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English| Silent Alphabets in English Language| Curio Facts

The English language is famous for having rules that don't make sense, and the rules of spelling and pronunciation are a big reason. Some letters are pronounced, some aren't, and there's no real system for figuring out when to pronounce and when not to. In fact, more than half of the letters in our alphabet ( B, D, E, G, H, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, W, X, and Z) are silent in some words. And that's a conservative estimate. Silent letters confuse English language learners of all ages, and native speakers can't even explain why they're there. It's time that we get to the bottom of this spelling and pronunciation mystery. The English language has been written down for more than a thousand years, which means it's had plenty of time to borrow and twist around words from other languages. For example, consider Greek words like "psychology" and Japanese words like "tsunami." Because English doesn't have the Greek letter ψ (psi) or the J...

Dinosaurs| Flying Reptile equal in size to a Giraffe| Curio Fatcs

Dinosaurs| Flying Reptile equal in size to a Giraffe| Curio Fatcs





Think about the biggest flying animal you've ever seen. Let's see — geese are pretty big, and despite their reputation, swans can get to be terrifyingly huge. And albatrosses — aren't those massive? Of course, there are always ostriches, but those can't fly. 

But Quetzalcoatlus could. And that thing was as tall as a giraffe.

During the late Cretaceous era, in the waning years of the dinosaurs' reign over the planet, a giant reptile soared through the sky with a wingspan as long as a city bus. Quetzalcoatlus needed all that surface area to stay aloft because it might have weighed about 550 pounds (249 kilograms) — more than a mountain gorilla, and last we checked, gorillas don't fly. On the ground, Quetzalcoatlus would walk on four "legs," standing approximately 10 feet (3 meters) at the shoulder with a long, stiff neck topped by a skull measuring another 10 feet. In short, these things cut an impressive figure.

But how does something like this live? It's difficult to imagine.

Did they nest in trees and cliffs like modern birds, or roam the plains like giraffes when they weren't flying?

 Or maybe they didn't spend much time on the ground at all, opting instead for a lifetime of transoceanic flights like the albatross

The sad fact is, not a lot remains of these delicately-boned behemoths, so their lifestyle is likely to remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. At least we can be sure that they flew, right? 

Flier flier, pants on fire

Yes, we were heartbroken to learn that there are, in fact, some paleontologists who think that Quetzalcoatlus was just too heavy to get off the ground. Its ancestors might have flown, goes this line of thinking, but like the ostrich, this former flier traded the skies for sheer bulk. But don't think this argument is over just yet. Other estimates place the creature at a substantially lighter weight — even as low as about 154 pounds (70 kg) — which would be plenty small enough to be carried by those giant wings. After all, modern flightless birds like emus and penguins don't have much in the way of wings, but Quetzalcoatlus had no such deficiency. Since they survived for more than 130 million years with the same massive wingspan, they were probably using it for something.



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