I appreciate you accepting the possibility of a giant Dragonfly existing, so thanks for that.That is either a sighting of a giant Dragonfly, or it is an hallucination.
I believe it is the latter.
I appreciate you accepting the possibility of a giant Dragonfly existing, so thanks for that.That is either a sighting of a giant Dragonfly, or it is an hallucination.
I believe it is the latter.
And it's carrying some sort of alien communication device in its mouth! Who is it calling? Why is the media trying to hide the TRUTH?
What would the U.S public prefer;
(i) ET visitation
(ii) Giant Dragonflies
48 Percent Of Americans Believe UFOs Could Be ET Visitations . What would the U.S public prefer;
(i) ET visitation
(ii) Giant Dragonflies
Which would be preferable do you think?
I know what you mean..That says more about the standard of science education in the US than it says about Giant Dragonflies.
There's more:The dragonfly clasper of the males fits with the shape of the Devil's Footprints. It's at the end of it's tail and is used to grasp the female before mating. If the male giant dragonfly is low on energy in cold weather, then it could hop on it's tail as opposed to walking on it's legs to save energy.
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A similar but less known episode involved the great explorer James Clark Ross.
One of the tasks of his historic 1839-1843 expedition was to take geomagnetic reading in a number of locations. One of these prearranged locations was the barren and desolate Kerguelen Island (now a French possession) in the Southern Indian ocean, which was reached in May 1840. While looking for a suitable location to set up their geomagnetic and astronomical stations the ship crew came across a trail of hoofprints in the snow, which was followed until it disappeared on the rocky soil. Ross wrote that he was "intrigued" by this discovery, since no creature native to the island could leave such prints. The HMSs Erebus and Terror stayed at Kerguelen for two months, while geomagnetic, tidal and astronomical observations were carried and both the officer and the crew explored the island in search of the mysterious beast but to no avail. One officer speculated that the hoofrints belonged to a horse which managed to swim to the shore from a wrecked ship, but his guess was as good as anybody else's.
Snow fell all through the wee hours of February 8, 1855, in Southern Devon, a county in south western England.
When the sun rose at last, villagers throughout the county awoke to find a set of strange footprints stretching over 100 miles throughout the county. But it wasn't the length of the track or its sudden appearance that caused the most alarm. It was that the track at one point went right through a 14-foot-high wall, leaving untouched fresh snow on top of the wall. Elsewhere, the track went through a haystack, emerging on the other side. It was also found to enter a 4-inch drainpipe, and continue out the other end. In some places the track stopped inexplicably, only to reappear elsewhere. Most significantly, the track was found to have crossed a two mile stretch of river, picking right up again on the other side as if the maker of the footprints had walked on water. Theories and explanations abounded, until some clergymen suggested that perhaps the devil was on the prowl. From that moment on, the devil was said to have walked in Devon.
When people hear this story they generally imagine horseshoe-sized cloven hoof prints... If this was the devil, he must have been more petite than he's usually depicted, and up on ballet pointe the whole way.
This subject was covered in a radio broadcast on the BBC (The Stargazer talks) by Lt. Commander Rupert T. Gould, RN on 13th February 1935. He drew attention to the observation that the tracks were convex meaning that the 'hoof' must have been concave. This ruled out many suggestions that the track were made by familiar animals with 'pads' on their feet. The residents would have been familiar with the tracks of such animals. The tracks also approached the front doors of dwellings before retreating. He also commented that, at a spacing of 8 inches over an estimated 60 miles of tracks made over night in thirteen hours, the 'creature' must have made 9 strides per second!
Captain, Captain, Captain. I didn't explain myself well enough. The giant dragonfly still has the use of it's wings for aided lift, but is unable to perform full flight. Perhaps it was injured, exhausted, suffering from insect 'frostbite' etc.Do you suppose that the Devon Devil is really a giant dragonfly?
A dragonfly walking 100 miles?
Can you not see a good reason why this is unlikely?
Clue.
They are called Dragonflies, not Dragonwalks.
Another flaw is that dragonflies do not wear horse shoes.
These footprints, most of which measured around four inches long, three inches across, between eight and sixteen inches apart and mostly in a single file, were reported from over thirty locations across Devon and a couple in Dorset. It was estimated that the total distance of the tracks amounted to between 40 and 100 miles. Houses, rivers, haystacks and other obstacles were travelled straight over, and footprints appeared on the tops of snow-covered roofs and high walls which lay in the footprints' path, as well as leading up to and exiting various drain pipes as small as four inches in diameter. From a news report:
"It appears on Thursday night last, there was a very heavy snowfall in the neighbourhood of Exeter and the South of Devon. On the following morning the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the footmarks of some strange and mysterious animal endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the footprints were to be seen in all kinds of unaccountable places - on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and court-yards, enclosed by high walls and pailings, as well in open fields."
The area in which the prints appeared extended from Exmouth, up to Topsham, and across the Exe Estuary to Dawlish and Teignmouth. R.H. Busk, in an article published in Notes and Queries in 1890, stated that footprints also appeared further afield, as far south as Totnes and Torquay, and that there were other reports of the prints as far away as Weymouth (Dorset) and even Lincolnshire.
There were also attendant rumours about sightings of a "devil-like figure" in the Devon area during the scare. Many townspeople armed themselves and attempted to track down the beast responsible, without success
X-ray imaging of beetles helps confirm that tracheal system design may limit size in insects. More of the body is filled with air-filled tracheal tubes in larger species, particularly in the legs, and so much larger species than exist today might not have room for enough tubes.
The team focused in particular on the passageways that lead from the body core to the head and to the legs. They reasoned that these orifices may be bottlenecks for tracheal tubes, limiting how much oxygen can be delivered to the extremities.
“We were surprised to find that the effect is most pronounced in the orifices leading to the legs, where more and more of the space is taken up by tracheal tubes in larger species,” said Alex Kaiser, biologist at Midwestern University.
They then examined the tracheal measurements of the four species to see if they could predict the largest size of currently living beetles. The head data predicted an unrealistically large, foot-long beetle. In contrast, the leg data predicted a beetle that nicely matches the size of the largest living beetle, Titaneus giganteus .
“This study is a first step toward understanding what controls body size in insects. It's the legs that count in the beetles studied here, but what matters for the other hundreds of thousands of beetle species and millions of insect species overall is still an open question,” said Jake Socha, Argonne biologist.