Showing results by author "Danna Staaf" in All Categories

Before there were mammals on land, there were dinosaurs. And before there were fish in the sea, there were cephalopods - the ancestors of modern squid and Earth's first truly substantial animals. Cephalopods became the first creatures to rise from the seafloor, essentially inventing the act of swimming. With dozens of tentacles and formidable shells, they presided over an undersea empire for millions of years. But when fish evolved jaws, the ocean's former top predator became its most delicious snack. Cephalopods had to step up their game.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was never expected to be a scientist. Born in 1794 in a French village more than 100 miles from the ocean, she pursued an improbable path that brought her to the island of Sicily. There, she took up natural history and solved the two-thousand-year-old mystery of how the argonaut octopus gets its shell. In an era when most research focused on dead specimens, Jeanne was determined to experiment on living animals. And to keep sea creatures alive for her studies, she had to invent a contraption to hold them: the aquarium. 

Nursery Earth shines a spotlight on the world’s baby animals, asking us to turn back the clock on our favourite creatures and explore how they develop on a level never before seen! Biologist Danna Staaf takes us on a quest seeking out the most fascinating (and sometimes most bizarre) babies, including the elusive newborn Humboldt squid in the Gulf of California, the unusual yet adorable juvenile echidna 'puggle,' the baby moth that looks and acts like a venomous snake and the bug with the grandest entrance in the animal kingdom – the periodical cicada.