ovipositor. These wasps have a lot of really cool and interesting adapta-
tions. One is their extreme sexual dimorphism. Females have the stingers
mentioned above, but they have no wings. The males are larger and while
they lack stingers, they have wings. The differences between the sexes are
so dramatic that it is often very difficult to determine what the two sexes of
a given species are unless the two are actually seen mating.
The males are in many species are so
much larger than the females that they
actually pick the females up and carry
them in flight during mating. After
mating, the male sets the female down
and she then crawls into the under-
ground burrow of other bee or wasp
species. The larva of these other ground
-nesting bees and wasps will become
the hosts for the growing Panda Ant
A female Panda Ant found in
larva. What happens is the female Pan-
a garden in Santiago, Chile.
Photograph by Christian Lu-
da Ant will lay a single egg beside each
khaup. host larva or pupae she finds. These
eggs hatch and the Panda Ant larva
eats its way into the host larva. The
Panda Ant grows inside of the host lar-
va, feeding off its tissue, eventually kill-
ing it. Once the larva Panda Ant ma-
tures into an adult it only feeds on nec-
tar.
 Five Panda Ant Facts

1. Firstly the Panda Ant

is a misnomer, as it is not
an ant at all, but a wasp of
the family Mutilidae.
and also only the females
that have stingers.
4. Panda ants feed
mainly on nectar.

2. It is sometimes
5. Despite the fact that
called the “cow killer”
the female lays

Incredible FOSSILS
because of the strength about 2000 eggs a
of its sting, which, it year the species is consid-
has been said, can ered endangered. The ma-
take down an animal
the size of a cow.
jority of the young ants are
eaten by ant eaters. Those
Ever Unearthed
that do survive have a typi-
3. The Panda Ant exhib- cal life span of 2 years.
its sexual dimorphism –
the male is a lot bigger
than the female and is pre-
dominantly nocturnal. The
female is more active dur-
ing the day. It is only the
females that are wingless
 Panda Ants May Look Cute
But They’re Poisonous
Lionfish: Beautiful and
Enough To Kill Cows
Dangerous Invaders In the animal world, looks can be deceiving, and often the
creatures with the most beautiful coloration or stunning
Panda ants may
By Nicoletta Lanese, Live Science Contributor | January 17,
adaptations are actually the most deadly. Whether it’s look like cute
2019 03:09pm ET poison frogs or mantis shrimp, an appealing appearance little bugs,
can be a huge red flag.
Lionfish hail from the South Pacific and Indian but they’re actu-
oceans, their habitat stretching from Australia up to Japan Just take these hairy insects known as panda ants for in- ally very danger-
and South Korea. Twelve different lionfish species swim stance. At first glance they seem like cute little bugs that
ous wasps in the
through this region, feasting on shrimp and smaller actually do sort of resemble panda bears!
mutillidae family
fish. Lionfish corner their prey against reefs and rocks, then
Panda ants, however, can not only be deadly, but they’re that are native
strike suddenly to swallow the prey whole. A voracious spe-
not even really ants at all! They may well look like harm- to the Chile’s
cies, lionfishes' stomachs can expand to up to 30 times their
less little hairballs on the surface, but these nasty little
normal size after a meal, according to Smithsonian maga- coastal regions.
creatures have earned a reputation in their native Chile as
zine, leaving the fish plenty of room for seconds. “cow killers” and shouldn’t be underestimated
Lionfish not only have huge appetites, but also breed
with similar gusto. They reproduce year-round, meaning a This allows them to lay their The males and fe-
mature female can release about 2 million eggs per year, ac- eggs in other insects’ nests, and
cording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
males of this spe-
their hatched larvae then feed on
istration (NOAA). cies exhibit ex-
the other bugs’ eggs.
Juveniles measure less than an inch (2.5 centimeters) treme sexual di-
long and grow to about 13 to 15 inches (33 to 38 cm) long as
adults. Unusually large lionfishhave been found swimming
morphism, mean-
at depths of up to 300 feet (91 meters), and these mega- Maybe worst of all, these nasty ing the males look
specimens breed and eat even more than their smaller coun- little critters have earned a repu-
terparts do. Lionfish can survive for up to 15 years in the
like regular old
tation as “cow killers” due to
wild, according to National Geographic. wasps, but the fe-
one terrifying ability
males don’t at all
 10 STEPS TO SAVE MOTHER EARTH
6. Conserve Energy
1. Start an urban
garden and grow your 7. Stop Junk Mail
own food.

8. Drive Wisely
2. Help bees by improving your
local habitat with pollinator
9. Voice your concern
friendly plants.

10. Nourish Yourself

3. Become a citizen scientist
and help researchers study
the effects of climate change
on plants and animals.

4. Consume less

5. Share more.