Hello all and happy April Fool's Day! When I’m volunteering with animals, I'm often asked whether a particular snake is poisonous. The intended question is usually whether the animal is venomous, meaning carrying venom that would be dangerous to you if you  were bitten. Something being poisonous means that it is dangerous if you  bite it . Very important distinction! However, in the indulgent spirit of April 1st, here's an ACTUAL answer to the question of poisonous snakes.  W

Hi everyone! I hope you're all having a great day. As an avid reader and someone deeply interested in diseases and outbreaks, when I saw John Green's video titled "The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time", I was extremely excited. To sum up a nearly 50 minute video, Green goes into incredible depths on the historical implications of tuberculosis, explaining to the audience just how deeply embedded this disease was 200-300 years ago to now. It subverts our expectations o

We can do blogs now! Yay! I was reading an ornithology article today, and it described birds as "descendants of dinosaurs", which is by no means untrue, but also partially misleading. After all, a finch is no less of a dinosaur than a T. rex. We must remember that the taxonomic category Aves , which modern birds are part of, is a specialized clade within the clade Dinosauria . All birds are therefore dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds. For a clade to be scientifically