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Viral video shows how to find your vestigial organs

Your tailbone was once an anchor for … your tail.

Image from Vox on YouTube.

Evolution of the body is divergent.

The human body is an amazing organism, to say the least.

To watch an athlete dunk a basketball or a ballerina turn a pirouette is to witness an extraordinary machine at work. But the human body is also a biological junkyard of useless ideas it has yet to ditch as we evolve.

There are many organs, tissues, and cells that make up the human body that, though they once had an evolutionary purpose for our survival, are now obsolete. Think about your tonsils or wisdom when they get inflamed to the point of needing surgical removal. These and all other "useless" body parts are known as vestigial organs and every species from humans to birds to felines to fish have them.

The video below goes over just a few of the vestigial organs we can locate on our bodies if we know where to look.

10-15% of people can see a tendon in their wrists that connects to the palmaris longus muscle. Although it serves no purpose for humans, it's essential for primates that live in the treetops and swing from limb to limb.

Humans also have three muscles around their ears that allow some people to make them wiggle. When fully formed in other mammals, the muscles work to rotate the ears in order to pinpoint the source of sounds. Although these body parts are worthless in a practical sense, they serve as a reminder of our vast evolutionary history and reveal our deep connections to other beings on the planet. That knowledge is far from useless.


This article originally appeared eight years ago.

Through the magic of evolution there are countless instances where animals are so camouflaged to their environment, they're nearly impossible to see.

This helps them hide from predators or gives them cover to lash out and eat other animals.

The orca is black on top and white on the bottom so they're hard to identify from above or below.

Who'd notice this terrifying viper in the desert sand?


This seahorse perfectly blends into its environment.



But when human beings blend into the environment, it's not a miracle of nature, it's usually just dumb luck or poor fashion sense.

Here are ten times that things were camouflaged by pure coincidence.

Cat matches dog


The building is slowly fading into the sky.

Via Reddit user pachew96

This black car looks like a mirror after being washed

via Reddit User Tittzo

The cat in the carpet


The vines on the side of this house changed their color to match the siding.

via Reddit user ErnestoJesperson

She is the sea and the sky

via augustoberg / Instagram

The only time polka dots have worked as camouflage.

via Reddit user TheDoorBelllGuy

This woman is wearing the floor.


If she died right there, no one would notice.


This brings new meaning to the phrase, "Eat it or wear it."


Creepiest moment in a hotel since "The Shining"

Reddit user Wickensworth

Image created from Pixabay.

Science looks at the building blocks to life on Earth.

Life on Earth is tough as nails.

From the crushing, soulless depths of the ocean to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from boiling hot springs to Antarctic wastes — even in the radioactive heart of Chernobyl, life thrives. It finds a way. It laughs in the face of adversity.


Turns out, that amazing tenacity is kind of our birthright as Earthlings. To understand why, you've got to go back to Snowball Earth.

720 million years ago, the Earth was a pretty different place. For one thing, it was in the icy grips of something called the Cryogenian period.

ice age, environment, algae, earth freezing, science, global warming

Saturn's moon Enceladus. 720 million years ago, Earth's surface might have looked strikingly similar.

Photo from NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

Living on Earth would have been tough. For 85 million years, the planet was locked in a grinding cycle of massive freezing and thawing. This was no mere chill. At its height, the entire planet may have been frozen over with glaciers marching over even the equator. The alternative? Greenhouse conditions caused by massive volcanic eruptions.

Sounds like a bad time to be around. And, yet, life didn't just endure. This period happens to coincide with one of life's greatest moments — the jump from single-celled bacteria and microbes to multicellular life. Plants, animals, mushrooms, just about everything you can see in your day-to-day life is a descendant of this great leap forward.

But this triumph in the face of adversity wasn't a coincidence. At least, that's what a letter published Aug. 16, 2017 in the science journal Nature says.

Life didn't just endure this cycle of ice and fire. It may have flourished because of it.

The reason, the authors say, has to do with algae. For the three billion years before, single-celled life had scrimped by on whatever energy and nutrients it could grab. There wasn't much to go around.

But things were going to change. As the glaciers marched back and forth across the surface of the planet, they acted like giant belt sanders, grinding mountain into powder — powder that was chock-full of minerals like phosphates. When the cycle flipped and the volcanoes took over, the glaciers melted and dumped all those nutrients straight into the ocean.

Where the algae could get it.

Which then spread like never before.

Which was then food for everything else. Suddenly there was plenty to go around and life began to eat. And thrive. And change. And, over time, that life made the leap from tiny, lonely microbes to the ancestors of all the multicellular life we see today.

We don't just endure hard times. They give us the fuel we need to grow.

This is just one possible explanation, but the scientists say it's backed up by evidence. Chemical signatures in the rocks show a massive algal bloom around this time. Other ideas might come in later and disprove it, of course — that's just how science goes.

