Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid known as a pitfall trap. It has been widely assumed that the various sorts of pitfall trap evolved from rolled leaves, with selection pressure favouring more deeply cupped leaves over evolutionary time. However, some pitcher plant genera (such as Nepenthes) are placed within clades consisting mostly of flypaper traps: this indicates that this view may be too simplistic, and some pitchers may have evolved from flypaper traps by loss of mucilage.

Rafflesia arnoldii belongs to genus Rafflesia, is known for producing the largest individual flower on earth. The flower of Rafflesia arnoldii can attain a diameter of nearly one meter (3 ft) and can weigh up to 11 kilograms.This flower is mostly seen in rain forests of Sumatra and Borneo. These plants are quite rare to find these days and are critically endangered. The flowers are unisexual and thus proximity of male and female flowers is vital for successful pollination. These factors make successful pollination a rare event.

Tunicates or urochordates (appendicularians, salps and sea squirts) is a sub phylum of group of underwater saclike filter feeders belonging to phylum Chordata. The body of an adult tunicate is quite simple, being essentially a sack with two siphons through which water enters and exits. Water is filtered inside the sack-shaped body.Tunicates exhibit all important characters of chordates like, in having notochord, a dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal slits, and a post-anal tail. Tunicates begin life in a mobile larval stage that resembles a tadpole.The larval stage ends when the tunicate …

Dont get confused what you are seeing is infact an animal which lives on our own planet Earth like we do.Star nosed Moles ( Scalopus aquatus ) Scalopus aquaticus is found from southeastern Wyoming, South Dakota, and central Texas, prefers fields and open woodland.This animal ranges somewhere between 110-180 mm in length and body is covered by velvet fur.
Adult star-nosed mole exhibit heavily clawed forelimbs, well equipped for digging, and the twenty-two touch-sensitive appendages ringing its snout.These fleshy pink “fingers” on the snout of the star-nosed mole point to this …

Anomalocaris which ruled the oceans during the Cambrian era is an extinct genus of anomalocarids, which are thought to be closely related to the arthropods,on the basis of its jointed body(But without doubt it belonged to ecdysozoa which includes moulting and some segmented animals) .Since the days of Joseph Frederick Whiteaves in 1892 when he for the first time described Anomalocaris as a separate crustacean-like creature due to its resemblance to the tail of a lobster or shrimp ,It continued to mislead palaeontologists. It took some time for the …

Classification of Fossils is sometimes tricky as they do not follow systematics of living organisms and here come stem groups to the rescue.In order to know about stem groups we need to understand Crown Group also.
Stem groups:
Stem group organisms always lack one or more features that are present at the base of the crown group to which they are attached.

Archaeopteryx
Originally uploaded by Sebastian
Niedlich (Grabthar)

Crown Group:
A crown group is a living clade or monophyletic group which consists of the last common ancestor of all living examples and all of its descendants.But …

Just trying to kill time on sunday afternoon as i didnot have enough motivation to do micro injections for generating transgenic Drosophila I was surfing some webpages and one of them led to new Technical note published in online first section of development Genes and evolution.Louis A. Boell & Gregor Bucher came out with a protocol for performing the difficult task of In situ Hybrization in Rotifer Brachionus plicatilis and also method for culturing this species so that this could establish B. plicatilis as a rotifer model system.The expression …