The early bird..... has two tales....

We aren't sure the rhyme goes like that either?

A 120-million-year-old bird sported a long tail and a second, shorter tail. 

The discovery points to a complicated evolutionary path for the tails we see in birds today.

One of the oldest known birds that is the Jeholornis, lived in what is today China. It was also thought to sport only a long fan-feathered tail at its back end. Now, however, paleontologists are claiming discovery of a second tail frond adorning the bird. 

In peacocks and other birds, such feathery features are more for attracting the attention of potential mates than for any functional purpose.

Since male birds today are the ones with the striking plumage, the authors suggest that perhaps only one sex of Jeholornis sported the eye-catching tail fronds.

Written by JC

A volcano in space??

Yes really,

I found this article on the National Geographic which explored this amazing volcano...

A report from Andrew Fazekas (scientist)

For years astronomers have been puzzled as to why our Milky Way galaxy's "volcano"—a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its core—is dormant today. It seems the answer may simply be that we didn't catch the cosmic monster—weighing at least four million times the mass of our sun—feeding at the right time, according to a new study.

"If we had been around to see it two million years ago, the situation would have been very different," said study co-author Philip Maloney of the University of Colorado in Boulder. “The Milky Way's black hole was maybe ten million times brighter [then]," he said. "I don't think anyone really had any expectation that SMBH might vary in luminosity by such a huge factor on such a short—relatively speaking—time scale."

Astronomers have long suspected there was an ancient outburst from the hibernating black hole, but it’s only now that they believe they have found an actual ‘fossil imprint’ of the cosmetic monster’s last big meal.

The international team’s new theory points to a lacy filament of gas, mostly hydrogen, called magellanic stream, which can be seen trailing behind our galaxies two small companion galaxies: the large and small Magellanic Clouds. Maloney believes powerful beams of energy erupting from the SMBH two million years ago hit the stream—causing its hydrogen gas to get ionized and light up, much like the glow of auroras we see here on Earth. This ionization of the Magellanic Stream has puzzled scientists since its discovery two decades ago. “No one has been able previously to come up with a good model to explain the ionization," said Maloney.The team now suspects that this glowing stream of extragalactic gas may be the fossil imprint of the SMBH eruption two million years ago.

We at GeoBlogs HQ think this is amazing....