Caterpickles Cleans House, Again
The “Pigs in Space” cast, 1980. (Image via the Muppet Wiki)
Despite my best effort, The Four-Year-Old’s unanswered question index keeps getting longer. I’m at 137 and counting (I haven’t entered today’s questions yet. I’m afraid to, frankly.) Anyway, what with the holidays coming up, I thought I’d clean house again and see if I can’t take care of some of the easier ones all in a batch.
“Are there pigs in space?”
As far as I can tell, pigs in space is a phenomenon limited to Muppet Show skits and Russian mockumentaries. Although animals were the primary astronaut life-form during the 1950s and 1960s, most were mice, dogs, or monkeys. The closest thing to a pig I could find was a pig-tailed monkey named Bonnie who was lead astronaut on NASA’s Biosatellite III mission, which was launched on June 28, 1969. Well, unless you count that chimp named Ham who was sent up in the Mercury Redstone rocket for a suborbital flight in 1961.
“Do ducks have tongues?”
Yes. Birds, including ducks, have tongues. Let’s all take a moment to be grateful that they (usually) don’t have teeth.
“Do mosquitoes have hearts?”
Yes, but they look so different from ours you probably wouldn’t be able to pick them out from a drawing. Go ahead, give it a try (scroll down for the diagram).
What? Back already? Mosquito hearts are really long skinny tubes running along their backs (the red bit in that diagram I sent you to). The lower bit (the part that runs up from the bug’s anus to its chest) is considered to be the mosquito’s heart. The upper half of the tube doesn’t contract and is considered to be its aorta. When it’s not in this tube, mosquito blood, which by the way is either green or colorless, flows freely throughout the bug’s body. The heart tube pulls blood in from the bug’s main body cavity and as the tube contracts, pushes it up through the aorta to flush the brains and other organs in the mosquito’s head.
“Were there butterflies in dinosaur time?”
Yes. Although butterfly bodies decay rapidly, making butterfly fossils extremely rare, scientists have found fossilized butterflies in rocks dating from the Cretaceous Period, when flowering plants began to become more common.
Related Articles:
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- Caterpickles Cleans House (Caterpickles)
- Animals in Space (NASA)
- Butterflies by Gloria G. Schlaepfer
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