But if this is true, then it just makes life on Earth that much more incredible.

Most Shared

Nómade the elephant was born without tusks. Now her mutation is mainstream.

Evolution could help defend elephants from poachers — but that might not be a good thing.

Growing up in war-torn Mozambique wasn't easy for Nómade the elephant.

Mozambique, a southeastern African nation, gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. Then two years later, the Cold War found its way onto Mozambican soil in a bloody conflict that lasted until the mid-1990s and claimed up to a million human lives and displacing even more.

When the human forces weren't directly at each other's throats, they scavenged the savannah for animals they could kill for meat and ivory to trade for weapons or cash. But Nómade survived, along with 11 of her sisters, thanks in part to a miracle mutation that left them without tusks.


Nómade and her family. Photo provided by Joyce Poole/ElephantVoices, used with permission.

By the end of the war, the African elephant population in the Mozambique park where Nómade lived had been reduced by more than 90%.

Half of the females left alive were tuskless, just like Nómade.

Tusks are a crucial survival tool for elephants and, unfortunately, one of the main reasons why people try to kill them. While those lengthy incisors obviously make great weapons, elephants also rely on them for foraging in the dirt for minerals or food as well as scraping bark off trees or bending down branches to reach tasty goods. They're handy as a place to rest those big, heavy trunks on, too.

In typical animal fashion, however, males tend to have the mightier tusks, which they rely on to show off their elephant sexiness. It also means that they get poached in much higher numbers. As a result, the tusklessness gene has only really passed down the maternal side of the African elephant family tree, to elephants like Nómade.

This is the epitome of evolution in action: a rare mutation that grows more common over several generations when it turns out to be a blessing for survival.

Back in the 1930s, tusklessness was estimated to affect about 1% of both African elephant genders; today, there are parts of the continent where 98% of the females are born without tusks. 'Cause who's gonna hunt 'em if there isn't ivory to sell?

Average male tusk sizes in Africa are actually shrinking. But totally tuskless males are still rare, seeing as — erm — lady elephants are less inclined to breed with them. Sorry, fellas. Photo by Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images.

It turns out the same tusklessness that saved these females' lives might also be leaving a lasting impact on the whole of African elephant society.

Elephants are, of course, incredibly smart and social creatures. "But the scars of poaching last a very long time," according to Joyce Poole, Ph.D., co-founder and co-director of the ElephantVoices, a conservation group that works with Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where Nómade and her family roam.

Having lived under the threat of violence for so long has left many elephants with the equivalent of a broken home, Poole explains. "When a family loses a matriarch, the possibility of calf survival drops because there's no one to take care of the young." For example, the first few times she encountered Nómade, she says, "she was in a different group. A similar configuration of animals, but a different configuration every time." (That's also how she got her name — "nomad" in Portuguese).

To make matters worse, many of the females that do survive past childhood don't even reach full sexual maturity — both from increased stress levels and the fact that, well, there just aren't enough males left to go around, which means they probably aren't going to get pregnant. As a result, the rate of tuskless elephants just keeps going up because the males with tusks are dying out faster than they can be replaced.

Photo by Anna Zieminski/AFP/Getty Images.

"There's also pervasive myth — I'd call it an old wives' tale — that tuskless females are more aggressive than elephants with tusks," Poole says.

To be fair, there are some aggressive tuskless females, particularly in Nómade's family. In another early encounter at Gorongosa, one of Nómade's sisters led a massive mob of more than 30 elephants straight at Poole's safari truck, a move which earned her the name Corajosa, or "Courageous One."

But that behavior wasn't because of her tusklessness, Poole explains. "These are some of the most aggressive elephants in Africa because of what they've been through, and they pass that behavior down from one generation to the next."

Fortunately, Corajosa, Nómade, and the rest of their kin have warmed up to Poole over time. They also have another tool to make up for their lack of tusks: their trunks. "They're such smart animals and the trunk is such a magnificent organ that they are able to compensate," Poole says. "It can push over a tree or caress a baby … it's a magnificent thing to have."

HOORAY, WE STILL HAVE TRUNKS! Photo by Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images.

On one hand, these African "tusklesses" are proof of evolution in progress.

On the other hand, it's also a frightening example of the damage that human intervention can really do. What was once a genetic survival advantage has now become the exact opposite — and it's likely that that trend will continue.

"If we're able to bring poaching and the illegal trade, then over generations, the tusklessness will decline," says Poole. "But that's going to take a long, long time."

There is a silver lining, however. While half of the females who lived through the war in Mozambique are tuskless, only about a third of the elephants born since then have the same condition. And the fact that they can live for upwards of 70 years means that, if things do improve, we'll actually be able to observe the difference across generations. It's one thing to know that nature always finds a way; it's another thing entirely to see that change in action.