Mima mounds! I remember walking among some next to UC Santa Cruz's campus. Mima mounds are these large, round bumps covered in grass found in prairies and grassland, especially on the West Coast. They look so strange, in fact, that some people thought extraterrestrials must have created them. To give you a sense of scale, some of the mounds are 8 ft tall and 30 ft wide. Scientists used to believe that these were too big for burrowing animals like gophers to create them. Well . . . computer modeling has shown that pocket gophers could build up these mounds over several hundred years, so many gopher generations. These pocket gophers push soil up so that they can keep their burrows dry when rain causes flooding at the ground surface.
Although scientists didn't observe these mounds being created (since it takes up to 700 years, after all), they now think this is a plausible explanation for how mima mounds form.
What I think is so cool:
"What's really cool about this is scaled by body size, these are the largest structures built by any mammal not including humans," Gabet told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "In terms of effort, it would be like a single person building the pyramids."
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/geologists-digging-mima-mounds-mystery-say-gophers-behind-it-2D11702466
Although scientists didn't observe these mounds being created (since it takes up to 700 years, after all), they now think this is a plausible explanation for how mima mounds form.
What I think is so cool:
"What's really cool about this is scaled by body size, these are the largest structures built by any mammal not including humans," Gabet told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "In terms of effort, it would be like a single person building the pyramids."
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/geologists-digging-mima-mounds-mystery-say-gophers-behind-it-2D11702466
Photo credit: Washington State DNR