Why Woodpeckers Don’t Mind Hitting Trees With Their Faces - The New York Times

The birds hammer away, yet they don’t get concussed. Scientists found that assumptions about the animals’ impact-absorbing skulls were wrong.

Traditionally, when people were coming up with hypotheses about how animals function, a lot of the time they never even looked at the living animal; they would just pull bones out of a drawer, said M… [+1086 chars]

full article...